sfwc

The story here is likely off on the wrong foot from the start: our Halloween isn't really meaningfully connected to Samhain. https://adfontesjournal.com/archives/halloween-its-creation-...

It's not instantly clear from e.g. http://www.lojban.org/publications/etymology/etysample.txt what the algorithm was for the computerized part of the process of gismu construction, although I doubt it was as naive as you seem to be implying. In any event, the humans involved also played with the gloss words they were feeding it to try and find good compromises. {klama} does not in fact take the "l" and "a" from "travel" - it comes from (in Lojban's phonetic spelling) the English "kam" (come), the Hindi "ana" and the Chinese "lai".

At worst, learning Lojban vocabulary is no worse than learning any foreign language, and at best it's somewhat easier (which has been my experience) - I certainly don't see how its phonology "just makes it really difficult for everyone".

I don't think anyone claims that Lojban phonology will help people guess the meaning of its root words. Even if you guess that {klama} means "travel", you probably can't guess that it means precisely (x1 travels to destination x2 from origin x3 via route x4 using conveyance x5). As a native English speaker who's been learning Lojban casually for a few weeks, I find the phonological resemblances helpful mostly as mnemonics - {prenu} is easier to remember for sounding a little like "person", {nitcu} like "need", et cetera. (And remembering the place structures does get easier, there is a fairly consistent rationale to how they are chosen.)

If the human brain functions more or less according to classical physics, with causality running forwards in time, then "one's nature" is just a very complicated function of the local state of the universe - the previous state of one's brain (including the encoding of the consciousness function itself) plus incoming sensory data.

More than once you've probably made a decision, at least in part, by psychoanalyzing yourself (and maybe psychoanalyzing the way that you're psychoanalyzing yourself) - so imagine being able to psychoanalyze yourself in real time, with (near-)perfect accuracy. (There might be information-theoretic problems with trying to simulate your whole brain inside of itself at speed.)

If one is the kind of person who has given serious thought to one's motivations in life (which must include coming to the realization that they are, in a certain fundamental sense, arbitrary) then I don't know that they would necessarily change all that much under these conditions.

Seemingly the same Henry Baker who wrote all those papers on garbage collection.

http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/

http://www.bakercapital.com/team_baker_g.html

Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ResponseToBakersAntiRelationalPaper

(all via http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HenryBaker)

GemStone was beloved of most who used it, and it is poised to make a comeback through MagLev.

Meanwhile, ORMs (which attempt to implement an OODB on top of an RDB) are ubiquitous.

Submission title is somewhat misleading. Nobody appears to be claiming that e.g. a chimp engineered with the human version of FOXP2 (the single gene under discussion) would have human-style language capacity commensurate with its intelligence - just that FOXP2 is a contributing factor.

There's a fundamental difference between BlackBerry and iPhone here, though: You don't have to use BlackBerry AppWorld if you don't want to, you can make your application available directly from your own website. Furthermore, AppWorld only takes a 20% cut: I think getting another 10% of the gross revenue (over what the App Store charges) should be worth a flat $20 administration fee to you.

The dailygalaxy article makes it sound like this phenomenon is completely baffling to scientists - my first thought as I read it was "vitalism", they seemed to be saying that the sequence recognition just happens by magic. In fact, though, the original paper discusses at least two possible mechanisms.

I think "Factor" is a good name for a programming language, it's memorable and it conjures up appropriate mental images. That the word has both of these qualities ensures that it will be used for many other things, and this will be true of most good names. Instead of worrying about the googlability of "Factor", can't we count on people to at least search for "Factor programming language"? And if Google isn't already returning good enough results for that now, I think I'd rather wait a little while for search technology to catch up than compromise on the names of my programming languages.