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 ( 6427 )
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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 -
CEO Cut His Own Pay, Drastically, So He Could Afford to Raise His Employees to...
Since our $70k min wage was announced 6 years ago today:*Our revenue tripled*Head count grew 70%*Customer base doubled*Babies had by staff grew 10x*70% of... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mars, Earth, and the Land of Imagination [Utopia]
Posted on 13 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Courts Decide That Graffiti is REAL 2: Further Thoughts [reframing the...
I’ve been thinking about my post of April 9, Courts decide that graffiti is REAL – Meaning and identity in graffiti, skateboarding, and on the web. I’ve been... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Institutions Are Doing Technical Research About Computer Games?
April 2021 update to my list of institutions active in technical games research! https://t.co/jYEY4y2Bzn pic.twitter.com/cpjHczmVxH— Mark Nelson (@mm_jj_nn)... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken Blooms
Posted on 12 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Born to Groove, Kids and Music 1: Three Examples
I’ve grown up in a culture that isn’t serious about music. Sure, some small group of musical performers are lavished with money and attention, the center of an... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Over (and Into?) a Volcano
From YouTube: After weeks of thousands of earthquakes on the peninsula of Reykjanes in Iceland on March 19th 2021 the ground opened up and the lava reached the... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dinner at the Malibu Diner [pandemic]
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Japanese Cinema, 1926
A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from the Early Days of Japanese Cinema (1926) https://t.co/9kl2puDf6P pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
YouTube on the Rise
Americans using social media: a 2021 update from Pew Research.https://t.co/G8Pr0FF9vG@pewinternet pic.twitter.com/aiJRzGswLv— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander)... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Power Really Does Rot the Mind [Hubris Syndrome]
Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage, The Atlantic, July/August, 2017: The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Convolutional Neural Nets and Human Vision Processing
It's amazing that Alexnet is still one of the best models of human visual processing (when looking both at layerwise correspondence and total variance explained... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bhutan Was Vaccinated Against Covid-19 in a Week
Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the “Dragon King” of Bhutan, formed a national-service corps that has helped to set up and staff more than 1,200 vaccination... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Courts Decide That Graffiti is REAL [SK8parks, the Interwebs, and Being...
One reason graffiti interests me is that it is socially and institutionally ambiguous. It was created back in the late 1960s and 1970s by (mostly) kids who... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do We Fact-check Social Media?
Avi Tuschman, Want to solve the misinformation crisis? We already have a proven solution at our fingertips, Fast Company, 4.8. Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Do You Get When You Search on “graffiti Museum”? [urban Design Center, Now...
A bunch of stuff. Top two (at least when I searched, YMMV): Museum of Graffiti, Street Museum of Art. Here are their self-descriptions. The difference is... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY