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 ( 7831 )
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Deep Learning's Diminishing Returns
Why GPT-6 or 7 may never come. Great essay on "Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns" @IEEESpectrum https://t.co/VJDXjBejDZ— Gary Marcus... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Aardman Does Stop-motion Animation [Adam Savage]
On a Shooting Set of Aardman Animations' Early Man! Adam Savage’s Tested Adam Savage steps onto one of the film stages at Aardman Animations, where a complex an... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How the Ubiquity of Search Engines is Changing People's Understanding of How...
Monica Chin, File Not Found, The Verge, Sept. 22, 2021. The article opens: Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. Read more
Posted on 23 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Third, a Third, and a Third, Approximately || Two Hallways in 51 Pacific...
Posted on 23 September 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Beyond Human Nature
Amia Srinivasan, in a wide-ranging conversation with Tyler Cowen: I also think one error that is consistently made in this discourse, in this kind of... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Work [freedom and Dignity]
Jonathan Malesic, The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less, NYTimes, Sept. 23, 2021. We need that truth now, when millions are returning to in-person work... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does GPT-3 Tell the Truth?
Owain Evans, How truthful is GPT-3? A benchmark for language models, AI Alignment Forum, Sept. 16, 2021. This is an edited excerpt of a new ML paper (pdf,... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Music and Heart Beat
Abnormal heart rhythms tend to form simple inter-beat-interval ratios that match music: Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk for ventricular early beats, Piazzolla’s... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Relationship Between Poetic Meter and Meaning in Accentual-syllabic Verse
nbspOur preprint is out! Together with Petr Plecháč (@versotym) and @AWLassche we try to show that poetic meters historically tend to maintain distinc... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Overview of the Theory of Overparameterized Machine Learning
"A Farewell to the Bias-Variance Tradeoff?An Overview of the Theory of Overparameterized Machine Learning" (https://t.co/6zFxHeXB0c). Read more
Posted on 18 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wendell Pierce: Bring Back Music and Dance in Congo Square
Callé Hamel, Havana, Cuba. Every Sunday they gather continue a long tradition of dance and music in honor of the Orishas. Read more
Posted on 16 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hot Streaks in Art, Science, and Film [Talent Search]
Liu, L., Dehmamy, N., Chown, J. et al. Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers. Nat Commun 12, 5392 (2021).... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Social Media Has the Strongest Effect When It Violates Cultural Values [Japan an...
Hsu, T. W., Niiya, Y., Thelwall, M., Ko, M., Knutson, B., Tsai, J. L. (2021). Social media users produce more affect that supports cultural values, but are... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Savage on Cosplay [Homo Ludens]
Some years ago I watched a bunch of TED talks. And then lost interest. These days I rarely watch any TED talks. But I watched this one because it's by Adam... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Are the Requirements of a Proper Foundation for AI?
Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, Has AI found a new Foundation?, The Gradient. You may have heard that over a 100 AI researchers recently gathered at Stanford to... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The War in Afghanistan Was a Gigantic Corruption Pump Funded by US Taxpayers
Farah Stockman, "What Failure? For Some, the War in Afghanistan Was a Big Success", NYTimes, Sept 13, 2021. Instead of a nation, what we really built were more... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Authoritarianism, Left and Right
"People with extreme political views that favor authoritarianism – whether they are on the far left or the far right – have surprisingly similar behaviors and... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos (on Saturday): Jersey City Hinterlands [railroad]
Posted on 11 September 2021
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Apartment [Media Notes 63]
I’ve just watched The Apartment, a romantic comedy from 1960. According to its Wikipedia entry the film “has come to be regarded as one of the greatest films... Read more
Posted on 10 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Launch of the Elsie - A Ship Model by Erik Ronnberg, Jr. [building]
I've been watching a lot of videos by Adam Savage, who was a model-maker in the film industry before becoming co-host of MythBusters. Read more
Posted on 09 September 2021 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
