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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Dinner at the Malibu Diner [pandemic]
Posted on 11 April 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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From Japanese Cinema, 1926
A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from the Early Days of Japanese Cinema (1926) https://t.co/9kl2puDf6P pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
YouTube on the Rise
Americans using social media: a 2021 update from Pew Research.https://t.co/G8Pr0FF9vG@pewinternet pic.twitter.com/aiJRzGswLv— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander)... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Power Really Does Rot the Mind [Hubris Syndrome]
Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage, The Atlantic, July/August, 2017: The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Convolutional Neural Nets and Human Vision Processing
It's amazing that Alexnet is still one of the best models of human visual processing (when looking both at layerwise correspondence and total variance explained... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bhutan Was Vaccinated Against Covid-19 in a Week
Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the “Dragon King” of Bhutan, formed a national-service corps that has helped to set up and staff more than 1,200 vaccination... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Courts Decide That Graffiti is REAL [SK8parks, the Interwebs, and Being...
One reason graffiti interests me is that it is socially and institutionally ambiguous. It was created back in the late 1960s and 1970s by (mostly) kids who... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do We Fact-check Social Media?
Avi Tuschman, Want to solve the misinformation crisis? We already have a proven solution at our fingertips, Fast Company, 4.8. Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Do You Get When You Search on “graffiti Museum”? [urban Design Center, Now...
A bunch of stuff. Top two (at least when I searched, YMMV): Museum of Graffiti, Street Museum of Art. Here are their self-descriptions. The difference is... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Billionaires in Space
Kara Swisher interviews Diana Trujillo, a NASA flight director in charge of the robotic arm on the Perseverance Mars rover. Here's some remarks on the in... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ramble into 2021, It’s About Time [graffiti, Music, Words, Science, Progress]
It’s April, it’s Spring, it’s 2021, a new year, and it’s about time. I haven’t done one of these in awhile. I do these “ramble” posts as a way of organizing my... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scorsese's First Storyboard?
11-Year-Old Martin Scorsese Draws Storyboards for His Imagined Roman Epic Film, "The Eternal City" https://t.co/HQCqJk8jOH pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 08 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Did Peter Turchin 'predict' the Capitol Riots of 1/6 Back in 2012?
It's one thing to predict a financial crisis or a war or whatever year after year til one finally happens and you claim to be a prophet. Read more
Posted on 07 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
But What About Telepathic Communication? [more on the Incoherence of...
Think of this as a pendant on and further exploration of my ongoing discussion of the incoherence of the idea of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer. I’ve... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Great Escape
Posted on 07 April 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Dana Gioia Says That Rap/hip-hop is Poetry [talks of Other Things as Well]
Tyler Cowern interviews Dana Gioia, once upon a time California Poet Laureate, head of the NEA, and an executive at General Foods. About a quarter of the way in... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Generative Grammar in the 21st Century: Innateness is Not Doing So Well
A recent post by Martin Haspelmath, Some (ex-)generative grammarians who are abandoning innateness. The opening paragraph: In the 1960s, a view of language... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3281 Drones in Lights Over Shanghai
Read about it here. H/t Tyler Cowen. Read more
Posted on 05 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Incoherence of the Idea of Brain-to-brain Thought Transfer [once Again]
Once again I find myself thinking about the (im)plausibility of direct brain-to-brain communication of thoughts, most recently hyped by Elon Musk in... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Born to Groove
Posted on 05 April 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
