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 ( 7143 )
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On the Centrality of AI Metacognition [in Search of “wisdom”]
Samuel G. B. Johnson, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Yoshua Bengio, et al., Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition, arXiv:2411.02478v1... Read more
Posted on 16 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
Sun, D. (2025). Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication.... Read more
Posted on 16 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir
Mike Isaac, Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir, NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2025. Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Photo Color Sandwich
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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OLMo-2 from Allen AI is the First Fully Open GPT4-class Model.
From a Facebook post by Ted Underwood: OLMo-2 from Allen AI is the first fully open GPT4-class model. Open code, open data, everything. Read more
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
2025 New York Times Photo Review
I recently entered the 2025 New York Times Portfolio Review, which was free. It’s simple: You submit 10 photos, if you make the cut those photos will be... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is the Transformer Architecture One from a Set of Equivalent Architectures?
This strengthens my hypothesis that there is a large set of equivalent neural architectures of which the original transformer is just one sample. https://t. Read more
Posted on 15 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Nite Shots with a Twist in the Middle [hallucinated City]
Posted on 14 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Why MAGA and AI Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage, Or a Bat and Ball
Dan Brooks, How Generative A.I. Complements the MAGA Style, NYTimes, March 13, 2025. The article opens by discussing that batshit crazy "Trump Gaza" A.I. video. Read more
Posted on 14 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Giant Steps: Carnegie Hall Jazz Band
“Giant Steps” is one of John Coltrane's best known tunes. He recorded it in 1960 on an album of the same name, which has become a jazz classic. When played... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coming and Going in Hoboken
Posted on 13 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Love-bombing the President: Elon and Donald, Sitting in a Tree, X X X X I N G (n...
Amanda Marcotte, “I am the alpha in this relationship”: What Musk’s romantic history reveals about his hold on Trump, Salon, March 12, 2025. Read more
Posted on 13 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sociogenomnics, is It Just Another Spin of the Nature/nurture Wheel, Or Will It...
Dalton Conley, A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way, NYTimes, 13 March 2025. Since Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase “natur... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Are We as a Culture Addicted to Work? [Because We Have Forgotten How to...
I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and because it's relevant to a book I'm trying to get off the ground. Read more
Posted on 12 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Mighty Quinn [Media Notes 158]
I saw The Mighty Quinn when it was in theaters, 1989 and loved it then. I just watched it on Amazon Prime. I still love it. Wikipedia quotes Roger Ebert as... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wheeee!!!
Posted on 11 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Do the Rich Nations of the Middle East Foretell the Future?
There was a time, a millennium ago, when the Middle East had nations more advanced than any in Europe. That's where Europe learned mathematics (Arabic... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Noisy Path from Source to Citation [where's the Boundary Between "loose"...
The Noisy Path from Source to Citation: Measuring How Scholars Engage with Past Research, Hong Chen, Misha Teplitskiy, David Jurgens, arXiv:2502.20581v2 [cs.CL]. Read more
Posted on 11 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Facebook is Worse Than I’d Imagined
Jennifer Szalai, A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top, NYTimes, 3.10.25. CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Notes on the Erotic: Pole Dancing, Ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a...
Back in February I posted, What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge. That line of thought led me to take Fifty Shade... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY