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 ( 7356 )
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The Chair (How Many Women Were on the Faculty of the English Department at...
Having watched The Chair in a single sitting, I suppose I should say something. But I don’t have much to say. For one thing, I haven’t been in a classroom in... Read more
Posted on 25 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Spacecraft 6: The Child is Father to the Man
Morton begins Spacecraft by talking about his childhood as an eleven year old boy coming from a family of limited means and walking to school in the morning,... Read more
Posted on 24 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
120 Years of Faking Space Travel for the Movies
Starting at about 2:42: "Take this shot of a flying saucer in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). It's clearly just a toy on a string. But that would all change... Read more
Posted on 24 August 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kids and Music 8: Sant Andreu Jazz Band [Born to Groove]
Sant Andreu Jazz Band is a youth jazz band from Barcelona, featuring 7- to 20-year-olds. The bandleader is Joan Chamorro. The Sant Andrew Jazz Band is based... Read more
Posted on 21 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Asian Salad with Ginger Dressing and Grilled Chicken Breast at the Malibu Diner
Posted on 21 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Heritable Functional Architecture in Human Visual Cortex
End of an odyssey of many years - I'm sure I had the first logistical discussions about this project in 2012... Our twin study on retinotopic (pRF) maps with... Read more
Posted on 21 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Long-term Gene–culture Coevolution and the Human Evolutionary Transition
Timothy M. Waring and Zachary T. Wood, Long-term gene–culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Vol. 288 No... Read more
Posted on 20 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Changing Terms of My Socratic Bargain with the American Academy [and the...
In the course of writing a somewhat quixotic review of Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age for 3 Quarks Daily I decided to conclude by... Read more
Posted on 19 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mural Fest in Jersey City, Again
Posted on 19 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Are There So Many Male Characters in Folktales? Ross Douthat Suggests an...
Some years ago I was asked to review a collection of articles in the nascent field of Darwinist literary criticism, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson,... Read more
Posted on 19 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Over the Last Week, a Sampler...
Posted on 18 June 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Peer Review, What's It Good For? All Together Now: Absolutely Nothing!
Mark Humphries, The Absurdity of Peer Review: What the pandemic revealed about scientific publishing, Elemental, June 3, 2021. Read more
Posted on 18 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What I Did During the Covid Pandemic: Built a Miniature Venetia Palazzo
Photograph by Jenna Bascom Sian Ballen and Jeff Hirsh, The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature, New York Social Diary, June 17, 2021. Read more
Posted on 18 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Think I Need to Slip Some Flowers in Here
Posted on 17 June 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Scaling: Fear Not Big Numbers [Disney’s Fantasia Scaled the Cosmos to Two Hours]
Aiyana Green and Steven Strogatz, Who’s Afraid of Big Numbers, NYTimes, June 17, 2021. ... vast sums of money become more comprehensible if they are reframed... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New York Celebrates Lifting of COVID Restrictions with Fireworks, but It Wasn't...
Posted on 16 June 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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How Symbolic AI Helped Us Transcend the Word Illusion
By “symbolic AI” I mean the research done from roughly the beginnings of AI in the mid-1950s though the 1970s and into the 1980s. In particular, I mean the... Read more
Posted on 15 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Feel a Quickening in the Force [the Times They Are a Changing]
3. AI and neuroscience have begun a dialog to their mutual benefit. 4. @Noahpinion decides to think about how to regulate and legitimate graffiti. Read more
Posted on 15 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hey, Kids! I Have an Idea. Let People Vote on What Graffiti Stays Up. They Can...
Actually, I have a friend who was a graffiti artist in Japan, then got arrested for illegally painting on stuff. It made him famous, and now his wall art is in... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain-inspired AI and AI-inspired Neuroscience
I've now turned this into a PDF file which you can download here: https://www.academia.edu/37815917/Mind-Culture_Coevolution_Major_Trans... In the early 1970s... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
