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 ( 7824 )
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The Return of Yellow Pagodas [goldenrod]
Posted on 08 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I've Been Saving These for a Gloomy Day [irises]
Posted on 07 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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On the Moral Value of Work
The title of Peter Coy’s Labor Day op-ed caught my attention: Work Is Intrinsically Good. Or Maybe It’s Not?, NYTimes, September 5, 2022. Read more
Posted on 07 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Varieties of Spiritual Experience [35% of People in US & UK Report Spiritual...
Robert Wright interviews David B. Yadan, author of The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. At about 14:11: David B. Yaden: Right in the beginning of this... Read more
Posted on 07 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Suburban Railroad Station
Posted on 06 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Two Views of Ornamental Plants on Washington St. [looking N and S on Washington...
Posted on 05 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Sailing Along
Posted on 04 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Progress in Trumpet Technique: Hora Staccato
Grigoraș Dinicu wrote “Hora Staccato” as a showpiece for violin on the occasion of his graduation ceremony from the Bucharest Conservatory in 1906. Read more
Posted on 04 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rogue AI & the Relationship Between Reality and Community Orientations
Time once again to chew the AI-Doom bone. Rohit over at Strange Loop Canon has recent posts about AI risk is modern eschatology and Effective Altruism is a... Read more
Posted on 03 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
As the Era of Globalization Ends, China Has Become Obsessed with Food Security
N.S. Lyons, Why is China so Obsessed With Food Security? The Upheaval, September 1, 2022: The reality, which China’s leaders appear to have grasped at least... Read more
Posted on 03 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Traceable and Interpretable Reasoning Using Large Language Models
Antonia Creswell, Murray Shanahan, Faithful Reasoning Using Large Language Models, arXiv:2208.14271v1 [cs.AI], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208. Read more
Posted on 02 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: It's a Purple World out There
* * * * * A note about the middle image: That's a photo of objects on my dining table one of the evenings during Hurricane Sandy. The power was out so I was... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fred Rogers Was a Mensch, Who Faced Down a Skeptical Senator
Here's his 1969 testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications: Mr. Rogers on the Tonight Show in 1983, with Joan Rivers as guest host. Watch... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Prediction Mania as a Magical Attempt to Foreclose on the Future
I argue that notions like prediction and optimisation work like what religious studies calls cosmograms: supersized, whole-world models for how things relate... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Economist Bryan Caplan Says That Primary and Secondary School Are a Waste of...
The New York Times is running a set of guest op-eds about education. Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University has one under the title, “School Is... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken Peek-a-boo with Hydrangeas
Posted on 01 September 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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A Critical Period for Acquiring Rhythmic Feel?
Steven Pinker recently posted a short video about a critical period for learning language. He reports a recent study he participated in that found that, yes,... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Music on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood Was Good Jazz [Media Notes 79]
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was a children’s TV program that ran from 1968 to 2001. Thus my own childhood was well behind me by the time it got started. But I... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Note on AGI as Concept and as Shibboleth [kissing Cousin to Singularity]
Artificial intelligence as ambitious from its beginnings in the mid-1950s and this or that practitioner would confidently predict that before long computers... Read more
Posted on 30 August 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cab Calloway and His Band on the Road [railroad]
Photographic print of Cab Calloway and his band in a sleeper car, 1933 #openaccess #museumarchive https://t.co/yzXR22JyPQ pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 30 August 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
