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 ( 6831 )
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Taking AI to the Next Level?
Viv is from the creators of Siri. Siri can't learn, Viv can:As Viv’s knowledge grows, so will its understanding; its creators have designed it based on three... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Connected Courses
Here's what they say about themselves: Mission Connected Courses is a collaborative network of faculty in higher education developing online, open courses that... Read more
Posted on 15 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Self-Organizing Robot Swarm
M. Rubenstein, A. Cornejo, R. Nagpal, Programmable self-assembly in a thousand-robot swarm, Science, 2014, DOI: 10.1126/science. Read more
Posted on 15 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Evolution in Action in Our Time
From the NYTimes: Evolutionarily speaking, coyotes diverged from gray wolves one million to two million years ago, and dogs from wolves roughly 15,000 years ago. Read more
Posted on 14 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis 4: On the Matter of “the”
Chapter 7, “Nationality” is pretty straightforward. I don’t have much to say about it except for a puzzle that Jockers presents at the beginning. Read more
Posted on 13 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Abstracts & Links: Cultural Evolution and Complexity
Sociality influences cultural complexity Michael Muthukrishna1, Ben W. Shulman, Vlad Vasilescu1 and Joseph Henrich1 Proc. R. Soc. B 7 January 2014 vol. 281 no.... Read more
Posted on 13 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis 3.1: Style, Or Measuring the Autonomous Aesthetic Realm
Yesterday I posted on Chapter 6, “Style,” in which Jockers argued, in effect, that insofar as we can measure (or estimate) the factors that affect a text’s... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Close Reading" R Us & the Protocols of Distance
Franco Moretti coined the term "distant reading" in 2000 to indicate a type of literary analysis that subsequently became greatly facilitated by computer tech,... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis 3.0: Style, Or the Author Comes Back from the Dead
I’m going to devote two posts to Chapter 6, “Style.” In this post I’m going to present what I take to be Jockers’ main result, that authorial identity is, in... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Patterns: Hillis Miller on Burke and Derrida
J. Hillis Miller on Kenneth Burke: Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MES PFE Details, GV003, Fairmount Ave. Jersey City
Posted on 11 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Solitaire (in Retirement)
The New York Times just ran a piece on retirement coaches, professionals who help retirees figure out what to do with their lives now that they don't have work... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Daniel Levitan on Modal Control
That's not how he puts it, Levitan talks of attention, but his recommendations, as in the following paragraphs from his piece in the NYTimes, are about... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken Ghosts: Washington Street at Night
Posted on 10 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Group Minds at Wikipedia?
Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia Simon DeDeo (Submitted on 8 Jul 2014) Abstract: Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems,... Read more
Posted on 10 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Patterns Rising
Dan Rockmore and Simon DeDeo have organized a small meeting on the topic of patterns. It's taking place at Dartmouth this coming Monday and Tuesday. Read more
Posted on 10 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
“NATURALIST” Criticism, NOT “cognitive” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto
Reposted from The Valve, 31 March 2010, this is an informal manifesto for whatever it is I'm up to, and why I'm come to think of it as naturalist criticism. Read more
Posted on 09 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Shooting Blind
I first started shooting blind, that is, snapping the shutter without looking through the viewfinder to frame and focus the shot, when I wanted to get shots of... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis 2.1: How Do We Make Inferences from Patterns in Collection...
My previous post, about Jockers’ analysis of metadata from a collection of Irish American texts, got me to thinking about just what kind of inferences we CAN... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
IBM's Neuromorphic Processor Chip
From MIT Tech Review: IBM’s SyNapse chip, as it is called, processes information using a network of just over one million “neurons,” which communicate with one... Read more
Posted on 07 August 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY