Well. sort of. Clearly, you are using a computer. If you are on this site, you are probably quite familiar with computers as artifacts of our modern society. Hopefully, you are also familiar with the fact that Alan Turing, logician and mathematician extraordinaire, was instrumental in laying down the foundations of modern computer science, and did a little work to help turn the tide of WWII in the Allies’ favor. Hold that thought.

A phenomenal collection of Turing’s papers (including his first ever published paper, and some pioneering work on Artificial Intelligence) are going to be auctioned off in London tomorrow, and are expected to fetch something between $482,000 & $800,000. The reason I mention this is because supporters of Bletchley Park (Home of the code-cracking Colossus and, more recently the National Museum for Computing) are scrambling to raise enough funds to win the auction and keep these historically priceless papers available to the public.

I know it’s cutting it a bit fine, but I urge you to join me in paying our respects to Alan, without whom blogging, developing and database administration would probably be a lot harder. I’ve made a donation to Turing Papers fundraising page*, and I suggest you do the same.

*Even if the funds raised fall short of the auction price, the money will naturally still go to Bletchley Park, which is doing sterling work to preserve and promote the history of computing.