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 ( 7633 )
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Tell Me About the Blues: All Blues, Footprints, Simone
Now that we’ve listened to a bit of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Reds Allen, it would seem logical to move ahead in time, just a bit. That is, to take a... Read more
Posted on 17 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Have We Reached a Tipping Point? Which One? [AI, GPT-3]
Steven Johnson has an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine: A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says? (April 15, 2022). He starts... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Learning Tunes – "they're All Kinda the Same"
Ron Carter says something like, "Tell me the key and the first chord of the bridge and I've got it." He has that confidence because the tunes are all kinda the... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Forsythia in Make-up [YOWL!!]
Posted on 16 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Some Thoughts About Artificial Intelligence: Blossoming, Simulation, Embodiment...
First, I talk about the human metaphor at the heart of AI: How do we get beyond it, around it? Then I talk about the difference between a real phenomenon and a... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Keepin' It Real at Mickey D's [the Hallucinated City]
Posted on 16 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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AI's Protein-folding Revolution [Better Than AGI. Why? Because It's Real.]
Ewen Callaway, What's next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution, Nature 604, 13 April 2022, 234-238, doi: https://doi.org/10. Read more
Posted on 16 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hipster and Monk at Nica's
Allen Ginsberg and Thelonious Monk at Barroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter's apartment, New York City, 1961. pic.twitter.com/Q4FZtCCpLi— The Music Board... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: A Festival of Cherry Blossoms
Posted on 15 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Tell Me About the Blues: St. Louis Blues, Muggles, St. James Infirmary
W.C. Handy was known as the Father of the Blues – a sobriquet I believe he gave himself. He wrote our first example tune, “St. Louis Blues.” Bessie Smith was... Read more
Posted on 15 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mickey D's, Still Going Strong [Elon, Don't Mess with Twitter!]
Have you ever wondered when "Mickey D's" was first used as a name for MacDonalds? Just ask Twitter: "The nickname appears to have originated with blacks in the... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Kind of Computation Is Cognition? [Josh Tenenbaum]
Recent successes in artificial intelligence have been largely driven by neural networks and other sophisticated machine learning tools for pattern recognition... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Looks Like Things Have Gotten Back to Normal on My Academia Page
Back on April first I’d posted that, for some unknown reason, action on my Academia page had all of a sudden skyrocketed to 875 on March 29, and then quickly... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Cascade of Forsythia
Posted on 14 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Cultural Evolution of Technology, the Case of the Smart Phone [Progress Studies]
Is there a Moore’s law for this?— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 14, 2022 Phenomena like selfies are wrong level of explanation. They are just the most common... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Urban Pastoral
I had originally posted this to The Valve on November 19, 2007. As The Valve has been defunct and off-line for a couple of years, I am re-posting it here becaus... Read more
Posted on 14 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tell Me About the Blues, a New Series on the Savanna
I’m planning a relatively short series, of relatively short posts, a half to maybe a dozen, each discussing, say, one to three examples. Before plunging in we... Read more
Posted on 13 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cherry Blossoms [Sakura | Japanese National Flower]
Posted on 13 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Another Ramble: AI Alchemy & the Future, RationalityLand, Life Only, Terminology...
I haven’t done one of this in a while. I do them when I’ve got a number of things jammed up in my mind and have trouble deciding what to do next. Read more
Posted on 12 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
If a Million Monkeys Are Typing out Code, How Long Before They Produce a Coheren...
Yesterday Eric Jang and Santiago Renteria had an interesting conversation in the Twitterverse about a recent blog post in which Scott Aaronson discussed... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
