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 ( 7140 )
-
Friday Fotos: A Selection of Recent Shots
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
-
What's Going on Inside So-called "reasoning Model" LLMs
Melanie Mitchell has an interesting piece up: Artificial intelligence learns to reason, Science, 20 Mar 2025, Vol 387, Issue 6740, DOI: 10.1126/science. Read more
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Quantifying Emergent Complexity at Different Scales
Erik Hoel, Causal Emergence 2.0: Quantifying emergent complexity, arXiv:2503.13395v1 [cs.IT] 17 Mar 2025 Abstract: Complex systems can be described at myriad... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Remarkable Karolina Protsenko
This video comes with this notice: “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.” I don't know about the videos, but the voice sounds... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Clocks, Ships, Cities and Longitude
Martina Miotto, Luigi Pascali, Solving the longitude puzzle: A story of clocks, ships and cities, Journal of International Economics, 2025, 104067, ISSN... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Women’s Hands at 3QD
Back in October of 2021 I published this in 3 Quarks Daily: In Praise of Women’s Hands. I was in a down phase at the time and so didn’t post about it here at Ne... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.7 Describes a West Side Manhattan Office at Sunrise
Me: What’s in this photo? Claude 3.7: This is a photograph of an urban cityscape during what appears to be sunset or sunrise, giving everything a golden, hazy... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Blossoms
Posted on 19 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
-
Dan Davies: Cybernetic Abundance and Its Limits
cybernetic abundance and its limits by Dan Daviesthe age of half-diminished expectationsRead on Substack From then end of the article: The problem of... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Large AI Models Are Cultural and Social Technologies
Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans, Large AI models are cultural and social technologies, Science, 13 Mar 2025, Vol 387, Issue 6739 pp... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Stevens Institute, Coming and Going
Posted on 18 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
-
Into the Digital Wilderness and Beyond LLMs
Alexander Doria has a recent post, The Model is the Product, that’s gotten me to think about future developments in a different way: There were a lot of... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Has Trump Misjudged the Voters?
Kristen Soltis Anderson, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Sagging. Here’s the Key Reason. NYTimes, Mar. 17, 2025. I don't think anyone, apart from Trump insiders,... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
While LLMs Produce Funnier Memes Than the Average Human, the Best Human Memers...
Paper: https://t.co/L2pcZyw2uSGemini with image creation, turn this paper into a meme: pic.twitter.com/igbATVaHfV— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 17, 2025H/t... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Selection of Recent Photos [Hoboken]
Posted on 17 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
-
Magic Mike XXL [Media Notes 159]
As I watched Magic Mike XXL on Netflix the other night I realized that I’d seen it when it first came out in theaters, 2015. I don’t know what I thought about i... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Connections Between Sexual Activity, Depression, and Mortality
This video is based on information from the two studies below. Chao Cao, Lin Yang, Tianlin Xu, Patricia A. Cavazos-Rehg, Qinran Liu, Daragh McDermott, Nicola... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Centrality of AI Metacognition [in Search of “wisdom”]
Samuel G. B. Johnson, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Yoshua Bengio, et al., Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition, arXiv:2411.02478v1... Read more
Posted on 16 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
Sun, D. (2025). Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication.... Read more
Posted on 16 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir
Mike Isaac, Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir, NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2025. Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY