Bbenzon
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 ( 6524 )
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Pokémon Go and the Citizen Scientist
An editorial in Nature, Gotta name them all: how Pokémon can transform taxonomy: Millions of people have spent the past week walking around. Read more
Posted on 20 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Miyazaki’s Metaphysics: Some Observations on The Wind Rises
Another working paper. Title above, abstract, TOC and introduction below. Download at: Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 20 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Analog Vs. Digital: How General is the Contrast?
The distinction between analog and digital computers and, more generally, between analog and digital phenomena, has been an important one in contemporary... Read more
Posted on 19 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics
As many of you know, David Golumbia is one of three authors of a recent article that that offered a critique of the digital humanities (DH), Neoliberal Tools... Read more
Posted on 15 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ricky Smiley: Black Vs. White Marching Bands
I remember back in the mid-1960s when my high school marching band – the Marching Rams from Richland Township High School in western Pennsylvania – went to the... Read more
Posted on 15 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DH Facing the Public, Sharon M. Leon in LARB
As far as I can tell, most of the debates at digital humanities – what is it? is it complicit in neoliberalism? – are about the position of digital humanities... Read more
Posted on 12 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pāṇini Was Illiterate! How Marvelous!
I have long known that the first grammarian was a 4th century BCE Indian named Pāṇini. I'd tacitly assumed that he was literate and that,... Read more
Posted on 11 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Humanities? What’s That? (w/ a Look at Pamela Fletcher in LARB)
I don’t know when I first heard about “the humanities,” perhaps college, but maybe before. But if before, well, the phrase wasn’t meaningful until college, and... Read more
Posted on 11 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos (Displaced to Monday): The Humanities in Digital Flux, a Story...
Posted on 11 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DH and Critique (DHpoco), with a Nod to Latour (via Felski)
I just now came across this three-year old conversation, Open Thread: The Digital Humanities as a Historical “Refuge” From... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Should Digital Humanists Know How to Code?
From Alverado Rafael Alvarado, The Code Problem: The first is to learn for the reason that Tim Berners-Lee exhorts journalists to learn–you... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Color the Subject
I've just been reading through this post and its many comments, which is about digital humanities and cultural criticism, more or less. One topic under... Read more
Posted on 08 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Seinfeld Influence on Bill Gates
This is a link to a post at Bill Gate's blog. The post is about his relationship with Warren Buffett. On that page there's a video titled "Philanthropists in... Read more
Posted on 06 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It’s Not a Question of Manpower, a Brief Remark on Computational Criticism
One reason that has been given for computational criticism (aka ‘distant reading’) is that it is the only way we are going to examine books beyond the canon... Read more
Posted on 06 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Modest Take on AI
Greg Borenstein at Medium: What’s stopping AI from being put to productive use in thousands of businesses around the world isn’t some new learning algorithm. Read more
Posted on 05 July 2016 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Biologist Jerry Coyne on Scientific Method (Description)
Clyne sets up his response to a NYTimes philosophy piece (“There is no scientific method”) in this way: the classic presentation of “The Scientific Method” in... Read more
Posted on 05 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
July 4, 2016, Jupiter Day in the Solar System
Nicola Tilley in The New Yorker: Nasa has a habit of scheduling high-stakes maneuvers to coincide with patriotic holidays. On July 4, 1997, at lunchtime, the... Read more
Posted on 05 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ben and the Boys: Some Casual Remarks Violence, Authority, and Sex in Bonanza
A couple of weeks ago I watched my way through the first season of Bonanza, a TV western that I had watched in my youth. As some of you may know, it was one of... Read more
Posted on 04 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Myth of Regeneration Through Violence
Roy Scranton, ‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence, in the NYTimes: “Star Wars” managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and... Read more
Posted on 03 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Foto Make-up: Special Creatures
Posted on 03 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY