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 ( 7812 )
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Knowledge as Intersubjective Agreement, a Quickie
There are matters for which we have methods that allow for “tight” intersubjective agreement. There are other matters which no known methods allow for “tight”... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Quick Note About "Sausage Party"
I haven't laughed this hard since The Aristocrats – a decade ago, gasp! But only at the food orgy at the end. Before that, chuckles and giggles, but nothing tha... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Young Girl Rocks Out on Keyboard
Dan Everett posted shared this on his Facebook page and I thought I’d say a few words about her playing. I managed to find it on YouTube: The commenters there... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Remnants (and on Friday, Fancy That!)
Posted on 12 August 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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My Early Jazz Education 3: Herbie Mann and Dave Brubeck
Of course, it wasn’t all trumpet music that I listened to, just mostly. Really, mostly? Yeah, pretty near. Somehow I found my way to Herbie Mann. Don’t know... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Form, Event, and Text in an Age of Computation
I've put another article online. This is not a working paper. It is a near-final draft of an article I will be submitting for publication once I have had time t... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ted "no Whiteboard" Underwood on Digital Humanities at LARB
Melissa Dinsman interviews Ted Underwood in the Los Angelis Review of Books, #12 in her interview series on digital humanities. Read more
Posted on 11 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
My Early Jazz Education 2: Maynard, Miles, and Diz
In my post about Rafael Mendez I mentioned how he directed my attention to jazz. I loved the material he did with the “Spanish tinge,” as Jelly Roll Morton... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
My Early Jazz Education: From the Firehouse to Louis Armstrong
I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music. My father had a particular... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rafael Mendez: Passion, Variety, Technical Skill
Rafael Mendez was my first musical hero. I don’t know when I first learned about him, probably when I was 11, maybe 12. In the next half dozen years or so I... Read more
Posted on 05 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
DNA Multiplexing: Two 'layers' of Information
The first 'layer' (my scare quotes) is in the sequence of bases (G, A, T and C) in the double helix. Since the mid 1980s, it has been hypothesized that there... Read more
Posted on 04 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is David Ferrucci a Neoliberal Computationalist? Some Notes on Ideology,...
I am in the process of revising my post, Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics, and reposting it as a downloadable... Read more
Posted on 01 August 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coleridge's "Limbo" – Another Ring Composition?
While wandering in cyberspace, as I am sometimes wont to do, I came across a most curious, and thus alluring, blog: Samuel Taylor Bloggeridge. Read more
Posted on 31 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3 Approaches to Machine Intelligence: Classic AI, Simple Neural Networks, and...
Jeff Hawkins Donna Dubinsky (Numenta), Classic AI: For many problems, researchers concluded that a computer had to have access to large amounts of knowledge i... Read more
Posted on 31 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Descriptive Tables for Tezuka’s Metropolis, A Note on Descriptive Method
I've added another working paper, title above. It contains information supplementary to my article, Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos, Friday Edition (!): Along the Hudson River, Hoboken, NJ
Posted on 29 July 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Why Chomsky’s Ideas Were So Popular
I am in the process of revising my post, Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics, and reposting it as a downloadable... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reply to Lindley Darden on Abstraction
Back in 1987 Lindley Darden published “Viewing the History of Science as Compiled Abstraction,” AI Magazine, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 1987. Read more
Posted on 28 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Review of Rita Felski, The Limits of Criticique
Under review: Rita Felski. The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press, 2015. Dan Weiskopf in ArtsATL, July 5, 2016: Felski documents extensively how... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Potential of the World's Tribes, Big, Small, and New
Sitting in Sri Lanka, recently at war with itself, Ram Manikkalingam contemplates Europe and the rest of the world in 3 Quarks Daily: Meanwhile, (with perhaps... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
