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
-
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 ( 6423 )
-
Friday Fotos: Leaves and Blossoms
Posted on 23 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's Greatness
The late Harold Bloom was a bardolator without peer, so some have claimed. Whether he was the best I do not know, but bardolator he surely was. He devoted two... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Governors Island in Black and White, I.e. Grayscale
Posted on 23 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horgan’s The End of Science, a Reconsideration, Part 5: Mind-culture Coevolution
Horgan has suggested that we are facing the end of science in the sense that science has by now laid down the basic foundations of the world and that, while... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wiring Diagram of the Visual Cortex
A recent wiring diagram of the visual cortex - a little easier to read than the classic Felleman and van Essen (1991) https://t.co/rLPCfP1Otw pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 22 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tulip, Dialectical X Factor
Posted on 22 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Iconicity and Diachronic Language Change
Paper with Padraic Monaghan: stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development. but the role of frequency and... Read more
Posted on 21 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Satchmo in Giza
During the Cold War, the United States made the case for the American way of life by sending its best ambassadors abroad — jazz musicians. Read more
Posted on 21 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flowers! [red, Orange, White, Yellow]
Posted on 20 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading: Comprehension Vs. Interpretation, a Recent Article in NLH [has the...
Everyone knows perfectly well that interpretation is a kind of intellectual act that requires special training and practice. But the profession of academic... Read more
Posted on 20 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Quick Note on the ‘neural Code’ [AI Meets Neuroscience]
In The End of Science John Horgan has suggested that something called the ‘neural code’ as the Holy Grail of neuroscience, indeed, perhaps of all of science... Read more
Posted on 20 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Born to Groove, Kids and Music 2: Prodigies R’ Us
Prodigy: a person, especially a young one, endowed with exceptional qualities or abilities. That’s what the dictionary says. Not all fields have them, but them... Read more
Posted on 19 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horgan’s The End of Science, a Reconsideration, Part 4: “Meat That Thinks,” My...
That’s one of the remaining mysteries Horgan names in his new preface: “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?” That’s one I’ve been pondering in one... Read more
Posted on 18 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Who's Connected to the Internet, World-wide? [from 2014]
In 2014, this color map was said to show the "Location of Every Device in the World that's Connected to the Internet." I wonder how the map has changed for 2021... Read more
Posted on 18 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Alison Gopnik on Children, Exploration, Play and AI [R&D at the Skunkworks]
Ezra Klein interviews psychologist Alison Gopnik, Why Adults Lose the ‘Beginner’s Mind’, NYTimes, April 16, 2021. Children as explorers: Klein: You write that... Read more
Posted on 18 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Friends Attempt to Count to 42 in the Wilds of Jersey City on the Edge of...
Posted on 17 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horgan’s The End of Science, a Reconsideration, Part 3: A Close Reading of...
Now I want to shift away from examining Horgan’s arguments to examining his language. Why? Let’s hold that question in abeyance and look at the passage that... Read more
Posted on 17 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scrambled Sentences Work for Pretraining Large Language Models
"[...] we pre-train MLMs on sentences with randomly shuffled word order, and show that these models still achieve high accuracy after fine-tuning on many... Read more
Posted on 15 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horgan’s The End of Science, a Reconsideration, Part 2: Has the Study of the...
As I understand it, the standard model of particle physics recognizes three types of interaction: electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear force. These are... Read more
Posted on 15 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horgan’s The End of Science, a Reconsideration, Part 1: Introduction
Back in the ancient days of 1996 John Horgan published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age and thereby... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY