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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Journey into Shakespeare, a Tedious Adventure – Will the Real Hamlet Stand Up?
I’m inching my way toward a decision to take a serious look at Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I’m thinking about doing a book on ring-composition and I need another... Read more
Posted on 16 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Singing Promotes Cooperation in a Diverse Group of Children.
Good, Arla; Russo, Frank A. Social Psychology, Vol 47(6), 2016, 340-344. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000282 Abstract Previous research involving... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Darwin Was an Exploratory Forager: Topic Modeling Our Way Through His Notebooks...
Cognition. 2016 Dec 8;159:117-126. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.012. [Epub ahead of print] Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
At the Core of Statistical Machine Translation, and Other Things (Google)
NYTimes Magazine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The Great A.I. Awakening: When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Joseph Henrich on Cultural Evolution, WEIRD Societies, and Life Among Two Strang...
Just around the corner, HERE. On collective thinking: COWEN: Now, another feature of your model, if I understand it correctly, is that you get more rapid or mor... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How People Move in Cities Can Be Investigated by Examining Geo-tags on...
Uncovering Urban Temporal Patterns from Geo-Tagged Photography Silvia Paldino, Dániel Kondor, Iva Bojic, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Marta C. González, Carl... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tyler Cowen on Trump the Deal-Maker as President
Writing in Bloomberg View, Cowen explains: One common feature of many real estate deals is that they are based on selling to different groups of people at... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
King Trump Assembles His Court
I was struck by a passage in a NYTimes editorial for 12.12.16, “Flawed Choices for the State Department”. It was primarily about the choice of Exxon Mobile CEO... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Presidential Politics 2016: The Real, the Ritual, and Beyond the Pale – A...
Well, not exactly. But it’s that strange, really it is. Anyhow, I’ve got an essay about it over at 3 Quarks Daily: Prelude and Exordium to the Ordination,... Read more
Posted on 12 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Alan Liu on Birth of the Cool
Yesterday I'd posted about Olivier Morin Alberto Acerbi (2016): Birth of the cool: a two-centuriesdecline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction,... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two-centuries Decline in Emotional Expression in Anglophone Fiction
Olivier Morin Alberto Acerbi (2016): Birth of the cool: a two-centuriesdecline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction, Cognition and Emotion,... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Madam Wayquay's Salon for the Stressed and Distressed
Posted on 09 December 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Sins of Steven Pinker: Or, Let’s Get on with It
Over at Crooked Timber John Holbo has recently initiated a discussion with "evolutionary psychology" in the title: Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology, Royalty... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What You See is What You Get
The graphic computer interface that became common with Apple's Macintosh computer is sometimes known as WYSIWYG, where "WYSIWYG" = "what you see is what you get. Read more
Posted on 06 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Broca and Wernicke
Abstract: Broca and Wernicke are dead, or moving past the classic model of language neurobiology With the advancement of cognitive neuroscience and... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neurolinguistics of Language
Here's links to a bunch of recent articles in Journal of Neurolinguistics (H/t Dan Everett). Note that all are behind a paywall, but you can at least link... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Another RGB Series
Here is the original scene: It is an object of no particular interest, a plastic milk bottle with part of its top cut off. It's on window sill and you can see... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2016 CULTURE, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Fr8s
Posted on 02 December 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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An Executive Guide to the Computer Age
Another document uploaded to Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/30219563/An_Executive_Guide_to_the_Computer_Age William Benzon, "An Executive Guide to the... Read more
Posted on 02 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
For Trump's Supporters, Corruption is Part of the Deal
Matthew Yglesias in Vox: But Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton political scientist who recently published an excellent little book about authoritarian populist... Read more
Posted on 30 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
