I was listening to an NPR broadcast driving back from work when one thing caught my ear. The topic of discussion had something to do with the use by US judges and supreme justices of various verses from American POP and Rock culture. One example was the following verse from "Like a Rolling Stone" - a 1965 song by Bob Dylan: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose". This sounds all good and dandy, but I think this is just a paraphrase of: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by Marx & Engels published in 1848. So, they've got Dylan beat by about 117 years :)
Update (11/23/2013): " Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon." ( http://usat.ly/19bLZET ) Long overdue!!! With academic background in applied mathematics and computer science and years of experience in Information Technology it would be incredibly surprising if I didn't know of Alan Turing, or so I thought. Sure, I knew who he was and had a good idea of what he had contributed to the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and of course computer science, which he basically founded; and things like Turing Machine, Turing Test, and Enigma Code-breaking have been widely popularized. I also knew that he died relatively young, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding his premature death. That is until I read the following in the book titled "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: "Turing's hom
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