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 ( 6476 )
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Environmental Change Forced Humans to Become More Adaptable 320,000 Years Ago
Smithsonian Magazine, "Turbulent era sparked leap in human behavior, adaptability 320,000 years ago", October 21, 2020: For hundreds of thousands of years, earl... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Beach
Posted on 21 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Why Comparisons Between Brains and Computers Are Problematic at Best [the...
Matthew Hutson, How Much Can Your Brain Actually Process? Don’t Ask. Slate, March 29, 2016. This is a useful summary comparison between digital computers and th... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fighting the Big Tech Ecosystem
Kara Swisher, The Justice Dept.’s Lawsuit Against Google: Too Little, Too Late, Oct. 20, 2020. There’s no such thing as a single entity called Big Tech, and jus... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How fastText and BERT Encode Linguistic Features
We find that most of the information for linguistic features (e.g., grammatical gender, number and animacy) are located in subsets of 5 to 10 neurons. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are Inventors Or Firms the Engines of Innovation?
Article by Ajay Bhaskarabhatla, Luis Cabral, Deepak Hegde, and Thomas Peeters in Management Science, published online Oct. 7, 2020. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sad Truth About Social Media
This is what I have been saying. All the cute and clever content moderation policies and fact-checking and media literacy efforts — none of it matters. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Boys: Superheroes for the Trump Era? [Media Notes 50]
Just watched the Netflix series, The Boys, which came out in 2019 and is based on a comic book from 2006-2008, about which I know nothing. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Investment and the Conditions for Exponential Growth [#Progress Studies | Tech...
At the end of their article, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020), Nicholas Bloom, et al. Begin to draw some conclusions, thus (p. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Long Term Storage in the Human Brain [ANNs Pale in Comparison]
Chromatin as long-term storage. Amazing. Though I think we now have several layered intra-cellular and synaptic mechanisms for long-term memory storage? Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Evolution 8: Language Games 1, Speech
I'm bumping this post, from 2010, to the top of the queue for two reasons: 1) the section "Language Games and Game Theory" is germane to my recent post, Why do... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Couple of Seconds of Louis Armstrong as a News Boy in His Teens?
According to this article by James Karst, in 64 Parishes, that clip, shot in 1915, may be our earliest film clip of Louis Armstrong: An eight-second silent... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Denis DiBlasio Performing in the Zone ["I Don't Know If It's Like a Drug...
About DiBlasio: Baritone saxophonist, flautist, educator, composer, arranger, Executive Director of The Maynard Ferguson Institute of Jazz and head of Jazz and... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mood Regulation and National Sentiment [indigenous Peoples Meet Columbus]
First, what is mood affiliation? As far as I know, the term was coined by Tyler Cowen in a blog post on March 27, 2011, Meta-ethics, realism, and intuitionism. Read more
Posted on 16 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Autumn in the Arches
Posted on 16 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Facebook Or Freedom, Part 6: Ideas on the Table [so Far]
This is mostly a book-keeping post to list the various ideas I’ve gathered on the problem of social media, with Facebook as my prime example. Read more
Posted on 15 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Will? [should We Retire the Idea Along with the Controversy Around It?]
Free will is an ongoing concern of Jerry Coyne, a biologist. He doesn’t believe it exists. Neither does Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist. I don’t know why... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Shots of a Street Lamp in Early Evening [Hoboken NJ]
Posted on 15 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What We Need Online is the Electronic Equivalent of a Public Park [digital Publi...
This is perhaps the most interesting thing I've read about the problem of the online environment and, in a way, it speaks to my sense that we need... Read more
Posted on 14 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Facebook Or Freedom, Part 5: A Different Case, Blogger
Even as I’ve been playing at cat-and-mouse with Facebook, Google’s Blogger has changed its interface. From my point of view it’s pretty much of a wash, in some... Read more
Posted on 14 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY