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 ( 7846 )
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Using AI Allowed a Professor to Turn Grading from Torture into Teaching
MIT professor accidentally leaked his NotebookLM grading system during a Zoom call.Dude forgot to turn off screen share and we watched him grade 47 essays in... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Interesting How Automation Also Creates All Sorts of New Tasks and Bottlenecks.
Fascinating insights from senior engineers on how AI is changing their jobs. Interesting how automation also creates all sorts of new tasks and bottlenecks.... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ezra Klein Interviews Anand Giridharadas About Epstein’s Social Infrastructure
Ezra Klein, The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power, NYTimes, Feb. 13, 2026. About Girardharadas: Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Some Trees in Winter
Posted on 13 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Claude's Constitution and Other Matters AI
Ross Douthat, Is Claude Coding Us Into Irrelevance? NYTimes, 2.12.26. Are the lords of artificial intelligence on the side of the human race? That’s the core... Read more
Posted on 12 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two by Stan Getz: Focus and Voices
Note: Each video links to the first selection in a play-list that links to the whole album, one cut after the other. Focus Wikipedia: Focus is a jazz album... Read more
Posted on 12 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where's the Beef?
Posted on 12 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Séb Krier Needs to Rethink. Next-token Prediction Is, at Best, a Misleading...
I like Séb Krier. Never met him, but, courtesy of Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution, I’ve read a number of his long comments on the site formerly known... Read more
Posted on 11 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Train Shed a Liberty State Park as You've Never Seen It
Pssst. Look behind the ballerinas. Read more
Posted on 11 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Biophysics of Poetry
My long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (KK) is shadowed by an interest in “This Line-Tree Bower My Prison,” (LTB) which is one of the so-called... Read more
Posted on 10 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Sun, the Sun!
Posted on 10 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Large Language Model Reasoning Failures
Peiyang Song, Pengrui Han, Noah Goodman, Large Language Model Reasoning Failures, arXiv:2602.06176v1 [cs.AI] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602. Read more
Posted on 10 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MAGA and Its Myth of a Pristine Past
Andrew O'Hehir, MAGA’s war on “woke” has a long history — like 400 years, Salon, Febrary 8, 2026. The opening paragraph: One explicit goal of the second Trump... Read more
Posted on 09 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ice, Ice, Ice, Baby. Ice on the Hudson.
Posted on 09 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Terminology: Generative Machines, Epistemic Structure of the Cosmos,...
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, and some terminological issues have come. Noting particularly deep, just clarification.... Read more
Posted on 09 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wuthering Heights at New Savanna
As we've got a new Wuthering Heights movie coming to town this weekend I thought I'd publish a post linking to the various posts I've written about that strange... Read more
Posted on 09 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Vehicles
Posted on 08 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Cultural Ranks Revisited: From Stages to Dynamics
This post is by ChatGPT and summarizes a discussion we had about cultural ranks. * * * * * Cultural Rank Theory, as David Hays and I originally formulated it... Read more
Posted on 08 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bald Eagles on the Hudson
Eagles on the HudsonđŚ Bald eagles are on the ice on the Hudson River during winter primarily to hunt for fish and conserve energy. Read more
Posted on 08 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Organizing Multiple Agents into a Coherent Work Flow
I think agentic AI would work much better if people took lessons from organizational theory, which has actually spent a lot of time understanding how to deal... Read more
Posted on 08 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
