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 ( 7631 )
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Artificial Intelligence Learns from Neuroscience
Jamie Condliffe, Google’s AI Guru Says That Great Artificial Intelligence Must Build on Neuroscience, MIT Technology Review, July 20, 2017. Read more
Posted on 28 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Interpretation of Psychedelic Experience is Culturally Bound
Jules Evans writing in Aeon: But even with the same substance, different cultures frame psychedelic experiences in different ways, leading to different... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Elon Musk Has Created a Private Primary School for His Kids and a Few Others
Not much is publically known about it. This, from 2015 sounds good: Musk hired one of the teachers from the boys' school to help found Ad Astra, and the school... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Morning Transit
Posted on 27 July 2018
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I Think Future Computer Tech Will Be Amazing, But...
Back in 1800 the steam engine was king. The first steam locomotive was made in 1804; commercial success came in 1812. Those folks would have been dumbfounded... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cantometrics is Heating Up, a Cross-cultural Study of Music
For example, relevant to the following recent news... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gavin 1.1: Warren Weaver (1949) and Statistical Semantics [#DH]
Michael Gavin recently published a fascinating article in Critical Inquiry, Vector Semantics, William Empson, and the Study of Ambiguity [1], one that... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Joe Rogan and Joey Diaz Call “Bruce Lee Vs. Chuck Norris” – a Rough Transcriptio...
Two months ago I posted to 3 Quarks Daily about Joe Rogan’s podcast. I included three video clips, one of them a discussion about a scene from Way of the Dragon... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Things Shared by the Simulation Argument and Superintelligence, a Deconstruction
By simulation argument I mean the argument that suggests that we are living in a computer simulation created by a race of super-intelligent Orchestrators (my... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
My Problem with the Simulation Argument: It’s Too Idealist in Its Assumptions...
By “simulation argument” I mean the argument that it’s highly likely that we’re not real people. Rather, we’re just creatures in a computer simulation being... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Musk Vs. Bezos: Very Different Tech-driven Visions of the Future
Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world and is in the process of converting his "Amazon lottery winnings" (his term) into a space transportation... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the "thagomizer" Trail
The interesting thing is that instance is in mathematics where every other example I've seen retains Larson's original usage. So how'd the mathematicians get a... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Democratic Party: "A Fabian Retirement Home on Visiting Day"
quoth @zenpundit >The face of the Democratic Party is: three old white women, an even older white socialist dude and a 28 year old socialist woman of color. Read more
Posted on 24 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Tension Between Cooperation and Coordination
Connor Wood, Catherine Caldwell-Harris, and Anna Stopa (2018). “The Rhythms of Discontent: Synchrony Impedes Performance and Group Functioning in an... Read more
Posted on 24 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Literary Form: Derek Attridge on Caroline Levine
Francesco Giusti interviews Derek Attridge in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Their discussion uses Attridge's most recent book, The Work of Literature, as... Read more
Posted on 24 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The OED is Listening
Yesterday I discovered, thanks to Jerry Coyne (scroll down a bit), that Gary Larson had coined the term "thagomizer" in his comic strip. Read more
Posted on 24 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DON’T PANIC: Will Space-travel Be a Transformative Experience for Humankind?...
I’ve got a new piece up at 3 Quarks Daily: Three Children of the Space Age: Elon Musk, Freeman Dyson, and Me. Dyson was born in 1923; I was born in 1947; and... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pop Music, by the Numbers: 1950-2015
Rosebud Anwuri took data from the Billboard Hot 100 and ran the numbers. Big finding: 1. In the past sixty years, we have had only two major changes in music... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mommy, What's a Thagomizer?
I love this. When the Far Side came out in 1982, paleontologists realised they'd never actually named that part of a stegosaurus and began using the term... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Effing Heist Movie: Commentary on a Passage from New York 2140
Note: I originally published this at 3 Quarks Daily earlier this year. But 3QD has just moved to a different platform and some of the posts haven't yet made it... Read more
Posted on 22 July 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
