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 ( 6524 )
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Some Notes on Excellence: Why O.J. Simpson Was Better at Football Than His “Drea...
Back in the mid-1990s a banker named Bill Berry created a website called Meanderings. It’s now off-line, but you can find it in the WayBackMachine. I worked... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: White Cherry Blossoms
Posted on 12 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Messin' with the Eclipse [purple]
Posted on 11 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT Defines 10 Concrete Terms: Generically, for 5- and 11-year-olds, and...
The difference between concrete concepts, that is, concepts that can be understood entirely in sensorimotor terms, and abstract terms is an important one. Read more
Posted on 11 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Daffodils
Posted on 11 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI, Chess, and Language 3.2: Search! The Case of Language
In the previous post in this series I considered the issue of search in the context of chess: AI, Chess, and Language 3.1: Search! What enables us to entertain... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Up in the Sky [Hoboken Sun Trees]
Posted on 10 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Angelo Briandi, Jazz Wannabe
Andrea Scrima has an interesting piece at 3 Quarks Daily: Italian Americans, Gender Trouble, and The Sopranos. From the second paragraph: In an attempt to... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Photographing the Eclipse and Visual Pain [#Eclipse2024]
To get good shots of an eclipse you need to use a filter to cut down on the light. I don’t have such a filter, so this is the best I could do: The next two... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jamming at the Clef Club in Philadelphia
Just around the corner Ethan Iverson has a post about listening to the late Tootie Heath (jazz drummer) reminisce with his friends at the Clef Club in... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Has Chechnya Officially Become a Hokey-pokey Nation?
CNN reports: Authorities in the Russian Republic of Chechnya have announced a ban on music that they consider too fast or slow. Read more
Posted on 08 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pansies
Posted on 08 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sun, the City, the River, the Boats
Posted on 07 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GOAT Literary Critics: Part 5.2: The Nature of Authority in Literary Criticism a...
I don’t know just when it was, but at some point in my career – likely well before I had anything one would call a career – I learned that arguments from... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Visualizing Attention: A Transformer's Heart
This is the second of three videos from 3Blue1Brown about how transformers work. Here's the first. Timestamps: 0:00 - Recap on embeddings: 1:39 - Motivating... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Historical-Psychological Text Analysis with Contextualized Construct...
Yuqi Chen, Sixuan Li, Ying Li, Mohammad Atari, Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical-Psychological Text Analysis with Contextualized Construct Representation... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Siren Song of the AI Crowd
Make no mistake, every time I read a news story about all the time, effort, and investment being poured into building larger and larger generative AI models,... Read more
Posted on 06 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Data Hunger is Leading AI into Crazyland [Tulip Mania Redux]
Oh, I understand why they think they need more more and more data data data data. But I don’t think scaling is the answer and the industry is now headed into... Read more
Posted on 06 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flower Power
Posted on 06 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
When the Mind Reveals Itself: Some Moments from My Early Life.
On Wednesday I posted a tribute to the late John Barth in which I talked about a review I wrote about his 1968 collection: Lost in the Funhouse. Read more
Posted on 05 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY