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 ( 7846 )
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Is It True That One Day the Chinese Will Dictate the Content of American...
Some day the ask to Disney and Comcast will be that they censor ABC and NBC News’ coverage of China for the sake of access to the Chinese movie market and... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Whoa! Not for the Color-blind. [structural Analysis]
[Bonus points: look to the center] Read more
Posted on 10 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Frozen Politics of Debate About Nuclear Energy
Taylor Dotson and Bouchey, Democracy and the Nuclear Stalemate, The New Atlantis, Fall 2020. This is a long article about nuclear power. Read more
Posted on 10 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Literary Canon Wars of the 1990s
If this was true in the 90s, imagine how much truer it becomes with English major enrollments in free-fall.— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) October 9, 2020 The... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Social Sciences Journal Devoted to Description
Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber: Does the world really need yet one more academic journal? It does when there is an unmet need for disseminating certain type... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: It's a Purple World [then Along Came Matisse]
Posted on 09 October 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Why Do We Need a Genotype-phenotype Distinction for Cultural Evolution? Because...
When I first published about the process of cultural evolution a quarter of a century ago, in Culture as an Evolutionary Arena [1], I insisted on... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Form, Computation, and Plot Summary: A Short Note on Method
I’ve just made a short post about To Catch a Thief. It’s been on my mind for weeks but I didn’t post because: 1) what I had in mind was simple, really, but 2) a... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cary Grant Kisses Grace Kelly – Eww! [To Catch a Thief, Media Notes 47]
I watched this film, say, two months ago, and recoiled just a bit the first time Cary Grant kissed Grace Kelly. Why? At the time – the film is from 1955 –... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New England Arborists Are Replanting with Climate Change in Mind
Marguerite Holloway, New England’s Forests Are Sick. They Need More Tree Doctors. NYTimes, October 7, 2020. There's more in the article, which is about the... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [Media Notes 46]
What’s this movie about? More generally, what are movies like this about? Here’s what Wikipedia says: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, also promoted as... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
For a state-of-the-art German-English translation model, kNN-MT improves performance by 1.5 BLEU by searching for neighbors over only the training data. Read more
Posted on 07 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
House Recommends Anti-trust Action Against Tech Giants
Cecilia Kang and David McCabe, House Lawmakers Condemn Big Tech’s ‘Monopoly Power’ and Urge Their Breakups, NYTimes, Oct 6, 2020: “Our investigation leaves no... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once Again, It's a Big Mac Attack! The "genius" Prizes Have Been Announced for...
The Big Macs are so predictable from year to year that I'm not bothering to write original prose this time out. This text has been revised from last year's. Read more
Posted on 06 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Refutation of Facebook's Claims on Its Behalf (contra The Social Dilemma)
1) Facebook builds its products to create value, not to be addictive. FALSE. As @bengrosser's Facebook Demetricator shows the metrics Facebook developed such... Read more
Posted on 06 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Ancient Roots of the Anthropocene
Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis, Dorian fuller, The Deep Anthropocene, Aeon. ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies transformed most of Earth’s biosphere much... Read more
Posted on 05 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is the Cultural Evolution of Technology Cumulative Or Combinatorial? [Both,...
A new preprint by yours truly: Is the cultural evolution of technology cumulative or combinatorial? https://t.co/toK5pMXYqc Comments and feedback would be much... Read more
Posted on 04 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Facebook Critics Form Their Own Oversight Board [Facebook Objects]
Olivia Solon, While Facebook works to create an oversight board, industry experts formed their own, NBC News, Sept. 25, 2020 Some of Facebook's most vocal... Read more
Posted on 04 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Genotypes of Predomestic Horses Match Phenotypes Painted in Paleolithic Works...
The dotted horses are one of the most popular images of Palaeolithic Art. Two opposite horses are filled with dots and surrounded by hand stencils. Read more
Posted on 04 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes About the Nexus
Another surprise. This post has just over 3800 views, and it's mostly descriptive. No theory at all. It's relatively old, having been originally published on... Read more
Posted on 04 October 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
