psygnisfive

I saw this device in an episode of the TV show Beyond 2000. And this was back in the early to mid 90s.

Welcome to 15 years ago?

The only reason JSON script injection is a problem is because nitwits don't use a library that parses the JSON code first to verify that it's 100% pure JSON. Crocker's JSON library fully verifies pure JSON-ness before eval-ing the string (which is technically an unnecessary step).

Furthermore, why should we worry about changing JSON? It's not amazingly difficult to construct a parser for some custom document format like this, after all. I use a subset of Ruby as a data interchange format because of the ability to use arbitrary values as hash keys, and the ability to have symbols that are distinct from strings. The parser for it is maybe 80 lines at most, and doesn't rely on Ruby internals to handle it. Because Ruby also doesn't have a Date/Time literal notation, I have a way of denoting that (datetime(...)) which the parser also handles.

There's no reason people should be talking about this, it's a non-issue. It's never too late to change JSON, or to even do something completely different that better suits your needs. Just write the parser for it!

And if the issue is "OMG interoperability! :(", it's not terribly diffuclt to provide your developers with the JavaScript lib to handle the parsing.

Not to be a dick or anything, but we know precisely what the moai on Easter Island were for. They were religious figures of the Easter Islanders. They grew increasing large and numerous as the tribes of Easter Island began warring with one another, in an attempt to display the "greatness" of each tribes respective leaders. It is in part due to the obsession with symbolic greatness and the construction of the moai that led to the eventual downfall of the Easter Island culture, as can be seen by the eventual grass-roots moai destruction activity during the proper collapse of the island's society in the 1700s and 1800s. The few Easter Islanders that survived the end of their civilization described this back when they were first contacted.

Easter Island isn't some big mystery, unless you don't read history books.

</pedantry>

As I said in the other version of this:

Psycholinguistics research has repeatedly shown that the amount of influence is minimal, amounting to, in general, forcing you to pay attention to certain aspects of the world more so when you're describing using language than when you're thinking about things in other ways. E.g., you notice color differences more quickly or more accurately when you have to choose between two words that your language could have, than if you were picking a tee-shirt. Or you're more attentive to left and right orientation if your language has words for left and right when you're talking about something positioned relative to your body, but if you're just trying to navigate somewhere or looking for something, your language doesn't affect your thinking.

This effect is precisely what you'd expect, ofcourse, because you get it for absolutely everything else. If your culinary habits involve avoiding high fructose corn syrup, when you're looking for food you're going to be quicker to notice the presence of HFCS than if you're just talking to someone and they mention the corn industry's current HFCS production rates or whatever.

The generalization: when some cognitive task requires that you pay special attention to something, you will. Language is not special in this regard.

And that is how language influences the way we think.

While it's true that the potency of LSD is ridiculous (normal doses being a thousandth of what other drugs usually require), the effects are not limited to LSD. Mescaline and other psychedelics produce similar improvements in cognition, and have higher dosage requirements. Mescaline, for instance, requires around 100mg for a light dose, while for LSD it's over 1000 times smaller at about 20-70ug. So if you're concerned that LSD is just too easy to fuck up, in terms of dosage, try Mescaline instead.

There's been research that has shown quite reliably that sub-recreational doses of LSD and Mescaline (not combined) can induce incredibly vivid visions that can help a person visualize a problem they've been trying to solve, and in the end, make the problem solving easier if not trivial.

The experiment was done to see if the effects of psychedelics were merely "right-brained" and creativity enhancing, or if they could improve harder more technical cognition as well. It turns out they do improve technical cognition quite drastically.

Psycholinguistics research has repeatedly shown that the amount of influence is minimal, amounting to, in general, forcing you to pay attention to certain aspects of the world more so when you're describing using language than when you're thinking about things in other ways. E.g., you notice color differences more quickly or more accurately when you have to choose between two words that your language could have, than if you were picking a tee-shirt. Or you're more attentive to left and right orientation if your language has words for left and right when you're talking about something positioned relative to your body, but if you're just trying to navigate somewhere or looking for something, your language doesn't affect your thinking.

This effect is precisely what you'd expect, ofcourse, because you get it for absolutely everything else. If your culinary habits involve avoiding high fructose corn syrup, when you're looking for food you're going to be quicker to notice the presence of HFCS than if you're just talking to someone and they mention the corn industry's current HFCS production rates or whatever.

The generalization: when some cognitive task requires that you pay special attention to something, you will. Language is not special in this regard.

And that is how language influences the way we think.

You're right. Let's compare to a more adequate language. Like Ruby.

  def inc_all(i, xs)
    xs.map { |x| x + i }
  end

There are two things called his incompleteness theorems, but only one actually deals with completeness. The other deals with consistency, which is not coming up with contradictory answers. Basically, it says that any system that asserts it is consistent is necessarily inconsistent. This is I suppose related to things which are true about the system which cannot be proven true in the system, but only in a roundabout way.

Computability and completeness are also definitely related, but, not quite so tightly as you implied. Computability is a property of algorithms, while completeness is a property of axiomatic systems. Algorithms operate on axiomatic systems, but are not the systems they implement, and there's no inherent connection between being able to prove statements about a system, and the algorithms used to compute proofs for that system. As I said, SOL can prove FOL to be complete and consistent, and you can do this on a universal turing machine, but FOL cannot prove itself to be complete and consistent even doing this on a universal turing machine.

Of course, if your computer _is_ an axiomatic system (and all are), then the incompleteness theorem(s) do say things about what that computer can do, and we know that all turing complete computers have precisely the same sorts of constraints in that regard.

The real thing that was irksome, tho, was the assertion that there are some things that are obvious to humans but which are uncomputable. This is just unfounded. Unless you're supposing human brains are somehow not computing things (collections of neurons are computers, after all, just not von Neumann architecture), there is no way for this statement to be true.

No, that's not what it "basically means".

Firstly, the incompleteness theorem (there's only one) is not about computation but about proofs; specifically that there are some things within an axiomatic system which are true which cannot be proven such within the system itself.

Secondly, this does not mean that these things are unprovable, period. For instance, Gödel showed that you can prove these things perfectly fine, you just have to use different system. But this system will have its own unprovable statements.

Thirdly, computability was Turing's domain, not Gödels, and has to do with the kinds of algorithms you can use to perform proofs, not the system the proof is for. For example: second-order logic (SOL) can prove things about first-order logic (FOL) that FOL cannot prove about itself, but both systems can by utilized by a universal turing machine.

Fourthly, there is no known thing that cannot be proven, period, which is obvious for us humans.

Except that the hypothesis is not that there's at least one person that would let an AI out, but that ALL PEOPLE would let the AI out.

I don't program in Haskell, but I find the language to be incredibly alluring and appealing because it seems almost like a way to access the Comp. Sci. gnosis. It's so different, and so incredibly elegant and amazing in what it does and how it does it, that it feels as tho it reveals some arcane, secret knowledge that, once appreciated, will change how you view every aspect of reality itself.

I believe he took inspiration from this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

I'll be brutally honest: Not cool. It's old and boring and not in the least difficult. The software is what would've taken a while to make, and even that would theoretically consist of little more that two for loops to scan through each frame of video and output it to the audio jack.