Hey guys, found an easter egg in the episode. Sneaky logan tries to (subconciosly) sell us Lego Pirates toys at 10:50. You can tell this is an easter egg because in the beginning of the episode the box to the bottom left wasn't there then Logan sneakily removes the box from site. When I saw this I was in disbelief and cracked up about it. Also I would like to win a computer im poor and dont have one lol.
@Logan@wendell Regarding your idea to invite someone over for an "inmteresting conversation", I would like to see Prof. Chomsky on your show! I think there's a wide range of overlapping interests here, including the implications of technology that you guys, rightly, talk about a lot such as drones, NSA surveillance, as well as something you guys have mentioned a lot recently -- A.I. As I am sure you'd know Noam's contribution to programming is unparalleled, at least in the context of higher level theoretical work on expressive power of formal languages -- i.e. Chomsky-Schutzenberger Enumeration Theorem, Chomsky-Schutzenberger Representation Theorem, the Chomsky Hierarchy etc. He gave a wonderful lecture a few years back when he was inducted into the IEEE hall of fame. There is also a wonderful talk freely available on youtube -- MIT 150+ The Golden Age: The Original Roots of A.I. Noam is one of the leading figures, along with Saul Kripke, who works on the major epistemological problems w.r.t. A.I., and what Newton and Descartes described as "The Ghost in the Machine" and "the mind-body dualism" respectively. With the rise of Quantum Theory, and the subsequent liquefying of any concrete definition of "matter", materialism has lost all ground. As such, abstractions in Science are no longer a luxury, and Noam's life's work (the scientific part of it) has repeatedly shown how little we understand about higher cognitive computations in the mind-brain. These have serious implications for A.I., at least if by A.I. we actually mean Artificial "Intelligence", as opposed to statistical data approximation, which is not really intelligence. I will give you two simple instances -- we all know how badly ASR (artifical speech recognition systemsAAAA) suck. Yet, a human neonate is capable of discerning and identifying such complex variations in spoken language as identity relations, syntactic islands, and can even detect and identify the mother's voice from a mixture of both extremely high levels of pink and white noise (although they fail to do so with the father's voice). The second example concerns the linguistic competence related notion of Recursion -- the ability to embed propositional logic within propositional logic and achieve infinite expressability with the limited input every child receives as input while growing up. This ability is fully developed by 18 - 24 months of age, and evolutionary biologists believe that a large part of this ability is schematically embedded as part of our genotype! Noam has worked lifelong on this problem, along with a handful of others, and his insights on why true A.I. is extremely difficult to attain will make for a fantastic talk! Also there's his political activism and understanding to talk about!!
Just in case you guys are interested, I could arrange an introduction! I have worked on his theories for virtually all my professional life!
Cheers Tekies! Keep up the outstanding show! I eagerly wait for each Tek!