Honestly, the whole "Climate Change" thing was to explain that "it's not really global warming"; now they want to stop climate change by cooling the earth. ... So. Global Warming.

This kind of tampering would be a disaster.

Mental instability, irrationality, and other issues would cause global nuclear destruction. Hostility is a problem. On the other hand, aggression is the driver that prevents the world from stagnating; remove aggression entirely and nobody would even mate, causing a collapse of the human species.

What if the genius is trapped into thinking he's a common man by silly movies that emphasize his social commonness?

Can you cite an example of a popular entertainment that does this? Seriously asking.

Not to mention that, even using your incorrect definition, your claim that there are no "inadequate or redundant" human beings is still ridiculous.

If that's your values, I guess I can't argue with that.

Indeed. I'm not as smart as Turing was, so he must have been a fuckin' genius. No living human could ever hope to match him. Basically a god.

You know he made some really important contributions to discrete mathematics, logic and what would eventually be called computer science. But a lot of people were able to make really important contributions to computer science and the war. What exactly makes Alan Turing a god, and not, say, Claude Shannon? Or Richard Feynman? Or Enrico Fermi?

Genius is a wondrous thing but its counterproductive to turn it into a cult.

Humans are genuinely an amazing animal... but to claim that all humans are above average is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of awareness of both math, and humanity.

See, I didn't say everyone was above average. Tagging something as "mediocre" implies not just that it's average, but that it's inadequate or redundant.

Turing was very intelligent, but so was Reinhardt Heydrich. Intelligence doesn't itself guarantee virtue or necessity. By a lot of standards the US is overrun by redundant, overeducated people whose intelligence far exceeds its utility.

So, it's best to practice reticence whenever you're tempted to assign some kind of relative value to people. It's dangerous, and, I think, really stupid, to say this or that person is "better" than any other; some people are definitely better at some things, but everybody plays their role, we need everyone, there's no group of useless people "holding us back," the dumbest janitor is just as much "us" as our greatest inventor, artist, or athlete.

I mean, think of all those "amazing animals" whose corpses sit at the bottom of the Atlantic. Just because all they had was a deck gun and their courage, they are mediocrities? Britain wouldn't have won the war if all it had was a bunch of super geniuses sitting in a hut in Bletchley Park.

The problem with people like Turing, Einstein etc. is that nobody understands them nor the way they think (or thought)

This is a trope. We have a lot of first-hand accounts of Turing and Einstein, and Einstein's mental process is basically an open book. The problem is people fall into the trap of believing that genius is inscrutable and fundamentally "beyond" or transcendent of normal intelligence, and that it simply cannot be understood. What people have done, to an extent, is they've simply taken the myth of angelic or divine revelation, and interpolated onto a naturalistic framework and then applied it to great scientists.

Turing was a man, Einstein was a man, their brains were, genetically and in essence, probably identical to yours. They were special for what they did, what they wrote, what they accomplished; not what they were.

Also, "genius" is generally a label that gets stuck on people after they die, and it becomes part of the myth-making that goes along with the historiography of science.

I felt like the drama in Particle Fever was really manufactured, these people really didn't have much on each other and they sorta made it in editing. Also to be honest I thought the technical treatment of the material was really glib.

Also it's a documentary that was released directly to on-demand and probably didn't cost a million bucks.

There's no such thing as a mediocre human being.

Yeah, move audiences are really chomping at the bit for a probing discussion of the Halting Problem and the Turing-Church correspondence.

The Imitation Game changed aspects of the real Alan Turing's personality to conform more closely to our idea of the solitary nerd. It falls in line with the tired idea that only outcasts could love computers...As for explaining the science behind Turing's code-breaking machine, the movie doesn't bother.

It's a complicated topic, mainly because his work for GCHQ was only tangentially related to his work on universal computing machines or his theoretical mathematics, they never actually built a Turing-complete computing system to defeat Enigma (with bombes) or the Fish cipher (Colossi) -- and even this distinction between the two fundamentally different problems is lost to the film.

The movie isn't about computers, it's not even really about codebreaking. The movie is about a recluse with a dark secret, who, despite not fitting in and being generally weird, finds a purpose for himself and a way to make a contribution to the war, only to see his greatest accomplishments hidden from view and perverted by the security state. The movie is basically a retelling of A Man for All Seasons.

This proposal, of course, works from the assumption that you can get marginal gains in intelligence from marginal increases is brain mass, which I'm pretty sure hasn't been established empirically.

It's really hard to build a piece of portable equipment that properly grounds all noise sources, mainly because there's no earth connection and shields have to just dump to the battery, and but have to be really carefully filtered from the audio and data grounds before they all come back together.

Don't you mean AC-blocking choke or inductor? Caps block DC.

There's more than a few people who don't code or develop for iOS or OS X, but ponied up the $99 a year to get a developer account, just to have access to betas.

For better 'data' - look at the Apple forums.

Yeah, because armies of users come to post on Apple forums to let people know the update's working fine for them. :)

(FD. Yosemite's working great for me.)