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
-
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 )
-
Neuromorphic AI
Demis Hassabis, Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, Christopher Summerfield, Matthew Botvinick. Neuroscience-Inspired Artificial Intelligence. Neuron, Volume 95,... Read more
Posted on 28 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chaos in the Movie Biz: A Review of Hollywood Economics [#DH]
I'm bumping this to the top of the queue for my friends in computational criticism (aka distant reading). When the analyze a corpus, they tread all books in... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Origins?
Posted on 27 July 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
The Physics of Life's Origins(?)
Natalie Wolchover in Quanta: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Synch: Firewalking (performers and Spectators), Romantic Partners (& Empath...
Pavel Goldstein, Irit Weissman-Fogel, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory. The role of touch in regulating inter-partner physiological coupling during empathy for pain.... Read more
Posted on 24 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computational Psychiatry?
From MIT Technology Review: Psychiatry, the study and prevention of mental disorders, is currently undergoing a quiet revolution. For decades, even centuries,... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language Boundaries & Surface Tension
Andrew D. M. Smith in Physics: In his new study, Burridge presents a deliberately minimal model of language change, which focuses on explaining dialect... Read more
Posted on 18 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where is the Never Ending (medieval) Text? [#DH]
I checked in at Academia.edu today and found another article by medievalist Stephen Nichols. I've not finished it, but wanted to blog a passage or two anyhow.... Read more
Posted on 17 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Early History of Digital Creativity (James Ryan)
I am currently excavating the forgotten early history of computer story generation. More info here: https://t.co/drKKyMlmE7. pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 17 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Luxury Real Estate & Trump: International Networks of Power Crossing Public and...
Bloggingheads.tv – Published on Jul 14, 2017 00:26 Alex’s book Dictators Without Borders 04:29 Oligarchs and autocrats and kleptocrats, oh my! Read more
Posted on 16 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Lawfare" Comes of Age [@lawfareblog]
I first became aware of Lawfare through a wonderful March 3 post by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Five Views of a Painted Reptile on the Rocks
May 7, 2011 May 7, 2011 July 1, 2011 August 7, 2011 July 9, 2017 Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More, a History of American Lit Crit, This Time with Politics
Writing in the LA Review of Books, Bruce Robbins reviews Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard 2017). An interesting review of... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Walter Murch on Being Immersed in a Film Project and Then Pulling Yourself out
Walter Murch is perhaps best-known for his work on Apocalypse Now, where he did the sound design (for which he won and Oscar) and much of the editing. Read more
Posted on 13 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MAGA: A Conspiracy of Oligarchs Vs. the Rest of Us?
Just a quick take: We know that prior to becoming President Donald Trump was doing business in Russia. We now know that the Trump campaign – DJ Jr. Read more
Posted on 12 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ted Underwood on Intellectual Genealogies: Distant Reading is Social-Science, No...
Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”, DHQ Vol. 11, No. 2, 2017: Abstract: It has recently become common to describe all empirical approaches to... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Insane Confusion About Culture That's Behind Too Much Contemporary Thinking
From an essay by Walten Benn Michaels, The Myth of ‘Cultural Appropriation’: The logic is on vivid display in a TV ad for Ancestry. Read more
Posted on 10 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Green Villain, Ecotrek into the Arches
Posted on 09 July 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Terrorists, Collateral Damage, and Trolley Problems
Moral philosophers in the analytic tradition like to run thought experiments of a kind known as the trolley problem: There is a runaway trolley barreling down... Read more
Posted on 09 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Collective Computation
Joshua Sokol interviews Jessica Flack at the Santa Fe Institute. She says: Collective computation is about how adaptive systems solve problems. Read more
Posted on 09 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
