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 ( 7356 )
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Friday Fotos: A Quick Sample of Things Seen and Flicked at Various Times and...
* * * * * From top to bottom: Ragweed in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, probably early morning Washington St. at 13th, Hoboken 11th Street Flower Garden,... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Communication is Difficult – "all the Lonely People, Where Do They All Come From...
Sabine Hosssenfelder, You will probably not understand this, Backreaction, 22 August 2019: I could tell you many stories of renown physicists who told me, or... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Critique of Pure Learning and What Artificial Neural Networks Can Learn from...
"what is sometimes misleadingly called “artificial general intelligence”—is not general at all; it is highly constrained to match human capacities so tightly... Read more
Posted on 22 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cutting the Financial Sector Down to Size (it's in the Air)
Over at Crooked Timber John Quiggin posts: That’s the provisional title I used for my latest piece in Inside Story. Peter Browne, the editor, gave it the... Read more
Posted on 22 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Farhad Manjoo Sees Revolution on the Horizon, Around the Bend, and at the End...
Really? Here's his NYTimes column, "C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution." He's been reflecting on the recent announcement by the Business... Read more
Posted on 21 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Synaptic Overload, Orthogonal Views Along the Galectic
Posted on 21 August 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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This is Your Brain on Stories – "the Representation of Language Semantics is...
The #brain activity evoked from #reading or listening to a story is almost identical, according to research from @gallantlab at @UCBerkeleyNeuro published in... Read more
Posted on 21 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Those Were the Days, 51 Pacific, Fall 2012
Outside Up Top (w/ flare) (Bayonne in the distance) Inside, Work in Progress (reference material, yes, why not?) Deep Inside, contemplation ("she came in... Read more
Posted on 20 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Deirdre McCloskey on Liberalism (in the Classical Sense)
Eric Wallach interviews economist Deirdre McClosky in The Politic, February 2019. The Yale Politic: According to Bourgeois Equality, the average U.S. Read more
Posted on 20 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Behind the Scenes at Davos: The Coming Revolution Shall Be Celebrated,...
Jonah Bennett, A Trip Behind The Spectacle At Davos, Palladium, Feb. 9, 2019. There’s a great NowThis video that’s been circulating around from the Forum of... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Machine Creativity Zuckerberg Style: "move Fast and Break Things"
This is from an Atlantic article, about this paper: https://t.co/MxRNipid6O, which is VERY interesting - it's a collection of anecdotes of accidental... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Joe Rogan and His Middle-bro Audience
Devin Gordon, Why is Joe Rogan so Popular? The Atlantic, August 2019. The podcast: Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Richard Macksey at 3QD [TALENT SEARCH]
I’ve taken my Richard Macksey post from July 30, tweaked it a bit here and there, and posted it at 3 Quarks Daily:... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Happened to Childhood?
Kim Brooks, We Have Ruined Childhood, NYTimes, 17 August 2019: According to the psychologist Peter Gray, children today are more depressed than they were... Read more
Posted on 18 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Storefronts in the 'hood
Posted on 16 August 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Haunted by Love and Marriage: She and Heart of Darkness
Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are very different books. She is an adventure romance of well over 100,000 words while Heart of... Read more
Posted on 16 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s an Idea? An Informal Case Study About an Industrial Idea That Was...
In my working paper, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world [1], I took a close look at two cases examined by... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jeff Hawkins on the Brain [Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence]
Hawkins invented the Palm Pilot and then took his money and became a neuroscientist (he founded Numenta). Steve2152 over at Lesswrong summarizes a podcast... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is America Too Large? (Heck Yeah!)
Eli Dourado Wonders: Maybe America is Simply too Big (2016): But I want to focus on something else. I can’t shake the idea that we’re way out of equilibrium in... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is AI? (And What Could It Be?)
From a long post by David Chapman, How should we evaluate progress in AI?, at Meaningness: Because AI investigates artificial intelligence, its central question... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
