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 ( 7356 )
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Extended Adolescence – Adulthood Revised?
Bret Stetka in Scientific American: An analysis by researchers at San Diego State University and Bryn Mawr College reports that today’s teenagers are less likel... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Too Good to Last, the New Savanna Hit Streak is Over
Back at the end of January 2017 I’d noticed that traffic was up, with some days topping 3K or 4K. On August 11 New Savanna got 11,109 hits and on August 20... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Hermeneutics of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Peter Dorman at Naked Capitalism, (originally EconoSpeak): The thing is, he seldom makes arguments in the sense I understand that term. Read more
Posted on 24 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Military Ontology
.@andrewiliadis on the Basic Formal Ontology and its domain-specific permutations - e.g., Military Ontology https://t.co/vEsfNkwZWn pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 23 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pete Turner, Colors – the World
Richard Sandomir writes his obituary in The New York Times: Altering reality was nothing new for Mr. Turner. Starting in the pre-Photoshop era, he routinely... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I'd Be Wary of Ken Burns. In His Jazz Documentary He Stretched the Material to...
Ken Burns has a new Vietnam documentary out. I'd be wary of it. I've only seen one Burns extravaganza, the one on jazz, and that one made me a Ken Burns skeptic... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Deep Learning Through the Information Bottleneck
Natalie Wolchover in Quanta: Tishby began contemplating the information bottleneck around the time that other researchers were first mulling over deep neural... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cheap Criticism & Cheap Defense: Can Machines Think?
Searle’s Chinese room argument is one of the best-known thought experiments in analytic philosophy. The point of the argument as I remember it (you can google... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Think Like a Pirahã (What's REAL Vs. Real)
Something I'd recently posted to Facebook. I just realized that in one interesting aspect, I think like a Pirahã. I’m thinking about their response to... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Brief Note on Interpretation as Translation
I’ve come to think of interpretation as a kind of translation, and translation doesn’t use description. When you translate from, say, Japanese into English,... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: KidZ!
Posted on 22 September 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Effects of Choir & Solo Singing
Front. Hum. Neurosci., 14 September 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00430 Choir versus Solo Singing: Effects on Mood, and Salivary Oxytocin and... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Interests You, Or: How’d Things Get This Way in Lit Crit?
This isn’t going to be another one of those long-form posts where I delve into the history of academic literary criticism in the United States since World War... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Origins of (the Concept Of) World Literature
Martin Puchner, writing in Aeon: On the afternoon of 31 January 1827, a new vision of literature was born. On that day, Johann Peter Eckermann, faithful... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Problem with Close Reading: GIGO
I've bumped this old post (7.31.2011) to the top, as critical methodology is much in the air these days. And there is no universally agreed standard as to what... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
African Music in the World
Another working paper available at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/34610738/African_Music_in_the_World Title above, abstract, table of contents, and... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jakobson’s Poetic Function as a Computational Principle, on the Trail of the...
Not so long ago I argued that Jakobson’s poetic function could be extended beyond the examples he gave, which came from poetry, to other formal features, such a... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LitCrit: Getting My Bearings, the Lay of the Land
Another quick take, just a place filler. I’ve been playing around with this chart. Nothing’s set in stone. Terms are likely to change (especially the first... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trump, Gibbs & NCIS, and the Queen @3QD
I’ve got another post up at 3 Quarks Daily, Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs:... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Literary Criticism: A Short Note on the Current State of the Art
Just a place-holder, really, I’ve got other things I’ve got to do. A meaning-centric criticism takes translation as its first principle. A naturalist criticism... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
