Nerding it up in the UK

Well Leena let me loose for the day so what did I do, well I went to Bletchley park. Now this is a fairly significant site because this was where the British did all the code breaking in World War 2. This is where the first digital computer was built and lots of other clever things. As I walked through the gates I sort of felt like I was walking on hallowed ground. Instead of me banging on about it you can read all about this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park
and here:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

What I will bang on about is how blown away I was by the shear brilliance of what they did. They had all this encoded data and just shear intellect to crack it. The machines they built were nothing short of shear brilliant, it was very humbling to stand close to recreations of these machines and watch them work. Below is some pictures of a bomb, used to crack enigma





This picture is a bit blurry because this machine was working at the time and there was a lot of moving points.

How they cracked the Lorenz code is awe inspiring and well worth a read.

The other thing that caught my eye was this:


Other interesting facts that I learnt was that Ian Fleming worked as a navel intelligence officer during world war 2.