Bbenzon
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 ( 6954 )
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Underwood and Sellers 2015: Beyond Whig History to Evolutionary Thinking
Evolutionary processes allow populations to survive and thrive in a world of contingencies In the middle of their most interesting and challenging paper, How... Read more
Posted on 25 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Oh Woe is Us! Those Horrible Horrible AIs Are out to Get Us
These days some Very Smart, Very Rich, and Very Intellectual people are worried that the computers will do us in the first chance they get. Nonsense! We would d... Read more
Posted on 25 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Advanced AI, Friend Or Foe? Answers from David Ferrucci and from Benzon and Hays
David Ferrucci: “To me, there’s a very deep philosophical question that I think will rattle us more than the economic and social change that might occur,”... Read more
Posted on 25 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Art of Rotoscope: Taylor Swift Remade
49 University of Newcastle Australia animation students were each given 52 frames of Taylor Swift's Shake it Off music video, and together they produced 2767... Read more
Posted on 23 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Life of a Hired Intellectual Gun
One anecdote from among several: Xerox was developing a new operating system for its ill-fated line of computers. Their testing group was falling behind. Read more
Posted on 23 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Underwood and Sellers 2015: Cosmic Background Radiation, an Aesthetic Realm,...
I’ve read and been thinking about Underwood and Sellers 2015, How Quickly Do Literary Standards Change?, both the blog post and the working paper. Read more
Posted on 22 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mad Max: Fury Road – Notes Toward a Psycho-kinetic Reading
This is a quick note I posted to a private online forum. I may or may not expland on it later on, but I wanted to get the note out here in public space as... Read more
Posted on 22 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does Hot Water Freeze Faster Than Cold?
In some circumstances, it does. The question is a old one, dating back at least to Aristotle, and turns out to be surprisingly complex. This paper is a good... Read more
Posted on 19 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
When Birds Talk, Other Creatures Listen
From the NYTimes: Studies in recent years by many researchers, including Dr. Greene, have shown that animals such as birds, mammals and even fish recognize the... Read more
Posted on 18 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Women of the Upper East Side: A World Just Across the River but Beyond My...
Wednesday Martin in the NYTimes: A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: What’s an Aesthetic? – 3
The two previous posts in this series – What’s an Aesthetic? and What’s an Aesthetic? – 2 – used simple visual material and were mostly about light and color. Read more
Posted on 15 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Memories of a King, the Beale Street Blues Boy
It’s possible that the first photo I ever saw of B. B. King was on the cover of Charlie Keil’s Urban Blues, an ethnographic study that spilled over into common... Read more
Posted on 15 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cotton and Capitalism
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Adelman reviews three recent books on the origins of capitalism. Two espouse an "internalist" story, locating capitalism... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Moore's "Law" at 50
It's not a law, of course; it's an empirical generalization. But it's held up remarkably well. Gordon Moore, then head of research for Fairchild Semiconductor,... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s an Aesthetic? – 2
The source image in this post is very much like the source image in my previous post, What’s an Aesthetic? Early morning, misty, shooting from Hoboken toward... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Follow-up on Dennett and Mental Software
This is a follow-up to a previous post, Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain. In that post I agreed with Tecumseh Fitch [1] that the... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s an Aesthetic?
I was discussing this question with a writer friend over the weekend, though my end of the question was mostly about my aesthetic as a photographer. That’s... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Irises: Blue and Green
I like this shot, despite its compositional flaws. What're those flower fragments doing at the top? Of course, I knew they'd be there when I framed the shot, bu... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
And Now Poker: AI Battles Humans to a Draw
NBC: A poker showdown between professional players and an artificial intelligence program has ended with a slim victory for the humans — so slim, in fact, that... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Rhythm of Consciousness
Gregory Hickok in the NYTimes: Recently, however, scientists have flipped this thinking on its head. We are exploring the possibility that brain rhythms are... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY