Bbenzon
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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 ( 6654 )
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Whisper Not - Benny Golson and McCoy Tyner
Whisper Not (Golson): Benny Golson (born 1929), tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner (1938-2020), piano; Avery Sharpe, bass and Aaron Scott on drums. Jazz in Marciac... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Risks of Proliferating AI Agents
Malcolm Murray, The Shifting Nature Of AI Risk, 3 Quarks Daily, July 22, 2024. Second and more importantly, much of the focus in AI is currently on building AI... Read more
Posted on 22 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Touch of Yellow
Posted on 21 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Nine-year Old Chess Prodigy Hopes to Become the Youngest Grandmaster Ever
Isabella Kwai, At 5, She Picked Up Chess as a Pandemic Hobby. At 9, She’s a Prodigy. NYTimes, July 21, 2024. Since learning chess during a pandemic lockdown,... Read more
Posted on 21 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Human Go Players Learn from Superhuman AIs
đĄ️ Last year, we found superhuman Go AIs are vulnerable to “cyclic attacks”. This adversarial strategy was discovered by AI but... Read more
Posted on 21 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coffee and Cream
Posted on 20 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Masha Gessen: Are We on the Edge of an Autocratic Breakthrough?
Masha Gessen, Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality, NYTimes, July 20, 2024. The last three paragraphs: As for Trump, despite the gestures he made... Read more
Posted on 20 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nahre Sol Talks with Tigan Hamasyan
From the Wikipedia entry for Hamasyan: Tigran Hamasyan (Armenian: Տիգրան... Read more
Posted on 20 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Ever More Flowers
Posted on 19 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Refactoring Training Data to Make Smaller LLMs
Tentatively, most interesting thing I've seen coming out of the AI world in a year or so. A tweet by Andrej Karpathy: LLM model size competition is intensifying... Read more
Posted on 19 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s It Mean to Understand How LLMs Work?
I don’t think we know. What bothers me is that people in machine learning seem to think of word means as Platonic ideals. No, that’s not what they’d say, but... Read more
Posted on 17 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mood-congruent Memory Revisited
Faul, L., LaBar, K. S. (2023). Mood-congruent memory revisited. Psychological Review, 130(6), 1421–1456. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000394 (ungated version:... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Economic Growth in Roman Britain Over Four Centuries
Scott G. Ortman, José Lobo, Lisa Lodwick, Rob Wiseman, Olivia Bulik, Victoria Harbison , and Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Identification and measurement of... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rebuilding a 70-year Old Engine [a Bit of the Physical World]
I bought an UNUSED 70-year old ROLLS-ROYCE crate engine! How bad could it be? Pacific Northwest Hillbilly 0:00 unload and unbox 11:08 getting engine unstuck... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Birth of "Jaws"
Brian Raftery, 50 Years Ago, ‘Jaws’ Hit Bookstores, Capturing the Angst of a Generation, NYTimes, July 12, 2024. The article opens: In 1973, the first chapter o... Read more
Posted on 12 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: The Water Around Hoboken
Posted on 12 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Late Admissions: Lessons from Glenn Loury’s Memoir
From the webpage: In his stunning new memoir, "Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative," economist Glenn Loury surveys the stratospheric highs and... Read more
Posted on 12 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Burnout Coaches
Martha C. White, Seeing Workplace Misery, Burnout Coaches Offer Company, New York Times, July 9, 2024. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted how and... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Remnants
Posted on 09 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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The Aristocrats [Media Notes 138]
The Aristocrats is a 2005 documentary about a joke of the same name which Wikipedia characterizes as a taboo-defying, off-color joke that has been told by... Read more
Posted on 09 July 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY