Greatest Britons: Results

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skalpel
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:24 pm

The poll to decide the order of our top ten is up. Due to a tie in votes, we actually have a top 11 for this poll.

You can vote for four of your favourites. At the end of the poll, their original vote counts will be added on top of their poll scores and a final ordered Top 10 will be released.

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Alfred The Great

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- Began the process of unifying the warring kingdoms into a single England, appointing himself the first true leader of all England.
- Successfully protected Wessex from the Vikings, preserving the country's future.
- Founded the English legal system and helped to begin putting centuries of ignorance to bed by encouraging the spread of education.

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Tim Berners-Lee

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- Invented the World Wide Web
- Refused to profiteer on his invention, and instead gave it to the world as a platform for free exchange of ideas and information
- Founded the W3C Web Consortium which continues to work at preserving the quality and openness of the web for today and the future.

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel

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- Pioneered iron and steam shipping, building the world's largest ship, Great Eastern.
- Built the Great Western Railway. Every station (including London Paddington), the routes of the tracks, every bridge (including Clifton Suspension Bridge)
- Built the first successful under-river tunnel (and it is still used today).

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Winston Churchill

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- Made crucial use of the English language to mobilise and inspire Britain to fight fascism at all costs.
- Kept a sinking empire afloat and influential in world politics, aiding the bond between the USA and USSR which would help bring about the destruction of Nazi Germany.
- Fought with the British Army in his youth.

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Charles Darwin

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- Developed and proposed the staggeringly innovative concept of Evolution by Natural Selection, fundamentally changing the way that all of humanity looks at itself and its own history, the history of the world, and our relationship to every living thing on it.
- Travelled the world, collecting fossils, live animals, dead animals and plant specimens, enriching British scientific study.

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Isaac Newton

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- Developed the theory of Universal Gravitation, explaining gravity and forming the roots and an immense wealth of subsequent scientific understanding.
- His groundbreaking work in optics include the discovery of the colour spectrum and invention of the modern telescope.
- Developed the Three Laws of Motion, founding the modern study of Physics, and did about as much the same for modern Mathematics with the discovery of Calculus.

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George Orwell

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- One of the world most infamous anti-fascists, he took a bullet in the throat, and had himself watched by British Intelligence while volunteering against Franco's fascist regime in the Spanish War.
- Wrote nine novels, baring to the world the horrors of totalitarianism with Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- One of the greatest essayists in the English language, Orwell's famous and influential essays continue to offer hope and wisdom to this day.

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William Shakespeare

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- Probably the most important figure in the history of the English language, he invented some 1700 words and countless more common phrases which we all still use every single day today.
- Widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, he wrote 37 plays, among them Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, revolutionising drama to such a degree that his works today remain the benchmarks for writing for cinema, theatre and television.
- Wrote 154 sonnets which would influence the future of poetry and in particular the Romantic movement in literature.

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Adam Smith

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- Wrote The Wealth of Nations, an extensive study of commerce and industry, tearing the world from medieval concepts of money and inventing modern economics (and the study of economics) in the process.
- His writings would serve as the economic driving force behind the rise and prosperity of the British empire.

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George Stephenson

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- The 'Father of the Railway' broke ground in developing a string of innovative locomotives which would revolutionise travel in Britain and the world. His inventions included Stephenson's Rocket, the fastest train of its day which would influence the design of locomotive engines forever.
- Invented a safe lamp for use in mines, used locally and known affectionately as the Geordie Lamp (thus, I suppose, arguably making him the father of all Geordies).
- Like his friend Brunel, Stephenson built bridges and railways all over the country and the world, including the first railway line and service in history, between Stockton and Darlington.

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William Wilberforce

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- Fought vigorously and spent wildly to bring an end to slavery. His efforts were not only successful in shutting down the British African slave trade in the 1830s, but were influential in world discourse and, more crucially, also encouraged the British government to police the global slave market to such a degree that it would eventually help to end the problem on the international stage.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Little Lion Man » Tue Mar 17, 2015 5:57 pm

Churchill was a bit of a cronut.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Ramone » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:36 pm

Little Lion Man wrote:Churchill was a bit of a cronut.
I imagine a lot of the people on here weren't the nicest in reality.
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by overseasTOON » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:39 pm

Ramone wrote:
Little Lion Man wrote:Churchill was a bit of a cronut.
I imagine a lot of the people on here weren't the nicest in reality.
Newton was a dick.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:50 pm

Churchill wasn't even that good a PM, generally speaking, but he was the right (and probably only) man for the particular job demanded of a British PM in 1940. A very traditional Englishman and great orator who got very excited by war. Despite his past military ballsups and the fact that he seemed to be a prick as a human being, his bulldoggishness was probably the only thing that could have roused that much pluck from the peoples of a crumbling empire fraught with social unrest.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by biggeordiedave » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:28 pm

If I were Tim Berners-Lee, I'd have made sure I'd milked the WWW for every penny it was worth. He could be by far and away the richest man in the world by now, probably worth at least hundreds of billions.
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:52 pm

To be honest, it'd probably never have gotten off the ground if he'd charged. I think there was a few vaguely similar setups around the time he released the WWW (though I think they were mostly just communication networks) and they flopped because their creators wanted to charge for it.

