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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Samantha Power on NATO Countries Stepping up to the Plate on Defense Spending
She talks with Tyler Cowen on various things, including her new book, Education of an Idealist: A Memoir. COWEN: Why won’t Germany and some of the other larger... Read more
Posted on 11 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Speech on Campus
Pls RT: Here's another dose of sanity from @wesleyan_u President @mroth78 on free speech on campus: https://t.co/xFP7Vbb1vf — Cathy Davidson (@CathyNDavidson)... Read more
Posted on 11 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Coupled-group as a Single Unified Cultural Actor, a Brief Note
I have written of a group coupled in music-making as a single actor, a single physical system in which some signals pass internally within the nervous systems o... Read more
Posted on 09 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In the Aftermath of Sandy
Posted on 09 September 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Jonathan Franzen Urges Us to Accept the Near Inevitability of a Climate...
Jonathan Franzen, What If We Stopped Pretending?, The New Yorker. The deck: The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t... Read more
Posted on 09 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How the Norwegians Strong-armed the Robber Barons of Big Oil
Mitch Anderson, The Viking guide to Oil Wealth Management, Reasons to be Cheerful. Like many other nations, Canada is blessed with enormous resource wealth. Read more
Posted on 08 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cloudy Day on the Hudson River
Posted on 07 September 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Different Languages and Similar Encoding Efficiency During Speech Despite...
Christophe Coupé1, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu1, and François Pellegrino, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the... Read more
Posted on 07 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sahara Desert Was Created by Humans 5000 Years Ago
As recently as 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was not a desert, but green. Dramatic changes can arise from even gradual planetary shifts. First the change comes... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do You Get a Letter Or Recommendation from Paul Romer? Chat with Him at...
Emily Badger, A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man, NYTimes, Sept 5, 2019. It's about ideas: But Mr. Romer, in a seminal 1990 paper, showed that ideas... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Data Isn't Enough, Not Even the BIGGEST and BEST DATA, Because Correlation...
Tim Maudlin reviews Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why, in Boston Review: Pearl also has one big axe to grind, especially when it comes to the stud... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Kokayashi Kiyochika (but Not Really Photos, Instead: Woodblock...
Adam Roberts put me on to Kiyochika's work, though he wasn't interested in that cat. He was interested in the print below, which depicts Tsar Nicholas II... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Squirrels Listen to the Surrounding Birds to Know When They're Safe
James Gorman, NYTimes, reports, Squirrels Relax When They Hear Birds Relaxing, Sept 6, 2019. Researchers at Oberlin College reported Wednesday in the... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Evolution of Agriculture from 10 Kya and into the Future
Arie Altman, Alex Mesoudi, Understanding Agriculture within the Frameworks of Cumulative Cultural Evolution, Gene-Culture Co-Evolution, and Cultural Niche... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Optical Neural Network for Deep Learning
Researchers demonstrate all-optical neural network for deep learning https://t.co/QPEU9yUESP #DeepLearning #NeuralNetwork — Machine Learning (@machinelearnflx)... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Emergent Ventures Has Announced It's Fifth Cohort of Grants
Tyler Cowen's been running it for about a year, with the first cohort being announced on November 7, 2018. Here's the current (fifth) cohort. This link gets... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
This Isn't Mars, It's Even Stranger, It's Earth (Liberty State Park, NJ)
Posted on 05 September 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Amazon Delivery, Cheap and Fast but Irresponsible?
Patricia Callahan has a long article in tne NYTimes about Amazon's use of contract drivers to deliver its packages, "The Human Cost of Amazon’s Fast, Free... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Scores an 'A' on the N.Y. Regents Science Exams
Peter Clark, et al., From 'F' to 'A' on the N.Y. Regents Science Exams: An Overview of the Aristo Project, arXiv:1909.01958 [cs. Read more
Posted on 05 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Coming Regulation of Big Tech? Yikes! We're Not Ready.
Kyle Langvardt and Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Sen. Hawley’s Bid to ‘Disrupt’ Big Tech, Lawfare, Sept. 4, 2019. From the conclusion: We see five important takeaways... Read more
Posted on 04 September 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
