Linuxfest

Looks like I will be going both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday has some sessions that I plan to attend (Jomla and Drupal) but George Dyson is giving a talk on Sunday:

Alan Turing: The First 100 years, by author George Dyson
A talk by author and science historian George Dyson entitled "Alan Turing, the First 100 yrs". "The history of digital computing can be divided into an Old Testament whose prophets, led by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, supplied the logic, and a New Testament whose prophets, led by John von Neumann, built the machines. Alan Turing, born on June 23, 1912, arrived in between. Turing's one-dimensional model of universal computation led directly to von Neumann's two-dimensional implementation, and the world has never been the same since."

George Dyson is the son of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. (born 1953) He is an author and historian of technology whose publications cover the evolution of technology in relation to the physical environment and the direction of society. He has written on wide topics that include the history of computing, the development of algorithms and intelligence, communication systems, space exploration, and the design of water craft. He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 and Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, in which he expanded upon the premise of Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name. His forthcoming book, "Alan Turing, the 1st 100 years" is scheduled for publication in early 2012 and has been described as "a creation myth of the digital universe." He is the subject of Kenneth Brower's 1978 book The Starship and the Canoe.

I have seen him speak two other times and he is a lot of fun. He lives in Bellingham and our paths cross from time to time.