He's made plenty of money for one man just by being the inventor and giving speeches, advice, founding organisations etc. and his name will soar through history to boot. Not bad really <awe>.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by biggeordiedave » Wed Mar 18, 2015 4:24 pm

skalpel wrote:To be honest, it'd probably never have gotten off the ground if he'd charged. I think there was a few vaguely similar setups around the time he released the WWW (though I think they were mostly just communication networks) and they flopped because their creators wanted to charge for it.

He's made plenty of money for one man just by being the inventor and giving speeches, advice, founding organisations etc. and his name will soar through history to boot. Not bad really <awe>.
Or he would've been the first trillionaire. I know what I would have gone for.
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Colback's Orange Tufts » Wed Mar 18, 2015 6:54 pm

biggeordiedave wrote:If I were Tim Berners-Lee, I'd have made sure I'd milked the WWW for every penny it was worth. He could be by far and away the richest man in the world by now, probably worth at least hundreds of billions.
He couldn't, he was working for CERN and CERN can't directly monetise what they work on due to their charitable, publically funded status. Never would have taken off either, only gained traction in academia cos it was free, then it spread
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Wed Mar 18, 2015 6:56 pm

Cisse's Overheating Torso wrote:
biggeordiedave wrote:If I were Tim Berners-Lee, I'd have made sure I'd milked the WWW for every penny it was worth. He could be by far and away the richest man in the world by now, probably worth at least hundreds of billions.
He couldn't, he was working for CERN and CERN can't directly monetise what they work on due to their charitable, publically funded status. Never would have taken off either, only gained traction in academia cos it was free, then it spread
So he couldn't have basically taken his work, amended it here and there in private and released it for profit if he felt like it? How far does CERN's ownership of its employees' work extend?

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Colback's Orange Tufts » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:08 pm

skalpel wrote:
Cisse's Overheating Torso wrote:
He couldn't, he was working for CERN and CERN can't directly monetise what they work on due to their charitable, publically funded status. Never would have taken off either, only gained traction in academia cos it was free, then it spread
So he couldn't have basically taken his work, amended it here and there in private and released it for profit if he felt like it? How far does CERN's ownership of its employees' work extend?
When you sign up you there's t & cs. They can get litigious about people trying to make profit off stuff that's supposed to be in the public domain. Pretty sure at least they could have prevented him getting copyright, maybe not from monetising it. He also needed the CERN infrastructure to set up the www, home servers/internet connections weren't really a thing.

It's hard to say though, part of the model is that the experiment R&D is done in each participating country with local businesses, driving forward their expertise. And CERN encourages companies making money from the expertise gained (to justify tax spending).
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Colback's Orange Tufts » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:10 pm

You can actually download all the the LHC dataset now if you wish and try and recreate my thesis. Although a) it's not in an obvious format b) you'd need to write tonnes of software to process it c) the files are huuuge d) you need tonnes of processing power
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:13 pm

So work done in CERN is sort of in like a big open source database and anybody can dip into it, take from it, use it to develop their own ideas, and then profit from the end product?

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Colback's Orange Tufts » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:18 pm

skalpel wrote:So work done in CERN is sort of in like a big open source database and anybody can dip into it, take from it, use it to develop their own ideas, and then profit from the end product?
It's kinda variable and unclear but yes. But much of the processing software is NOT open because of about competition between experiments.

I mean one of the detectors built in Liverpool that's now spare is being used in a proton therapy facility now. CERN don't really care even though it's worth 100k. Much of it is IP or techniques anyway, so you need to work with the CERN people to benefit from it anyway.
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:30 pm

Interesting. Are you still with CERN in any capacity by the way?

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Colback's Orange Tufts » Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:43 pm

skalpel wrote:Interesting. Are you still with CERN in any capacity by the way?
My account lapses on the 31st March, should extend it for thesis corrections. But otherwise no, now I have a non academic job
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by skalpel » Thu Mar 19, 2015 3:19 pm

Great response, but I'm bumping for more votes. Even if you didn't nominate anybody, get involved in the poll. There are two pairs of Britons who are tied at the moment, so more votes could help make the difference.

The final results are being calculated as Number Of Nominations + Number of Poll Votes. In the case of tied positions, the ranking is sorted by Number of Nominations.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Mifune » Thu Mar 19, 2015 4:52 pm

Only 6 votes for Newton <disgrace>.

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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by Ramone » Thu Mar 19, 2015 5:07 pm

Mifune wrote:Only 6 votes for Newton <disgrace>.
That's what he gets for being a bloody alchemist <fist>
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Re: Greatest Britons *POLL UP*

Post by overseasTOON » Thu Mar 19, 2015 5:09 pm

Ramone wrote:
Mifune wrote:Only 6 votes for Newton <disgrace>.
That's what he gets for being a bloody alchemist <fist>
And these things are truly awful:

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