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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Tap Dancing with Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson
Enjoy Gene Kelly as he presents Dancing Is a Man's Game on Omnibus on 12/21/1958. This performance features Mr. Kelly dancing with sports legends Edward... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
INEQUALITY!! Sparks Rising Tide of Protests World-wide [but the Success Rate is...
Declan Walsh and Max Fisher, From Chile to Lebanon, Protests Flare Over Wallet Issues, NYTimes, Oct 23, 2019. LONDON — In Chile, the spark was an increase in... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence & Regulating the Internet [Tyler...
Tyler Cowen converses with (Crooked Timber's) Henry Farrell on this that and the other, including the internet: COWEN: Now, we’re chatting in early October,... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What I Did Before Going to Bed Yesterday, More Photo Madness [sunflower Seeds]
1. The "original", a realistic rendering of the RAW file that came out of the camera. 2. Derived from 1. 3. Derived from 1. 4. Derived from 1. 5. Derived from 1... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Heart of Darkness is 16th Most Assigned Text Across a Collection of Seven Millio...
About the Open Syllabus Project: The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching an... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Local Narrative Logic and Global Order, Or How We Get from Here to There in Hear...
Note: This is a stand-in for an idea that needs to be more fully developed. The problem posed by form Not long after I began working on Heart of Darkness I... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What I Did This Morning, a Sequence of Photographs
1. First rendering. 2. Grayscale image derived from first rendering. 3. Second grayscale image derived from first rendering. 4. Likely derived from 2nd grayscal... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Will Exxon Mobile Finally Pay up for Deceiving Its Investors, and the Public,...
Lee Wasserman, Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change? NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2019. But in internal memos dating back to the 1970s, Exxon predicted that... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Whole-brain Network Topology, the Ascending Arousal System, and Information...
Li M, Han Y, Aburn MJ, Breakspear M, Poldrack RA, Shine JM, et al. (2019) Transitions in information processing dynamics at the whole-brain network level are... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Technology Adoption
We overestimate how fast technology adoption has historically occurred. Take the transition from animal to mechanical: the first canaries in coal mines were... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Donald Trump, the Tail [media Master] Who Wags the Dog [body Politic] of...
John Emerson has recently posed the question: “With all the things wrong with Trump, why is his dumbness the final zinger for so many people? Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Structure of Technology Revolutions
2/6 The first part of the @forbes piece (https://t.co/YSmjiYykf0) discusses the structure of technology revolutions, as described a quarter century ago by... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Interpretive Fallacy, Two Versions
Interpretive Fallacy, a different version: If A can be interpreted as B, then it must be a case of B. Example: That cloud (A) looks like an elephant (B),... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Bright Cloudy Day in Late September on the Waterfront in Hoboken, NJ
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Acting: Masks Or Faces? Two Recent Studies
Christian Jarrett, Acting changes the brain: it’s how actors get lost in a role, Aeon, Oct. 21, 2019: In one paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, a... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sounds with Sights in Prehistoric Caves?
Bruno Fazenda, Chris Scarre, Cave acoustics in prehistory: Exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response, Journal of the... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading the Human Swarm 5: Night-time Action and Brain-to-brain Coupling...
Ch12 of The Human Swarm, “Sensing Others” starts off with two dynamite paragraphs. I say they’re dynamite because they speak to two of my hobby horses, a... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Genes Sometimes Emerge in the Course of Evolution, 'de Novo' [culture Does...
Adam Levy, How evolution builds genes from scratch, Nature, 16 October 2019: In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sin... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Messin' w/ Photoshop [BAPC Camping Trip]
I like to play around with Photoshop. It's a regular part of my routine. Yes, most of the time I process my photos through Lightroom in a relatively... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Codgers Just Wanna' Get High and Find the Meaning of It All [42] – Ayahuasca
Casey Schwartz, Taking Ayahuasca When You’re a Senior Citizen, NYTimes 10.17.19 (in the Style section, no less). At 74, the venture capitalist George Sarlo migh... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY