So this is what Alan Turing’s statue looked for his birthday a few days ago.



Our rough total amount of donations came in at £720, which with £68 spent on flowers. Meaning we have raised about £650 for Special Effect, beating last year’s total by about 50%!

This post is an extended version of the 2015 report, that appears on the subsite for Flowers for Turing. This version is a bit more light-hearted and looks at some of the differences between last and this year. There will be two other posts to come, one a proper analysis of things that could have been better this year, and the other the traditional transparent accounting post.

Flowers

In all, there were more bunches of flowers, that looked much better, and which turned out to cost less than last year. Win all around.The credit for this belongs to, as it happens, my mum and dad for buying, fetching, arranging and generally sorting them.

In case you are wondering – the reason that my mum and dad handled the flowers this year was that my girlfriend’s birthday is, unhelpfully, also on the 23rd June. So I took her to the seaside, where she good-humouredly put up with me checking twitter every couple of minutes.

Twitter

On that subject, Twitter was very quiet this year. While there were a quite a few little notes:

It wasn’t anything like the storm that happened in 2013. On the other hand, we put a zero on the end of how much we raised. I’m quite happy with that exchange rate.

Missing Flowers

Something pointed out my one of my friends…

This is the statue as it started the day…

…and this is it a few hours later.

The question is, where have the rest of the flowers gone? There were lots more on the ground… Also some of the bunches look new (I’ll need to cross reference) were people bringing flowers and other people taking them away?

Roll of Honour

Now the important bit.

Each bunch of flowers (I expect there will be more later) was pledged by one of (where a company or university is listed this should be read as staff/students/alumni/hangers-on from company or university, rather than any endorsement from the place itself – this is very definitely a grassroots thing):

Royal Holloway, Computer Science PhD Students

Royal Holloway, Information Security Group

School of Computer Science The University of Manchester (separate bunch) x 2

Cambridge University, Computer Science

Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington

The University of Salford Computing Society

School of Computing at the University of Leeds

Paul Heideman

University of Aberdeen, Computer Science

University of York, Computer Science

Heriot-Watt University, Computer Science

Exeter University, Computer Science

University of New South Wales

Oxford University Press

Someone in Liverpool, UK

The Yeno Family

Someone in Yukon, Canada

University of Hertfordshire

Andy Longhurst

Brighton College Mathematics department

Elizabeth Fritsch

Bill Risbridger

Moscow High School No. 179

the Brin Family

Someone in Seattle, USA

Someone in Manchester

From someone alive because of your work

“With eternal thanks for helping enable us to do what we love everyday and spreading our learning to the ends of the Earth” – The raywenderlich.com team

Sony Evolution

An Admirer of Turing’s work.

I’ll put up the accounting post shortly (where we put up the receipts for flowers and the receipt from Special Effect so that it’s clear to everyone that all the money went to the right place) but right now I’m basking in the glow of a job well done. Really pleased that everyone came together on this one.