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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Documental "Lucumi, El Rumbero De Cuba" (Rumbero of Cuba)
This is an excellent little film (26 minutes). There's some delightful dancing and drumming in the last third. Note that the white dress is ceremonial. Read more
Posted on 29 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Quick Takes: Detect Animate Vs. Inanimate in 250 Msec
Back in the 1970s 1980s David Hays and I hypothesized the existence of perceptual mechanisms that would support a quick determination of whether or not... Read more
Posted on 29 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Change in National Mood Shows up in Patterns of Word Usage Observed in Historica...
From the NYTimes: In the wake of the election, it’s clear American society is fractured. Negative emotions are running amok, and countless words of anger and... Read more
Posted on 29 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Panics (When Will They Learn?) – A Post at Language Log
Mark Liberman: The last month or so has seen renewed discussion of the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence, sparked by Stephen Hawking's speech at... Read more
Posted on 28 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Protect the Vulnerable: Identity Politics is Here to Stay
Michelle Goldberg in Slate; some definitions: Identity politics and political correctness aren’t the same thing, but they are interrelated. One situates... Read more
Posted on 26 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Crown, Episode 7: Elizabeth Sticks up for Herself
I urge you, if you’ve got Netflix, to watch The Crown, which I’ve already written about in an earlier post. I’ve just watched episode 7, “Scientia Potentia Est”... Read more
Posted on 26 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Zero-Shot Translation – "implicit Bridging Between Language Pairs Never Seen...
Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation Melvin Johnson, Mike Schuster, Quoc V. Read more
Posted on 25 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Liberty Obscured
Posted on 25 November 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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How He Got Over: The Trump His Followers See
Christian Parenti has looked at a lot of raw video footage of Trump speeches. He writes about what he found at Nonsite.org: Contrary to how he was portrayed in... Read more
Posted on 25 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Domain-general Sequence Processing in the Brain
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2016 Nov 14. pii: S0149-7634(16)30347-5. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.10.033. [Epub ahead of print] Supplementary Motor Area as key... Read more
Posted on 25 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
EEG Investigation of Film-editing Techniques
“Cuts in Action”: A High-Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film Authors Katrin S. Heimann, Sebo Uithol,... Read more
Posted on 25 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kleptocrat in Chief?
Matthew Yglesias worries the Trump will ratchet up the self-dealing and corruption once he gets in office. Reflecting on Trump’s recent sit-down meeting with... Read more
Posted on 24 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Donald Trump: A Close Reading of a Short Passage Most Revealing
Yesterday, 23 November 2016, Trump sat down to chat with reporters, editors, and pundits from The New York Times. After a bit of chit-chat about a somewhat... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Privilege is Toxic: What About This Trump Guy?
David Remnick (The New Yorker) writes about Obama coming to grips with a Trump presidency. It's a long and interesting article. Read more
Posted on 20 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The End of Identity Politics?
Mark Lilla, The NYTimes: But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should becom... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seth Kaufman Needs Your Help
Seth used to blog at Acephalous and The Valve (where I first met him). Then there's Lawyers, Guns Money and Salon. He's suffering from multiple organ failure... Read more
Posted on 19 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Obama Vs. Trumpism
David Remnick, Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency, The New Yorker, 28 November 2016. Here's one passage: Air Force One landed at Fort Bragg and the... Read more
Posted on 19 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
86 Billion Neurons
Steven Mitten reviews The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, MIT Press, 256 pp., $29.95. Read more
Posted on 19 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Several Distant Views of the Statue of Liberty
Posted on 18 November 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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How Synchrony and Asynchrony Co-exist
https://t.co/SNfVWgIi59 — Science (@scienmag) November 18, 2016 From the news article: The team built a system of three coupled platforms, each supporting up... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
