aufreak

You can actually use your gmail account to check your exchange accounts. If your work place allows that, go right ahead! I've been accessing my univ exchange account via gmail and never regretted it.

The author says that simply typed lambda calculus proves that programs terminate. That sounds to me like saying "simply typed lambda calculus is not Turing-complete". Disclaimer: I know basics of lambda calculus but don't exactly know what the "simply typed" one is.

google would've been thought of as "yet another search engine" before the name "google" existed. Nobody knows who or what is going to change the world.

  (defmacro set-sqrt (place v) `(setf ,place (* v v)))

should actually be

  (defun square (x) (* x x))
  (defmacro set-sqrt (place v) `(setf ,place (square ,v)))

Here is a link to the section on "what makes lisp different" that is referred to in the article -

http://bit.ly/8yrvC

Life is tooooo big to get stuck working on only one thing :P

A sample size of ONLY 10 CEOS (not all entrepreneurs are CEOs and 30 is a respectable sample size), no control group to see if just about anyone will answer "yeah, that about describes me" to the same questions, no control questions to see if the entrepreneurs will answer "yes, that's me" to stuff that is not hypomanic. What kind of conclusions can you draw from such a study?

The pure functional world was pretty much impenetrable for me for that very reason ... until I encountered Monads in Haskell. Monads have changed the game completely by providing a very clean encapsulation of side effects in general. There are people who are trying to generalize it even further using what are called "arrows", but just groking Monads in Haskell will give you a new understanding, somewhat along the lines of what learning exterior calculus does to your view of traditional vector calculus.

I agree. Moreover, I think it would have been useful to measure variables indicating emotional state as the affirmation is uttered. If you feel crippled when you utter "I'm a lovable person", chances are your subconscious is saying "no you're not". It is also known that jumping from "Nobody loves me" to "I'm lovable" isn't possible for the most. You need to take small steps, each of which needs to be coupled with a better feeling.

Much of it seems dated - before R7B. Just program as usual and measure in order to optimize. That works as a general formula for all languages. For more fun, look at the Haskell optimization guide! http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Performance

The ToC doesn't contain anything about the situated cognition, enactive cognition schools of thought, so I find applying the term AI to this book too broad. The topics covered seems to broadly fall under "automatic problem solving strategies" or something like that. Check out Rodney Brooks' robotics work for anything that feels like intelligence.