VE Day 75 – Remembering the meteorologists of WW2 | Royal Meteorological Society

One of the world’s most important weather forecasts ever made was during the Second World War. Meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg (attached to the Royal Air Force) persuaded General Eisenhower to change the date of the Allied invasion of Europe from the 5th to the 6th of June 1944 – D-Day. Weather also played a key role in the initial decoding of the complex German Enigma code as code breakers discovered the transmission of coded weather data.

Source: VE Day 75 – Remembering the meteorologists of WW2 | Royal Meteorological Society

A Beautiful Mind

The Lost City of London - Before the Great Fire of 1666

We’re just back from a trip to the cinema to see Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game” – deeply affecting and highly recommended!

Turing was a brilliant but eccentric, and troubled, mathematician, cryptanalyst, logician, philosopher and pioneer computer scientist, now widely regarded by those in the know as one of the more important and influential figures of the twentieth century.  To the general public, he is perhaps best  known not so much for his work on artificial intelligence and information technology as for that on military intelligence and code-breaking   during the Second World War, at  Bletchley Park.  He and his  equally oddball fellow academics at Bletchley Park (“Station X”) enjoyed the unlikely but more-or-less unqualified support of Churchill,  who clearly understood more than most the vital significance of the intelligence they generated  (“Ultra”).  (At the same time, though, remarking, rather archly, that although he knew he had…

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