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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Two Lampshades and a Mirror, a Study in Variation
Posted on 23 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What Are the Chances That Facebook Will Pull out of Europe?
Alex Hern, Facebook says it may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with US, The Guardian, Sept 22, 2020. Facebook has warned that it may pull out of Europe... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why, in the Course of an Intellectual Life, Can It Take Years to See the Obvious?
I’m thinking of my own intellectual life, of course. And I have two examples in mind, 1) my realization that literary form was at the center of my interest in... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why We Have Four Limbs and Five Digits on Each
20 years ago I published research on why animals have as many limbs and digits as they do. I posited a Limb Law governing # limbs and limb length across a wide... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some of the Locals Know This Area as Narnia [graffiti]
Posted on 21 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Measuring Culture Worldwide with a Sample of Two Billion Humans Using Data from...
Nick Obradovich, Ömer Özak, Ignacio Martín, et al., Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans, NBER Working Paper No. 27827,... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hardware Path Dependence and the Future of AI
Sara Hooker, The Hardware Lottery, arXiv:2009.06489v1 [cs.CY] 14 Sep 2020 Abstract: Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Before Photoshop
Ah, 19th c. spirit photographs - and these seem to feature machines meant to 'capture' spirits. The Victorians were mad for spiritualism, seances, ghosts,... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why We Sleep
Unraveling why we sleep https://t.co/lx5VZ6gMXs — Germán Sierra (@german_sierra) September 19, 2020 Abstract from the linked article (which is not behind... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let's Get Lost
Posted on 19 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Facebook Or Freedom, Part 3: The Game Goes on [Media Notes, Special Edition #1]
It’s been 12 days since my last Facebook post, on September 7, and I’ve had at least four 48 hour reprieves since then, maybe 5 – I’ve not been keeping a... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Manhattan's West Side as Seen from Hoboken
Posted on 18 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Harry James Plays the Bejesus out of an Insane Arrangement of "St. Louis Blues"...
It's hard to describe what's going on here, but it's obviously from a movie (Do You Love Me? 1946). The introduction is silly and pretentious, but James shows... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Importance of Context
Remarkable conversation between Stan Ulam and Gian-Carlo Rota way back from 1985 on why context rather than simple recognition of images and feedback would be... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Away [Media Notes 45]
This is just a quick note: Away is a new Netflix series about a manned mission to Mars. The first season has ten episodes and takes us from launch to touch-down. Read more
Posted on 17 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High-Tech Fantasy That Won’t Work
New working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academia:... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Investigating Representations of Verb Bias in Neural Language Models
linguists need to be careful about assuming verbs fall into “alternating” and “non-alternating” classes: pic.twitter.com/jaThjFBesz — Adele Goldberg... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Symbolic Reasoning for Neural Architectures
Learning to decide which reasoning paths to take enables us to consider significantly deeper reasoning tasks and achieve SOTA results on CLUTRR, a dataset for... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
If You Had to Say That One Was Male, the Other Female, Which is Which?...
Posted on 16 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Is George Lucas the Greatest Artist of Our Time?
That's what Camille Paglia argues in this article, George Lucas’s Force, The Chronicle Review, October 15, 2012. I don't thin 'the greatest' is a useful... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
