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 ( 7626 )
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The Emergence of Cumulative Culture, Or What Dawkins Got Right
This is a follow up to my post, Gestalt Switch in the Emergence of Human Culture. I want a way to differentiate my version of culture from the current... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Universal Kid Space & Kiddie Lit
I was reminded of what I call “universal kid space” some years ago when I was at one of Nina Paley’s “frunches” – a weekly lunch-gathering of people interested... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Savanna Cracks 10K Hits Per Day for the First Time
Yesterday day New Savanna had over 10,000 page views and already has almost 5,000 as of 7Am this morning: Until roughly the beginning of the year I got between... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What's out There, Anyhow? [#DH]
From deep within a Twitter convo that started I don't know where: pictures show what they show. The question we're posing is, what other literary phenomena not... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Zipf's Law Explained?
Sander Lestrade, Unzipping Zipf's law, PLOS One, August 9, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181987. Abstract: In spite of decades of theorizing, the... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s on My Plate. I Ramble Through NCIS, Cultural Evolution, Description,...
I’ve got a number of posts planned for the near future, perhaps even the very near future. But I’m not sure in just what order I’ll be writing them. Here’s (som... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Islamic Philosophy
Carlos Frankel, Deprovincializing Philosophy, LA Review of Books (July 29, 2017), a review of Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford UP 2016). Read more
Posted on 11 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Sunrise, August 9, 2017
Posted on 11 August 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Gestalt Switch in the Emergence of Human Culture
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has just published a collection of 18 articles on culture and cultural evolution: Sackler Colloquium on... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Analyzing the Corpus of Trump Tweets [#DH]
David Robinson has been analyzing Trump tweets. For example: A number of different people have clearly tweeted for the \@realDonaldTrump account over time,... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Description, Interpretation, Explanation, and Evaluation as Rhetorical Roles in...
I’ve been thinking seriously about description for some time now, and in distinguishing it from interpretation and/or explanation. Read more
Posted on 09 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scale and Context in Computational Criticism [#DH #DH2017 Special]
I no longer remember just who started it off, if I ever knew, but the Twitter convo went on and on and branched here and there and covered a lot of territory. Read more
Posted on 08 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Diffusion of Folktales
Eugenio Bortolinia, Luca Paganid, Enrico R. Crema, Stefania Sarno, Chiara Barbieri, Alessio Boattini, Marco Sazzini, Sara Graça da Silva, Gessica Martini, Mait... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age [#DH, #DH2017 Special]
I orignally published this in 3 Quarks Daily, May 4, 2014. With Digital Humanities 2017 now happening in Montreal I thought I'd repost it here. Read more
Posted on 07 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Problematics of Identity in America
Gabrielle Bellot reviews Danzy Senna's New People in The Los Angeles Review of Books. From the review: The problem of the 21st century in the United States is... Read more
Posted on 07 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coupled Dynamics in Human Interaction
Uri Hasson and Chris D. Frith. Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions. Philosophical Transactions o... Read more
Posted on 05 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
NCIS, Popular in Trump Country
For some reason I’m rather fond of NCIS, the wildly popular TV series. I watched it on and off back in the days when I had a television, and before there was... Read more
Posted on 05 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Linguistics, Then (1960s) and Now
I first became interested in linguistics during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University. They didn’t have a linguistics department, nor anyone who... Read more
Posted on 04 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Major Transitions in Cultural Evolution
Identifying major transitions in human cultural evolution https://t.co/Yg8K8ryjmg — Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) July 30, 2017 The original research article is HERE. Read more
Posted on 30 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gary Marcus is Skeptical of AI, However...we Need a New Funding Paradigm
Writing in the NYTimes: Artificial Intelligence is colossally hyped these days, but the dirty little secret is that it still has a long, long way to go. Sure,... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
