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 ( 7643 )
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Is American Exceptionalism at Core a Detachment from Reality?
John Gray reviews Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, in The New Statesman, October 28, 2020. So: For the Portuguese former... Read more
Posted on 30 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A World and Its Reflection [Caven Point, Liberty State Park]
Posted on 28 October 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Covid-19 Virus Has Mutated During the Course of the Pandemic
This work was done by an exceptional team of virologists at UTMB. It's rigorous and shows pretty clearly that G614 increases infectivity in human lung cells ... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Roberts Reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry of the Future" –...
He’s ambivalent: It’s a righteous novel, and I’m a KSR fan of longstanding, so I expected to like Ministry of the Future. And I did, if only up to a point.... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Kinds of Red [fall Foliage]
Posted on 26 October 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Friday Fotos: Foreign Places in the Key of Burnt Orange
Posted on 23 October 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Is the Fact That Ideas Are Nonrival the Key to Economic Growth in the 21st...
I’ve been chewing on one particular paragraph, the final one, of Bloom et al. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”[1] Why? Because it bears on just what (these... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Environmental Change Forced Humans to Become More Adaptable 320,000 Years Ago
Smithsonian Magazine, "Turbulent era sparked leap in human behavior, adaptability 320,000 years ago", October 21, 2020: For hundreds of thousands of years, earl... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Beach
Posted on 21 October 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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On Why Comparisons Between Brains and Computers Are Problematic at Best [the...
Matthew Hutson, How Much Can Your Brain Actually Process? Don’t Ask. Slate, March 29, 2016. This is a useful summary comparison between digital computers and th... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fighting the Big Tech Ecosystem
Kara Swisher, The Justice Dept.’s Lawsuit Against Google: Too Little, Too Late, Oct. 20, 2020. There’s no such thing as a single entity called Big Tech, and jus... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How fastText and BERT Encode Linguistic Features
We find that most of the information for linguistic features (e.g., grammatical gender, number and animacy) are located in subsets of 5 to 10 neurons. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are Inventors Or Firms the Engines of Innovation?
Article by Ajay Bhaskarabhatla, Luis Cabral, Deepak Hegde, and Thomas Peeters in Management Science, published online Oct. 7, 2020. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sad Truth About Social Media
This is what I have been saying. All the cute and clever content moderation policies and fact-checking and media literacy efforts — none of it matters. Read more
Posted on 20 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Boys: Superheroes for the Trump Era? [Media Notes 50]
Just watched the Netflix series, The Boys, which came out in 2019 and is based on a comic book from 2006-2008, about which I know nothing. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Investment and the Conditions for Exponential Growth [#Progress Studies | Tech...
At the end of their article, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020), Nicholas Bloom, et al. Begin to draw some conclusions, thus (p. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Long Term Storage in the Human Brain [ANNs Pale in Comparison]
Chromatin as long-term storage. Amazing. Though I think we now have several layered intra-cellular and synaptic mechanisms for long-term memory storage? Read more
Posted on 19 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Evolution 8: Language Games 1, Speech
I'm bumping this post, from 2010, to the top of the queue for two reasons: 1) the section "Language Games and Game Theory" is germane to my recent post, Why do... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Couple of Seconds of Louis Armstrong as a News Boy in His Teens?
According to this article by James Karst, in 64 Parishes, that clip, shot in 1915, may be our earliest film clip of Louis Armstrong: An eight-second silent... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Denis DiBlasio Performing in the Zone ["I Don't Know If It's Like a Drug...
About DiBlasio: Baritone saxophonist, flautist, educator, composer, arranger, Executive Director of The Maynard Ferguson Institute of Jazz and head of Jazz and... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
