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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Complexity Unveiled, a Jivometric Mind Jolt
Posted on 18 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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New Study Shows Usefulness of GPT-4 as a Tutor in Nigeria
No working paper yet, but the results and experiment are written up here. They used Microsoft Copilot and teachers provided guidance and initial prompts:... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Describes a Sunrise Photo of Some Weeds, and Then We Talk....
I wasn’t expecting this. Not at all. It started out as an ordinary session in my “describe,” series, where I present Claude to describe a photo and I then... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Remote AI Sex? A Romantic Affair? Come On! [Strange New Worlds]
Kashmir Hill, She Is in Love With ChatGPT, NYTimes, Jan. 15, 2025. First line: "Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer." This and that... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Shaky-cam on a Midnight Run
Posted on 17 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Skinny on Techbros Zuckerberg and Musk [#DogShirtTV]
Pissing Off the World's Richest Men: Wherein Ben [Wittes] welcomes Yael Eisenstat, former CIA analyst and current democracy activist, to tell us about her caree... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Oldest Matrilocal Tribe in European Prehistory Dates to Late Iron Age Celts
Cassidy, L.M., Russell, M., Smith, M. et al. Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10. Read more
Posted on 16 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Describes a Photo of a Swatch Watch
What’s this? This appears to be a Swatch watch with a distinctive skeleton dial design, which allows visibility of the internal mechanical movement through the... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The ITER Fusion Reactor: The World's Most Complex Construction Project
Wikipedia: ITER (initially the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, iter meaning "the way" or "the path" in Latin) is an international nuclear... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Party Like You Own the World: Tech Billionaires for 47
Theodore Schleifer and Kenneth P. Vogel, A Euphoric Tech Industry Is Ready to Celebrate Trump and Itself, NYTimes, Jan. 16, 2025. A party at the Beaux-Arts... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Describes a Photo of Dawn in Liberty State Park
What are we looking at here? This image shows a scenic urban landscape view photographed during what appears to be sunrise or sunset, given the soft, ethereal... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Educational Distribution of Adults in the 20 Largest Protestant Denominations...
Episcopalians are the most highly educated Protestant denomination. Followed by the PCUSA and the ELCA. The old trope that the mainline is filled with the... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Henry Farrell: Biden Moves to Control Global AI
Henry Farrell, America’s plan to control global AI, Programmable Mutter, Jan. 15. 2025. The idea is to use export controls to restrict the selling and use of... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Feminine Wiles Meets Masculine Energy [Antony and Cleopatra]
Posted on 15 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Super Zuck, Champion of “Masculine Energy”
Zeynep Tufekci, Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice, NYTimes, Jan. 15. 2024. I really, really wanted to like Mark Zuckerberg’s gushing... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 on the Origins of Psychotherapy
Another nod to my series of reflections on melancholy and creativity, which started with an article in 3 Quarks Daily: Melancholy and Growth: Toward a... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Claude 3.5 Sonata Describes a NYC Food Cart: Baked Potato King
While it started out as a fairly standard interaction with Claude 3.5, albeit a bit rocky here and there, it developed into a rather striking and interesting... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Interstitial Urban Geometry [Hoboken]
Posted on 14 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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LLMs as Existential Interlocutors – What's It All About, Alfie?
Murray Shanahan and Beth Singler, Existential Conversations with Large Language Models: Content, Community, and Culture, arXiv:2411.13223v1. Read more
Posted on 14 January 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Revolution Will Be Written on Walls
Posted on 13 January 2025
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
