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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Reply to a Traditional Critic About Computational Criticism: Or, It’s Time to...
A couple of weeks ago I posted “In search of a small world net: Computing an emblem in Heart of Darkness” [1], which was about a computational procedure for... Read more
Posted on 29 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ghost Dancing at 3 Quarks Daily
Jim Culleny’s Monday Poem for Monday, August 28, 2017, is called “Ghost Dancing”. He prefaces it with this brief statement: Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in... Read more
Posted on 28 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hurricane Harvey Update
Here's a podcast featuring Tim Morton, speaking from the flood. He and his family are OK, though a bit wet. He's discussing the hurricane and philosophy. "But i... Read more
Posted on 28 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunday Special: Madam Wayquay's Words to Ponder
Posted on 27 August 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 2, How to Construct a Spirit
Culture has produced some strange things. Supernatural spirits is one of them. I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue just to get it on my mind, as I nee... Read more
Posted on 27 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Virtual Reading as a Path Through a Multidimensional-dimensional Semantic Space...
In my post, In search of a small world net, I speculated about analyzing Heart of Darkness with some appropriate vector space semantic model so that we could... Read more
Posted on 26 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Look, up in the Sky...
Posted on 25 August 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Metagram Software - A New Perspective on the Art of Computation
Back in the ancient days of 1980 or thereabouts my teacher, the late David Hays, got a small grant from the Air Force to study metagramming. What, you may ask,... Read more
Posted on 25 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Donald the Loser: Ben Wittes on Trump as a Security Threat
In March of 2016 Lawfare's Ben Wittes wrote a post in which he evaluated seven liabilities the candidate seemed to have. He's now written a post evaluating... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Audio Version of Heart of Darkness Online, and It is Excellent
"Reading" and "interpretation" have common meanings that are, at best, secondary or even tertiary to academic literary criticism. Authors sometimes give reading... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Deck: Getting Organized (as Always) – Lit Crit, #DH, Identity, Cultural...
When I did this a week-and-a-half ago I listed five to-do items. I’ve done three of them: NCIS boundary issues: But I intend to keep working on NCIS. I’m... Read more
Posted on 22 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Photographing the Eclipse and the Problematics of Color [#Eclipse2017]
This isn’t particularly about yesterday’s eclipse. That’s just a particularly extreme example of something face by every photographer working in color: Color... Read more
Posted on 22 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Finding a New Photographic Subject: Water
That’s right, water. Oh sure, I’ve got lots of photographs that have water in them, puddles and ponds, the Hudson River, droplets on flowers, but I never though... Read more
Posted on 21 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Substance Abuse Crisis in Food Service
Brittany Bronson in the NYTimes: According to a 2015 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the food services and... Read more
Posted on 21 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Color Term Salience in Cultural Evolution
David G. Hays, Enid Margolis, Raoul Naroll, Dale Revere Perkins, Color Term Salience. American Anthropologist, 74:1107-1121, 1972. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.5. Read more
Posted on 20 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Savanna: How're We Doing?
Last week I reported that New Savanna broke 10K hits per day for the first time. Was that a fluke, or an emerging trend? It's too early to tell. Read more
Posted on 20 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Creativity Through the Life Cycle
Writing in the NYTimes, Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths, report the results of a study involve people of various ages: 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers; 6- to... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Deliberate Cultural Engineering?
Anthony Biglan and Dennis D. Embry. A Framework for Intentional Cultural Change. Published in final edited form as: J Contextual Behav Sci. 2013 October 15;... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trump is a Nazi in Spirit...
if not in historical fact. Timothy Snyder, "The Test of Nazism That Trump Failed", The New York Times: “No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129
I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because it's useful in an argument I want to make about the importance of descriptive literary criticism to the science... Read more
Posted on 18 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
