Bbenzon
Description
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 ( 7865 )
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Keith Jarrett, "Over the Rainbow," Tokyo 1984
Keith Jarrett’s solo performance of “Over the Rainbow” in Tokyo in 1984 is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding and moving piano solo covers of all... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Our Place in the Universe: the Anthropocene, Gaia, and the Noosphere
Robert Wright and Boris Shoshitaishvili discuss Boris’s new book, Our Planetary Mirror, which draws on three big ideas—Gaia, the noosphere, and the... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Math, AI, and Terry Tao on a “war Footing”
Elisabeth Bumiller, Why One of the World’s Greatest Mathematicians Is on a ‘War Footing’, NYTimes, Oct. 15, 2026. Opening paragraphs: Terence Tao is typically... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Terence Tao Says We're Being Dragged into a New Era of Mathetics
Mathematician Terence Tao: "we're seeing the end of the romantic era of mathematics, the age of heroes. we're moving into an industrial era where math becomes... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Consolidating Context into Parametric Memory
Human intelligence grows by building on experience. We acquire knowledge, refine skills, revise beliefs, and carry what we learn into future situations.... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reconciling Symbols and Neural Networks
đ¤đ§ NEW PAPERđ§ đ¤ What is the relationship between neural networks amp; symbolic... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3 Patterns of Hemisphere Specialization in Humans
The brain’s neat division of labor, with language on one side and attention on the other, is just one of several workable layouts. Read more
Posted on 14 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Robert Wright Interviews Alex Gibney on His Musk Documentary
Robert Wright and filmmaker Alex Gibney discuss Alex's epic new documentary about Elon Musk—an exploration of how the world's richest man got so powerful (and s... Read more
Posted on 13 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mechanistic Interpretability, Making Things Up?
Researchers put a dead salmon in an fMRI scanner, showed it pictures of humans, and asked it to guess their emotions. The scan showed brain activity. In a dead... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Allocation of Training Compute for LLMs, 2024-2026
How AI shifted from a transductive paradigm (token-by-token answer completion) to an inductive paradigm (on-the-fly reasoning chain synthesis), in one chart.... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neil deGrass Tyson on Navier-Stokes, AI, and Math
What’s with AI solving the Navier-Stokes Equation? Neil deGrass Tyson breaks down what the equation is and the controversy surrounding the solution with the hel... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bill Gates Talks with Ezra Klein About AI
Ezra Klein, Bill Gates’s Blunt Warning on A.I. NYTimes, Sept. 29.16. From Klein's intro: Very few people combine technological experience, corporate experience... Read more
Posted on 29 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Woodland Scene by Danish Painter Peder Mørk Mønsted
This is not a photograph.Every leaf and every reflection was put there by hand, in oil, by the Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted in 1894. Read more
Posted on 21 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Doomsday Cult Inside OpenAI (& the Hugging Face Incident)
From YouTube page: In July 2026, a swarm of more than 1,000 OpenAI AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face — and the way they did i... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Brain Develops as Two Separate Structures Rather Than a Single Unified Organ.
A recent breakthrough published in Nature Neuroscience fundamentally changes our understanding of human biology, revealing that the brain develops as two... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Obama on AI
đ¨ OBAMA ON AI: "If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agenti... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Marilyn Monroe Promoted Ella Fitsgerald at the Mocambo in the 1950s
In the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald was not allowed to play Hollywood's most popular nightclub, Mocambo, because of her race. Marilyn Monroe, who was a big fan, calle... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain Synch While Holding Hands Attenuates Pain
Holding someone's hand while they are in pain reduces the pain, and the mechanism is brain-to-brain synchronisation. A 2018 study in PNAS found that when a... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Theory Is All You Need: AI, Human Cognition, and Causal Reasoning
Felin, Teppo and Holweg, Matthias, Theory Is All You Need: AI, Human Cognition, and Causal Reasoning (February 24, 2024). Strategy Science, volume 9, issue 4,... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yesterday's Walk Down Washington St. in Hoboken
Posted on 28 June 2026
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