Yesterday I took advantage of a rare opportunity to see a mint condition functioning Enigma machine in person.  James Grime (Enigma Project, Cambridge) was passing through on his way to the RSA conference.  If you're going I think he's going to be at the Thales e-Security booth.   Here's the YouTube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elYw4Ve4F-I 

In the process I learned some new things about Alan Turing.  A point was made that he was sometimes seen by others as an eccentric.  And the examples given were that he had sometimes been seen running with his gas mask on, which was an unusual sight for runners.  Another one was that he actually chained his drinking cup to the radiator so nobody would take it and it wouldn't get lost.  Eccentric seems as good a word as any for that type of thing.

But separately it was also pointed out that he was an elite endurance athlete and could have been in the Olympics had it not been for an injury.  From a geek perspective, what if maybe this could be attributed to experimentation in exercise physiology.  Vo2max/lung strength and staying hydrated during recovery phase are pretty important there.

If so maybe he was just a bit ahead of his time there and wouldn't have found the sight of these masked athletes at CrossFit Malibu the least bit unusual:

http://journal.crossfit.com/2012/11/pepperdine-partone.tpl (CrossFit Journal, A Metabolic Analysis of CrossFit's Elite: Part 1)

As one of the Pepperdine researchers explains about halfway through the video:  "it's just kind of a science nerd thing..."  :)