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 ( 6484 )
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The Navigational Skills of Dung Beetles
BBC News: Dung beetles record a mental image of the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the stars and use the snapshot to navigate, according to researchers. Read more
Posted on 15 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Google Opens a a Powerful Parser to the World
From Google's research blog: Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source Thursday, May 12, 2016 Posted by Slav Petrov, Senior Staff... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Branching Out
Posted on 13 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Paradox of the Text and Computational Criticism
Computational criticism, in Franco Moretti’s well-known terminology, is said to be “distant” reading. And there is an obvious sense in which it consistently... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hiroshima
President Obama will be the first sitting American President to visit Hiroshima, a visit that carries heavy symbolic weight (see, e.g. this article in the... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Do Philosophy Departments Pretend That Western Philosophy is All There Is?
Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden in The Stone, in the NYTimes: The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chess is for the Young
Tom Vanderbilt in Nautilus: Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. Read more
Posted on 11 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nowviskie on Why DH is Not a Neoliberal Con Job
Melissa Dinsman interviews Beverly Nowviskie in LARB. Here's one bit: So how can we reconcile the digital humanities benefit outside the academy with critiques... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Interesting Response to Moretti on Digital Humanities
On Saturday I ran up a post on Franco Moretti’s assertion that the results of computational criticism have “so far been below expectations”, as he remarked in... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Concepts Are Emergent Effects
I started off reading Ryan Heuser’s post, Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century, Episode 1: Concepts, and quickly followed a link to Michael Gavin’s post, The... Read more
Posted on 07 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"DH is Guilty of Making All Too Visible the Dirty Gears That Drive the...
As though no robber baron tried to launder his guilt by giving libraries to communities across the nation. Brian Greenspan on digital humanities as... Read more
Posted on 07 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Interesting? Is Moretti Getting Bored?
“The interesting” or “interestingness” came up in the Twittersphere in a response Ted Underwood made to Ryan Heuser: @quadrismegistus I think about this a lot... Read more
Posted on 07 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Vegetative Underground
Posted on 06 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ecstatic Jazz @3QD
On Monday I posted a piece at 3 Quarks Daily, Ecstasy at Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society. As I remark in the piece: Best jazz venue I’ve ever been in. Of... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is the American Body Politic Crumbling?
Sally Goerner in Evonomics: The media has made a cottage industry out of analyzing the relationship between America’s crumbling infrastructure, outsourced... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Digital Humanities in the Cross-hairs, with the Cavalry on the Way
Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia have published a critique of digital humanities (mostly just digital work in english lit. Read more
Posted on 03 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tyler Cowen on Novels as Models
This is a paper that is apparently unpublished. Robin Hanson has uploaded it to Research Gate. Is a Novel a Model? Tyler Cowen I defend the relevance of... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Respect: AIDS
I took this photo on April 24 of this year: It's a graffiti production by the AIDS (= Alone in Deep Space | America is Dying Slowly) crew in Jersey City. Read more
Posted on 01 May 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Obama at the Comedy Cellar
We know that Jerry Seinfeld is an admirer of Obama's comedy skills; that's why he had him on his cars and comedy coffee klatch.. Read more
Posted on 30 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Childhood's End
Posted on 29 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY