Not many years ago, I am sure that any reference to Alan Turing being gay would have been censored by the editor ostensibly for being irrelevant and inappropriate for a professional engineering magazine. I compliment the editor and see this editorial decision as another sign of progress.

I read the brother’s story at the Daily Beast and noted that he didn’t even mention Turing’s time at Princeton; the Princeton link: “When the Princeton Alumni Weekly did its assessment of the most influential Princeton alumni of all time, Turing placed second behind only James Madison.”

Is it too much of an exaggeration to suggest that without Turing, we’d be working our slide rules… in German?!

One quibble: it’s popular to conflate the Plymouth colony with the Puritans of The Mass Bay Colony but they were quite separate. The Pilgrims had not lived in England for some 11 years. They were Brownists, who didn’t believe in personal property, owning land, or conducting marriage services – which they regarded as a function of the state. The moved to Leyden but grew concerned that their children would grow up Dutch – that was their stated reason for removing themselves to the New World where they could await their Lord’s return in peace – which is what began the migration. To finance the trip they sold places, many were not even part of the congregation. They had to abandon one of the two ships they bought (it’s thought that the captain crammed on too much sail which made the ship spring leaks) and left Plymouth too late in the year in a state of disarray.

Pretty much everything that could go wrong did, and half of them died that first winter. But slowly they began to find their feet. One particularly striking aspect of them was the care they took to respect the native people, unlike the Mass Bay Colony. However, after 20 years there were so few settlers left in Plymouth they didn’t have enough for a congregation and closed the church. William Bradford, first governor, reckoned the colony to have been a failure.

If we reckon the Mayflower Compact to be the first constitution-like document of what would become the US, its intent takes on an added weight. It was drawn up at the behest of the non-religious passengers to protect them from living under the religious beliefs of the congregation. Separation, indeed.

The Democratic Party should similarly be taking advantage of Pride parades and festivals to do voter registration, which could well decide the election. Are they?