[HN Gopher] WWII code breaker Mary Ratcliffe has died
___________________________________________________________________
WWII code breaker Mary Ratcliffe has died
Author : smcin
Score : 76 points
Date : 2023-12-15 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dailymail.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dailymail.co.uk)
| smcin wrote:
| (There will be better obituaries for her, but for now the
| DailyMail was one of the first to publish)
| LemmyInThePub wrote:
| The Daily Mail certainly isn't a reputable news source.
|
| In fact, Wikipedia has banned its use:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Reliability
| dang wrote:
| On HN, we go by article quality, not site quality. This looks
| like a good enough article. Lots of past explanation about
| this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&so...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Surprisingly, no Wikipedia page for this notable figure.
| smcin wrote:
| I can't find out whether she was a cryptographer, but she was
| at a higher level than the technicians.
|
| https://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/yoursay/3840026.letter-f...
| MandieD wrote:
| Pages for women scientists have often been deleted (or at least
| nominated for deletion) for not being notable enough:
| https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-...
| dudul wrote:
| Was she a scientist? I didn't know her, and after reading
| this, admittedly short, article it doesn't look like she was
| doing much more than technician work.
| smcin wrote:
| The article didn't say she was a scientist. There were also
| technicians. It's unclear.
|
| I said there may be more detailed bios published. I was
| unable to find much under her name.
| ejb999 wrote:
| Not surprising to me - is she actually notable? as far as I can
| tell she is no more (or less) notable than any of the millions
| of people that contributed to the war effort - so along the
| lines of an army grunt following orders to shoot at the enemy,
| or an assembly line worker in the USA putting together B27's.
|
| She took coded messages, fed them into a device that someone
| else invented, and then delivered the output for someone to
| (possibly) act on. As far as I can tell she was a cog in the
| huge war machine.
|
| Do all of the millions of people, or 100's of thousands of
| americans who gave their lives, get or deserve a wikipedia page
| as well?
|
| Nothing against this woman, or anyone that contributed to the
| war effort, but millions upon millions of people did - and they
| are all equally worthy of remembrance.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| If you are ever nearby, I can strongly recommend visiting
| Bletchley Park. It is a pretty small museum now, but almost
| everything about it is fascinating and you can easily spend a
| full day there.
|
| https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
| komadori wrote:
| I prefer The National Museum of Computing, which now occupies a
| site just outside the Bletchley Park museum perimeter.
|
| For example, the last time I visited Bletchley Park they were
| exhibiting a mock-up of one side of a Bombe with a video screen
| mounted on the other side playing something on a loop. By
| comparison, TNMoC has a real working reconstruction of a Bombe
| and we were able to watch a live code breaking demonstration.
|
| https://www.tnmoc.org/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-15 23:00 UTC)