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
-
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 ( 7846 )
-
Canadian Geese in Hoboken by the Hudson River
Posted on 23 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
The War: The Blockage of Shipping and the Destruction of LPG Processing Could...
Patricia Cohen, War’s Attacks on Energy Could Turn Economic Shock Into Long-Term Damage, NYTimes, Mar. 23, 2026. The game has changed. Read more
Posted on 23 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Old Man, His Beret, and His Breakfast
Posted on 22 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Terrence Tao Talks with Dwarkesh Patel About Kepler Discovering His 3 Laws of...
Dwarkesh Patel, Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery, March 20, 2026. We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
G.O.A.T. 3 Egg Omelet with Spinach at Turning Point
Posted on 22 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Stand by Me and the Demise of Free-range Childhood [like I Had] [Media Notes 176]
Sarah Wildman, The End of the Free-Range, Device-Free ‘Stand By Me’ Childhood, NYTimes, Mar. 22, 2026. Wildman took her 12-year old daughter to see Stand by Me. Read more
Posted on 22 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Milk Bottle from the Ancient Days
I've been getting breakfast for the last two years, maybe three, and only just recently realized that what I thought of as an oddly shaped water caraffe was in... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Philosopher-Cat, Contemplating the World
Today: #Lookout We've so enjoyed looking out with you today, through rocks, windows, ancient buildings, trees and doors, to gardens and beaches and amazing skie... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tech Bro [Musk] Scamming NASDAQ Over IPO
Nasdaq is proposing to facilitate the largest involuntary wealth transfer from retirement savers to venture capitalists in market history. And nobody seems to b... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Vertical Intrusions [Hoboken]
Posted on 20 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
The Shock and the Narrowing: How ChatGPT's Success May Have Compromised AI's...
This post was composed by Claude (Anthropic) after an interaction which I initiated with a prompt consisting of 1) a capsule summary about the history of... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mystery Sequence in Hoboken
Posted on 19 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Brave New World: Notes on the Next 30 Years in AI [Work in Progress]
You may or may not be wondering why so many tweets have recently been showing up on New Savanna. There’s a good reason: I’ve been thinking. Read more
Posted on 19 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
This is What Happens When an Open-ended Research Project is Mis-perceived as...
Nadella paid $650 million to acquihire Mustafa Suleyman and 70 Inflection employees in March 2024. The job: make Copilot the AI product that justifies... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
World Models, Some Notes
World Models: The old, the new and the wishful #SundayHarangueThere is a lot of chatter about world models of late--even more than can be explained by Yann... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Taking Notes by Hand is More Effective Than by Laptop (?)
This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right.The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Psychological Well-Being for Introverts (like Me)
Dana G. Smith, Social Ties Help You Live Longer. What Does That Mean for Introverts? NYTimes, Oct. 9, 2025. Considering all the research around socializing and... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Getting Your Bearings
Posted on 17 March 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Now You Can Run a 100B Parameter LLM on Your Laptop
Holy shit... Microsoft open sourced an inference framework that runs a 100B parameter LLM on a single CPU.It's called BitNet. And it does what was supposed to b... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Brain's Dopamine Response to Music Peaks in the Mid-teens
Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo.Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
