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 ( 7149 )
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Lessons in Laughter
: Dozens of you have shared this lovely video with me over the past couple days. And I just love that it illustrates two baby lessons in one. Read more
Posted on 24 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Delirous with Daffodils
Posted on 24 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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What's Up, Umm, Err, Down with the Pyramids? [“a Vast Underground City”?]
The Egyptian pyramids have been a scientific, historical, and mythological (if you will) puzzle since whenever. What are the for and how were they built? On... Read more
Posted on 24 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
David Hays, Language and Love + Leslie Farber [why Techbros Are Dangerous]
I first learned of David Hays, who would become my teacher, mentor, and colleague, from an article he published in Dædalus (Vol. 102, No. 2, 1973):... Read more
Posted on 23 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Odd Angles
Posted on 23 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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The Demise of White Male Writer of Literary Fiction?
Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has posted the opening paragraphs of Jacob Savage, The Vanishing White Male Writer, Compact (Mar. Read more
Posted on 23 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken After Dark
Posted on 22 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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The Hippocampus and Language: A Conversation with Claude 3.7
I recently had a conversation with Claude 3.7 Sonnet about the functions that that hippocampus plays in language. As I lay down some basic information about... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Linguistic Capacity Present in Homo Sapiens 135 Thousand Years Ago
Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto, Remo Nitschke,, Mercedes Okumura, Ian TattersallI, Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: A Selection of Recent Shots
Posted on 21 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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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
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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