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The trial of WILLIAM DALE JENNINGS begins and lasts for 10 days. Jennings was born in Amarillo, Texas on October 21, 1917. Not long thereafter his parents moved to Denver, Colorado. After graduating from high school there, he moved to Southern California, where he wrote, produced, and directed stage plays in Los Angeles and Pasadena. He studied dance under Lester Horton and later worked with Martha Graham, two early pioneers of modern interpretive dance.
One night in 1952, as Jennings walked home from Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park), four miles west of downtown Los Angeles, he was followed by a plainclothes vice officer and arrested in his house under charges of indecent behavior.
Jennings, of course, was totally disheartened. If word of this got out, his dream of a career in screen writing would be totally shot. From jail, Jennings called Mattachine cohort, Harry Hay. Hay bailed him out of jail early the next morning, and it was then, over breakfast at the Brown Derby, that they decided to fight the charge in court, under grounds of entrapment.
To this end, they founded the Citizens’ Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. Long Beach attorney George Sibley took on the case. After a dramatic Los Angeles court trial that lasted for ten days, Jennings won a jury acquittal in a rebuke of police harassment, intimidation, and entrapment of homosexuals.
The acquittal energized other persecuted homosexual people into action throughout the nation and brought respect to the Mattachine Society, which had funded Jennings's defense. “The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name” was now on its way out of the closet, and the infamous statutes of “Crimes Against Nature” on the law books in every one of the United States were targeted for eradication. By the year 2000, most States had removed those statutes from their laws, partly due to of the influence of Dale Jennings. The struggle continues. An interesting footnote to this entrapment: designer and co-founder of the original Mattachine Society with Harry Hay, Rudy Gernreich left the bulk of his estate to establish a fund to assist Gay men who were arrested through entrapment.
ALAN MATHISON TURING OBE, FRS was born on this date (d: 1954); An English mathematician, logician and cryptographer. Turing is considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with "the Turing machine," formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Churq-Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine.
With the Turing Test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think.
The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of trying to determine which player – A or B – is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the determination.
He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.
During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval crypto-analysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the “bombe,” an electromagnetic machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
The 2014 film, The Imitation Game is Turing's story. The title refers to Turing's proposed test of the same name, which he discussed in his 1950 paper on artificial intelligence entitled "Computing Machinery." In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo estrogen therapy to achieve temporary chemical castration. The treatment caused him great anxiety and physical pain. An avid runner, he was no longer able to enjoy this exercise.
Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. His death was ruled a suicide, but this was controversial and many think he may have been murdered to silence him.
Of course it’s embarrassing to not always be infinitely wise, but I feel
that what we can offer each other is the truth of our growth process,
and that means we fall on our face again and again.
Sri Aurobindo says, “You get up, you take a step, you fall on your face,
you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you
take another step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look
sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step…” and
that’s the journey of awakening.
If you were awakened already, you wouldn’t do that, so my suggestion is
you relax and don’t expect that you will always make the wisest
decisions, and just realize that sometimes you make a decision, and it
wasn’t the right one, and then you change it.
- Ram Dass -
