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 ( 7640 )
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A Brief Note on Description in Literary Criticism [Heather Love]
In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (New Literary History, 41... Read more
Posted on 15 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I’m Feeling Itchy! What’s Going On? – Progress, AI, Movies, Straussian Reading...
Somehow I’m not pushing things out to the blog like I feel I should be doing. Yeah, I know I’m just pulling out of my annual melancholy phase, but still,... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Racism in America
We have very strong evidence that racism has been a major factor in shaping our stingy welfare state, our weak labor unions, and our hyper-local education lan... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Transition from Egalitarianism to Leadership and Despotism
Powers ST, Lehmann L. 2014 An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism. Proc. R. Soc. B281:... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Scans of an Alien Brain
Posted on 12 June 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Ross Douthat on Decadence || the Space Age || I've Been Wrestling with a...
And I think I've finally got an overall narrative/logical shape for the piece. Some Ross Douthat's thoughts on decadence have been helpful. I'm thinking... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Into AI Valley: Linguistic Pretraining Allows "VirTex" to Learn Visual Features...
Language is more "semantically dense" than other training signals, leading to more data-efficient learning than either traditional classification pretraining... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Agnes Callard on Truth and Jusice
From her conversation with Tyler Cowen back in 2018: COWEN: If I look at at least some parts of the American legal system, there’s a kind of adversarial... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Science in Science Fiction 3: New York 2140 [Media Notes 37]
Let’s continue thinking about science in science fiction. I propose we look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, to which I’ve devoted a working paper that... Read more
Posted on 11 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Software a Kind of Mathematics? – From an Ongoing Discussion on the Humanist...
I’ve appended two emails I recently sent to the Humanist list. They’re recent contributions to a long and winding discussion. * * * * * There’s a somewhat... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Readers Hate the Media [Media Notes 36]
Andrew Porter, Issue 45: Why everyone hates the mainstream media. Policy for Pandemics. When I became managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen in 2011, I started t... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Origins of Music
Mehr, S. A., Krasnow, M. M., Bryant, G. A., Hagen, E. H. (2020). Origins of music in credible signaling. PsyArXiv. In revision. Read more
Posted on 09 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Social Network [Media Notes 35]
I was certainly aware of this film when it came about in 2010 but, for whatever reason, didn’t go out to see it. It went on to win a slew of awards, including... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Child's Guild to the Japanese Empire, 1936
I wrote up an overview of a Japanese children’s almanac from 1936: A Child’s Guide to Japanese Empire https://t.co/plfZaKEmul pic.twitter.com/kUaK3Q9NYL — Konra... Read more
Posted on 08 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Ministry for the Future [people Get Ready]
That's the title of Kim Stanley Robinson's next novel, due out this October. The publisher's blurb: Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization... Read more
Posted on 08 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AGI is on the Way, NOT! (AGI = Artificial General Intelligence) [bounding AI]
Rodney Brooks, 17 May 2019: Brooks starts talking about various predictions various experts (such as Elon Musk) have made about self-driving automobiles,... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Turbulence, Japanese Style [Hiroshige]
Hiroshige - Whirlpools on a rocky coast #japan #japaneseart #hiroshige #広重 #ukiyoe #浮世絵 #日本美術... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Change at the Individual Level
NEW! @kkiley @vaiseys: With important exceptions, over time cultural change at the individual level happens via the replacement of people with settled... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Science in Science Fiction 2: 2001: A Space Odyssey – a Prophesy About the Comin...
Roger Ebert has argued that 2001: A Space Odyssey is fundamentally a metaphysical film making an ontological point: As we venture into space we are changing... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tracking Public Mood in the English Language World – Reaching a Peak/trough in...
The drop over the last four days amounts to as much as: 3 times the positive bump of a typical Thanksgiving, or 1.5 times the usual Christmas spike. Read more
Posted on 06 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
