Bbenzon
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 6483 )
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Orange, White, and Red
Posted on 18 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Conceptualizing the Chess Tree, a Moment in Cultural Evolution
I’ve been thinking about the chess tree. As I pointed out in an earlier post, Wikipedia informs us that Ernst Zermelo published his proof about the formal... Read more
Posted on 18 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Crane, Branches, Mist, the River, and the City
Posted on 17 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hollywood Vs. Bollywood: What Themes Are Important? Wealth Vs. Gender
In Hollywood movies, the most shameful thing is to be poor. In Bollywood movies, the most shameful thing is to be unmanly or unfeminine.... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Been Going on at New Savanna Over the Last Year?
Here’s the action at New Savanna over the last year: Notice the large increases in August and September of last year and in March through May of this year... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Irises, Yellow & White, with Cars
Posted on 17 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Globally, Songs and Instrumental Melodies Are Slower and Higher and Use More...
Yuto Ozaki, Adam Tierney, Peter Q. Pfordresher, et al. Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: ... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Unfrosted: A Network of Reference and Allusion [Media Notes 119 F]
As counterintuitive as it might seem at first glance, Unfrosted is fundamentally an intellectual movie. It starts out that way and never strays far from it. Wha... Read more
Posted on 16 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Pop-Tarts Portfolio
Industrial Strength Pop-Tarts Pop-Tarts, the Monolith Pop-Tarts, the Myth Pop-Tarts in the Wild Pop-Tarts, Sports Edition Pop-Tarts: Hot! Hot! Hot! Read more
Posted on 16 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some 1st Class Jazz: David Sanborn, Dizzie Gillespie, Diane Reeves, David...
At about 31:44 we have an absolutely INSANE version of "Stormy Monday" with Diane Reeves and David Peaston sharing vocal honors. Read more
Posted on 16 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Assorted Flowers in a Variety of Colors and Shapes
Posted on 15 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Pop-Tarts to Jackie O’s and Beyond [Media Notes 119 E]
One of the problems I’ve been having with Unfrosted is that it’s unfocused. As I mentioned in my original review, Seinfeld’s a miniaturist. Read more
Posted on 15 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Look at A.I. Hype
Julia Angwin, Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype? NYTimes, May 15, 2024. ...some of A.I.’s greatest accomplishments seem inflated. Some of you may remember... Read more
Posted on 15 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pop-Tarts, They Aren’t That Good [Media Notes 119 D]
I’ve been working away on Unfrosted and have been having trouble bringing a long article to a close. I came across an interesting review by Owen Gleiberman in... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain Encoding Models That Can Transfer Across Language and Vision
Jerry Tang, Meng Du, Vy Vo, VASUDEV LAL, Alexander Huth, Brain encoding models based on multimodal transformers can transfer across language and vision, Advance... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Matrix [Media Notes 120]
I saw it when it came out, and perhaps I saw in again on some streaming service, of maybe I got it on Netflix back in the DVD days. Don’t know what I thought... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Body Part Names Across Cultures
Variability in human body vocabularies. A team of linguists from @MPI_EVA_Leipzig and @UniPassau has conducted the first large-scale comparison of body part... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ethan Mollick on AI Superintelligence
Ethan Mollick has an interesting post at One Useful Thing: Superhuman? His third paragraph: No matter what happens next, today, as anyone who uses AI knows, we... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
My Mother Loved Irises
Posted on 12 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Aesthetic Preferences, Political Preferences, and Cultural Rank
From TheMoneyIllusion: The arts are often viewed as being in some sense “liberal”. This could mean many different things. Art might make people more liberal.... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY