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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Facebook Or Freedom, Part 3: The Game Goes on [Media Notes, Special Edition #1]
It’s been 12 days since my last Facebook post, on September 7, and I’ve had at least four 48 hour reprieves since then, maybe 5 – I’ve not been keeping a... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Manhattan's West Side as Seen from Hoboken
Posted on 18 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Harry James Plays the Bejesus out of an Insane Arrangement of "St. Louis Blues"...
It's hard to describe what's going on here, but it's obviously from a movie (Do You Love Me? 1946). The introduction is silly and pretentious, but James shows... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Importance of Context
Remarkable conversation between Stan Ulam and Gian-Carlo Rota way back from 1985 on why context rather than simple recognition of images and feedback would be... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Away [Media Notes 45]
This is just a quick note: Away is a new Netflix series about a manned mission to Mars. The first season has ten episodes and takes us from launch to touch-down. Read more
Posted on 17 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High-Tech Fantasy That Won’t Work
New working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academia:... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Investigating Representations of Verb Bias in Neural Language Models
linguists need to be careful about assuming verbs fall into “alternating” and “non-alternating” classes: pic.twitter.com/jaThjFBesz — Adele Goldberg... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Symbolic Reasoning for Neural Architectures
Learning to decide which reasoning paths to take enables us to consider significantly deeper reasoning tasks and achieve SOTA results on CLUTRR, a dataset for... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
If You Had to Say That One Was Male, the Other Female, Which is Which?...
Posted on 16 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Is George Lucas the Greatest Artist of Our Time?
That's what Camille Paglia argues in this article, George Lucas’s Force, The Chronicle Review, October 15, 2012. I don't thin 'the greatest' is a useful... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Culture and Vision
Can culture shape the way we see? "Researchers found that the brains of older East Asian people respond less strongly to changes in the foreground of images tha... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Minds Are Built from the Inside [evolution, Development]
What’s it mean, minds are built from the inside? As far as I can tell, I’ve been arguing that minds and brains are built from the inside since (at least) Januar... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How About a Carbon Sink Tower on Roosevelt Island in New York?
rescubika proposes the world’s tallest carbon sink tower in new york: the mandragorehttps://t.co/9Eu9ehUx46 pic.twitter.com/YYjck7j9Pg — designboom (@designboom... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three FR8s
Posted on 15 September 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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America's Central States Will Become a Dust Bowl by 2050 [global Warming]
Abrahm Lustgarten, photographs by Meridith Kohut, How Climate Migration Will Reshape America, NYTimes, Sept. 15, 2020. From the article: Americans have dealt... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain-to-brain Thought Transfer @ 3QD
My current post at 3 Quarks Daily is about a subject I’ve been thinking about since early in 2002, direct transfer of thought between people through technology... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dennett Reviews Henrich on How "the West" Emerged out of Medieval Europe
Daniel C. Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory, NYTimes, Sept. 12, 2020. A review of: Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tweet Stream on the Replication Crisis in the Social Sciences
It begins: Over the past year I have skimmed through more than 2500 social science papers. I wrote a giant post about everything that's wrong with them and how... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Disney in China, Whoops! [one Minute of Uighur Country in Mulan]
Brooks Barnes and Amy Qin, Disney Wanted to Make a Splash in China With ‘Mulan.’ It Stumbled Instead. NYTimes, Sept. 12, 2020. Read more
Posted on 13 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Best Songs Are Those Made in Dreams
Ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore found that recordings of Native American music already circulated among the Teton Sioux, circa 1915. Read more
Posted on 11 September 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
