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 ( 6442 )
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An Overview of the Theory of Overparameterized Machine Learning
"A Farewell to the Bias-Variance Tradeoff?An Overview of the Theory of Overparameterized Machine Learning" (https://t.co/6zFxHeXB0c). Read more
Posted on 18 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wendell Pierce: Bring Back Music and Dance in Congo Square
Callé Hamel, Havana, Cuba. Every Sunday they gather continue a long tradition of dance and music in honor of the Orishas. Read more
Posted on 16 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hot Streaks in Art, Science, and Film [Talent Search]
Liu, L., Dehmamy, N., Chown, J. et al. Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers. Nat Commun 12, 5392 (2021).... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Social Media Has the Strongest Effect When It Violates Cultural Values [Japan an...
Hsu, T. W., Niiya, Y., Thelwall, M., Ko, M., Knutson, B., Tsai, J. L. (2021). Social media users produce more affect that supports cultural values, but are... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Savage on Cosplay [Homo Ludens]
Some years ago I watched a bunch of TED talks. And then lost interest. These days I rarely watch any TED talks. But I watched this one because it's by Adam... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Are the Requirements of a Proper Foundation for AI?
Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, Has AI found a new Foundation?, The Gradient. You may have heard that over a 100 AI researchers recently gathered at Stanford to... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The War in Afghanistan Was a Gigantic Corruption Pump Funded by US Taxpayers
Farah Stockman, "What Failure? For Some, the War in Afghanistan Was a Big Success", NYTimes, Sept 13, 2021. Instead of a nation, what we really built were more... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Authoritarianism, Left and Right
"People with extreme political views that favor authoritarianism – whether they are on the far left or the far right – have surprisingly similar behaviors and... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos (on Saturday): Jersey City Hinterlands [railroad]
Posted on 11 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Apartment [Media Notes 63]
I’ve just watched The Apartment, a romantic comedy from 1960. According to its Wikipedia entry the film “has come to be regarded as one of the greatest films... Read more
Posted on 10 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Launch of the Elsie - A Ship Model by Erik Ronnberg, Jr. [building]
I've been watching a lot of videos by Adam Savage, who was a model-maker in the film industry before becoming co-host of MythBusters. Read more
Posted on 09 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Takes a (large) 'village' of Artificial Neurons to Simulate One Real Neuron
Neurons are not like logic gates, they can only be modeled using something like 10,000 coupled non-linear differential equations. Read more
Posted on 08 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Five Food Fotos [Friday Fotos Delayed]
Posted on 06 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Decentralization in China
As of 2000, the Chinese government ranked cities on 33 indicators, and published ratings with the names and pictures of the mayors of each city. pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 06 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The State of NLP These Days
The beginning of an interesting thread about NLP: well, all true, but at least they work. like, previous-gen models *also* didn't understand meaning, and... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Splish Splash
Posted on 02 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Q. Where’s Reality? A. Which One? [Howl's Moving Castle]
Back in the early days of the blog I had a lot of posts about Hayao Miyazaka. I'm boosting this one to the top on general principle. It's from August 21, 2010. Read more
Posted on 02 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Savage Builds a Totoro Costume [What Costume Are You Building for the Next...
Adam Savage is an experienced special effects designer and fabricator who has a YouTube channel where he shows how to build stuff. Read more
Posted on 29 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Spacecraft 7: Muppet Star Wars
This is a documentary about creating digital characters where there had been puppets in Star Wars. Naturally, they spend a fair amount of time on Yoda. Read more
Posted on 28 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pat Metheny Discusses Music with Two Neuroscientists
Interesting, but not as interesting as it could have been if, for example, the neuroscientists had deeper practical experience with musical performance. Read more
Posted on 28 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY