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 ( 7622 )
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From Telling to Showing, by the Numbers
I've been thinking about some remarks Moretti made about the digital humanities in a recent interview. Among other things he suggested that the results of... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Digital Humanities, the Public and "Saving the Humanities"
Melissa Dinsman interviews Laura Mandell in the LARB: Another concern that has come up deals with public intellectualism, which many scholars and journalists... Read more
Posted on 24 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Physics as a Mode of Thought – Critical Points in Biology (and Mind?)
Philip Ball, in Nautilus: Why Physics Is Not a Discipline. Rather, it's a mode of thinking that knows no disciplinary bounds. The habit of physicists to praise... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Fog and Mist
Posted on 22 April 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Art of the Deal: The Narrow Virtue of Donald Trump
Scott Alexander has some interesting observations about Donald Trump that he makes by discussing Trump's book, The Art of the Deal. Read more
Posted on 21 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Polylingualism
Victor Mair has a fascinating post on this topic over at Language Log, with many interesting comments. He begins: I'm sitting in the San Francisco... Read more
Posted on 21 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Deadwood and Moral Injury
I worked my way through Deadwood on DVDs however many years ago and thought it was terrific. I’ve just been through it again, all three seasons, as streamed on... Read more
Posted on 20 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Single Shots: Seinfeld’s Ongoing Anatomy of Comedy
One of the many clips I saw on YouTube in my ongoing investigation of stand-up was an interview with George Carlin where he said that, early in his career, an... Read more
Posted on 19 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Colorado Marijuana Tours: Evidence of Cultural Change in the USofA?
Alan Feuer reports on a 3-day pot tour of Denver and environs (NY Times): I found the options dizzying: In the two years since the state first permitted the sal... Read more
Posted on 17 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Speaking Your Soul in a Foreign Language
Rebecca Tan, "Accent Adaptation (On sincerity, spontaneity, and the distance between Singlish and English, The Pennsylvania Gazette 2/18/2016: Every... Read more
Posted on 16 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: More Spring Flowers
Posted on 15 April 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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This is Your Brain on LSD
From ScienceDaily: Researchers from Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualized the effects of LSD on the... Read more
Posted on 13 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Evolution of Language and Thought
J Anthropol Sci. 2016 Mar 8. [Epub ahead of print] The evolution of language and thought. Lieberman P1. Author information Abstract Language primarily evolved a... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain Size: African Elephants and Us
Why are humans so smart? Is it the sheer number of neurons we have, or the global architecture of those neurons? The brain of the African elephant is three time... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
the Heart of AlphaGo
From Michael Nielson, Quanta Magazine, Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? To begin, AlphaGo took 150,000 games played by good human players and used an... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Evolutionary Synthesis and Integrated Anthropology
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Ethnography, and the Human Niche: Toward an Integrated Anthropology Agustin Fuentes Agustin Fuentes is Professor in the... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross posted at The Valve Despite some reservations about fan scholarship -- e.g. I've seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia pros are adept at pointless... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: This and That
Posted on 08 April 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Two Puzzles Concerning the Self
A couple years ago I posted about how Plato confused the operations of his nervous system – its capacity to extract ‘canonical’ forms of objects from the flux o... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Geoffrey Hinton on Deep Learning, Go, and the Future of AI
Geoffrey Hinton is the one who invented so-called "deep learning", the technique that allowed a computer to beat Lee Sedol, a South Korean grandmaster, at Go.... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
