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 ( 6473 )
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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 -
A Source of Blue Dye in Rural China
Around the corner at Language Log Victor Mair quotes from a recent paper, E.J.W. Barber, "Of Salt Men and Cloth: The Remarkable Textile History Preserved in... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
If Language is for Communication, What Does That Imply About LLMs?
Noam Chomsky famously believes that language originated to facilitate thought, but then came to be a medium of communication. Others believe the reverse, that i... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Only the Fork is Left, and Some Syrup
Posted on 11 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Looks Like China is Eating America's EV Lunch. And Elon is MIA.
Kevin Williams, I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked, InsideEVs, May 9, 2024. Late in the article, after looking at a... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MUSE - "Hysteria" - KIDS Collaboration Cover
Produced by Kids Rock For Kids www.kidsrockforkids.com KRFK brought together extraordinary young performers for a mind-blowing collaboration! Read more
Posted on 11 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Those Scamps at Hydraulic Press Channel Are at It Again: Extruding Gummy Bears!
From the YouTube page: In this exciting video, we use a hydraulic press to conduct a series of experiments that explore the incredible power of hydraulic... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Mexican Drug Cartels Are a Bit "like Junior Partners to Corrupt Government...
Samo Burja, Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State, Bismarck Brief, May 8. 2024. As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Flowers & Flowers and More Flowers
Posted on 10 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What HAS AI Changed? What WILL It Change?
The answers to those questions range between “nothing” and “everything” depending on this and that. What is the scope of the question, earth only, or the whole... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Has Generative AI Already Peaked?
This paper is discussed in the video: Vishaal Udandarao, Ameya Prabhu, Adhiraj Ghosh, et al., No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY