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 ( 7846 )
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Big AI Vs. Big Government in the 21st Century
Ross Douthat, The Battle With Anthropic Is the Start of a New Kind of Conflict, NYTimes, June 16, 2026. The nature of the Anthropic conflict can be swiftly... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Thick Objects, High-Dimensional Models, and the New Intuitions [MR #11]
Early in Chapter 4 of his marginalism monograph, “Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?,” Cowen reviews what happened between the late 19th... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Newport Mall in Jersey City
Posted on 16 June 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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In Brains of Spanish-English Bilinguals Grammar is Embodied in Shared Tissue
Xuanyi Jessica Chen and Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, A Shared Neural Mechanism for Abstract Grammatical Computations Across Languages in Bilinguals, The Journal of... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
John Quiggin on the SpaceX IPO
At Crooked Timber, June 15, 2026. The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the... Read more
Posted on 15 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How'd That Happen?
Posted on 15 June 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Masterful Control of All Ten Digits
Those who have not seen this Video, Must See till the End. She is *Roxana Küwen*, a German Circus Artist, graduated at Fontys Academy for Circus Performance... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Sophisticated Take on the AI Bubble Argument
GeometricInvestor has a longish analysis of money flow and investment in the AI business, The AI Capex Ledger: Who Pays, Who Earns, and What the Bond Market Is... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ezra Klein Contra (extreme) Homo Economicus [Don't Torture Pigs]
Ezra Klein, What the Cult of Efficiency Costs Us, NYTimes, June 14, 2026. The opening: Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, offered the... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Burton “Random Walk” Malkiel on SpaceX’s IPO and the Poor Upside Potential for...
Burton Malkiel, best known for his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, has some interesting remarks in the NYTimes for those who are wary of being stuck... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Hockney, a Cat, Wall of Blue, and Leafy Branches
“I don’t reflect too much. I live now. It’s always now.” 데이비드 호크니.그림도... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Day Liliys Over the Budha
Posted on 13 June 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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From Jagged AI to Scaling, Yevick, Natural Intelligence, and Beyond...
I had a very interesting conversation with Google's AI – by which I mean the AI on the standard search page. I asked Claude to summarize it. Pay particular... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Late Hockney
Hockney was one of the world’s most successful artists, and could have done anything, anywhere. But his late-life art was laser-focussed on the transient... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Our Alien Overlords Have Arrived and Their Name is “Elon” [Starbase, TX]
Amy Gamerman, Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth, NYTimes, June 12, 2026 In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Some Things I Saw in May
Posted on 12 June 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Intelligent AI-based Instruments of the Future
Judah Goldfeder, Philippe Wyder, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence, arXiv:2602.23643v1 [cs.AI]... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Computational Capacity of a Single Biological Neuron is Very Large
For decades, neurons were modeled as point units in AI/neuroscience.But biological neurons have dendrites and nonlinear conductances.What capabilities are lost? Read more
Posted on 12 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken is Changing
Posted on 11 June 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Language as Involving Both Content and Location Addressing
Memory is one of the central concepts in thinking about and understanding both computing and the mind. Thinking about computating has brought us to understand... Read more
Posted on 11 June 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
