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 ( 7828 )
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Whole-brain Network Topology, the Ascending Arousal System, and Information...
Li M, Han Y, Aburn MJ, Breakspear M, Poldrack RA, Shine JM, et al. (2019) Transitions in information processing dynamics at the whole-brain network level are... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Technology Adoption
We overestimate how fast technology adoption has historically occurred. Take the transition from animal to mechanical: the first canaries in coal mines were... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Donald Trump, the Tail [media Master] Who Wags the Dog [body Politic] of...
John Emerson has recently posed the question: “With all the things wrong with Trump, why is his dumbness the final zinger for so many people? Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Structure of Technology Revolutions
2/6 The first part of the @forbes piece (https://t.co/YSmjiYykf0) discusses the structure of technology revolutions, as described a quarter century ago by... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Interpretive Fallacy, Two Versions
Interpretive Fallacy, a different version: If A can be interpreted as B, then it must be a case of B. Example: That cloud (A) looks like an elephant (B),... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Bright Cloudy Day in Late September on the Waterfront in Hoboken, NJ
Posted on 21 October 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Acting: Masks Or Faces? Two Recent Studies
Christian Jarrett, Acting changes the brain: it’s how actors get lost in a role, Aeon, Oct. 21, 2019: In one paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, a... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sounds with Sights in Prehistoric Caves?
Bruno Fazenda, Chris Scarre, Cave acoustics in prehistory: Exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response, Journal of the... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading the Human Swarm 5: Night-time Action and Brain-to-brain Coupling...
Ch12 of The Human Swarm, “Sensing Others” starts off with two dynamite paragraphs. I say they’re dynamite because they speak to two of my hobby horses, a... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Genes Sometimes Emerge in the Course of Evolution, 'de Novo' [culture Does...
Adam Levy, How evolution builds genes from scratch, Nature, 16 October 2019: In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sin... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Messin' w/ Photoshop [BAPC Camping Trip]
I like to play around with Photoshop. It's a regular part of my routine. Yes, most of the time I process my photos through Lightroom in a relatively... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Codgers Just Wanna' Get High and Find the Meaning of It All [42] – Ayahuasca
Casey Schwartz, Taking Ayahuasca When You’re a Senior Citizen, NYTimes 10.17.19 (in the Style section, no less). At 74, the venture capitalist George Sarlo migh... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graham Harman on Kantian Formalism in Art, with Reference to My Embryonic Accoun...
Graham Harman, posting about his new book, Art and Objects: As I see it, formalism is best defined in terms of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, where it is... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
BAPC Camping Trip 5: After Much Trial and Tribulation the Feather of Destiny is...
So there we were, we’d searched and searched for the Feather of Destiny and still it was not found. And then the Pentagonian Battle Cruiser appeared. What to do... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yikes! I’ve Got a Lot Goin’ On! – Literature, AI, Progress, Talent Search,...
And that’s a problem, because I only have so much time in a day and I can’t do all these things at once, nor can I really advance on each project each day. But... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
John Emerson on Donald Trump's Ability to Surf the World of Unregulated Slush...
Here's how it ends (to save you the trouble of clicking through to FB): Not only did he have money, his world was made up of other people with money. Read more
Posted on 18 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
BAPC Camping Trip 4: The Majesty of the Forest Reveals Itself to Us and a...
As we left the story yesterday we were making plans to find The Feather of Destiny. But how can you make plans to find something when you don’t even know what i... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Border Patrol: Arguments Against the Idea That the Mind is (somehow)...
I’ve been through this before, the idea that arguments such as those by Dreyfus and Searle seem curious and empty to me. Eye-hand coordination But before I get... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do We Define Success for Humans [and Progress?]
Robert Pollack, evolutionary biologist at Columbia, at Edge: "Rethinking our Vision of Success". From Darwin: Inherited novelty may be a sufficient source of... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
BAPC Camping Trip 3: In Which Plants Turn out to Be Communication Systems, a...
When we left for our camping trip we expected it to be just that, a camping trip. We hang out, tromp around in the woods and along the lake, build a campfire,... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
