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 ( 6406 )
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The Statues of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Were Brightly Colored
Scholars have known for centuries that Greek and Roman marble figures were routinely covered in bright paint. Why does the myth of their whiteness persist?... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Katyń Memorial (Jersey City)
From Wikipedia: The Katyń Memorial is dedicated to the victims of the Katyn massacre in 1940. Created by Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski, the... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Structural Instability: Two Examples and a Question
Bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? Because! FUNdaMentAl. From The Valve. This post concerns two of my favorite texts, "Kubla Khan" and Sir Gawain and th... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Suburban Domesticity on the Moon? VR, Cyborgs, and Other Strange Beings?
I had a little conversation with Bryan Alexander over First Man and our capacity for experience. It came down to this (Bryan): “Yes, there's a cultural pattern... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rudyard Kipling on Military Music
Mr Kipling's “Plea for Bands” is reprinted from The Times of London, 28 January 1915. (Courtesy The International Military Music Society) * * * * * Mr Rudyard... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cooperation, Coupling, Music, and Soccer
Bumping this to the top of the queue. Group intentionality is in the air. * * * * * Early in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, I set about conceptualizing... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
First Man and Our Capacity for Experience
First Man Trailer from Zoom.co.uk on Vimeo. I went to see First Man yesterday. I don’t quite what I think about it. Did I like it? I suppose so, though it was... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Polyrhythms in the Music of Brahams
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, Does Brahms’s Obsession With Rhythmic Instability Explain His Music’s Magic?, NYTimes, 19 October 2018: A century separates the... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An American in Paris on the Ronell Affair (remember That?)
Justin Erik Halldór Smith is an American philosopher working in the Continental tradition and living in Paris. Like top chefs who travel far to ply their... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chengdu's Going to Light It's Streets with an Artificial Moon
Elle Hunt, The Guardian, 17 October 2018: In Chengdu, there is reportedly an ambitious plan afoot for replacing the city’s streetlights: boosting the glow of th... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Lincoln Harbor Station on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Interface for Brain-to-brain Communication
BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains, L. Jiang, Andrea Stocco, +3 authors Rajesh P. N. Read more
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dissertation: Symbolic Computation in Neuronal Networks
Giovanni Sirio Carmantini, Dynamical systems theory for transparent symbolic computation in neuronal networks, 2017. Abstract: In this thesis, we explore the... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cosma Shalizi on Machine Learning, AI
A very good post by Cosma Shalizi, Revised and Extended Remarks at "The Rise of Intelligent Economies and the Work of the IMF". Read more
Posted on 19 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Notes on the Mind as Neural Weather: Augustine’s Confessions, Psychoanalytic...
While I was working on my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (Basic 2001) my friend Tim Perper put me on to the work of Walter Freeman, a neuroscientist who has... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
57 of World's 200 Richest Entities Are Corporations, Not Governments
At the Heart of Global Woes, 157 of World's 200 Richest Entities Are Now Corporations, Not Governments - https://t.co/KyO24dLxd1 via @commondreams — Katrina... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tyler Cowen on Wealth, Coal, Space, AI, & Stuff
Rob Wiblin interviews Tyler Cowen about his latest book, Stubborn Attachments. The core: WIBLIN: If I had to pick out 50 words from the book that summarized... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Heart of Darkness: Why Were Pilgrims on Board the Boat?
A couple of weeks ago I posted a fragment from an interview with Samuel Delany about the passage in Heart of Darkness when the boat pulled away from the shore a... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Seeds of a New Intellectual Structure for the Academy?
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I observed that the Catholic Church was the institutional center of intellectual life in Medieval Europe. But then... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Our Planet Has a Fever
, an infection from greed and ignorance is spreading like a plague far worse than when rats infested Europe's towns. Our world is nauseous from the toxic air... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY