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 ( 6827 )
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Hyperobjects and "Distant Reading"
Two successive tweets from Alan Liu: — Alan Liu (@alanyliu) May 31, 2014 So, topic models. Is the model the hyperobject or is it simply a description of the... Read more
Posted on 01 June 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Women Take to the Streets, Make Art
Julia Baird in the New York Times: One of the more astonishing outcomes of the Arab Spring has been a flowering of street art, a reclamation of dangerous,... Read more
Posted on 28 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Patterns: Ramsay on Shakespeare, and Beyond
I was looking though the syllabus for one of Alan Liu’s courses, Literature + (New Media Literary Interpretation: Close, Distant, and Other Reading) and came... Read more
Posted on 27 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Don’t Give a Crap About Science
I originally published this in The Valve, 25 March 2010. I republished it once before at New Savanna and I think it's worth republishing, this time in the... Read more
Posted on 23 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Biology of Musical Rhythm
Patel AD (2014) The Evolutionary Biology of Musical Rhythm: Was Darwin Wrong? PLoS Biol 12(3): e1001821. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio. Read more
Posted on 21 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Woodcrafter's Guide to the Galaxy
My friend Peter is building some shelves for his many CDs. I decided to document the project with photos. The challenge is to do that while managing to take som... Read more
Posted on 20 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Negotiating the Manifold Nature of Literary Criticism
Once again, what is the (academic) discipline of literary criticism? It has, of course, changed a great deal over the last 100 years, though I don’t want to loo... Read more
Posted on 20 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Warhol
The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has re-hung just about everything in celebration of its 20th anniversary. Warhol was, after all, a genius–whatever that is: We... Read more
Posted on 18 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sociology in Fantasia: MMO Games
Sociology in Fantasia Learning who those players actually are contradicts several stereotypes right off the bat. In some games, Yee notes, "a player group may... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sixty Years Ago - Gojira 1954
In honor of the latest Godzilla film, here's a blast from the past, a review of Gojira which I published in The Valve several years ago. Read more
Posted on 16 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graffiti Museum for Jersey City
Mana Contemporary is opening a graffiti museum in Jersey City: Lemay has brought on veteran street artists Logan Hicks and Joe Iurato to curate the programming. Read more
Posted on 14 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Evolution is Complex
From Nautilus, by Amy Maxmen: "The idea of directionality in nature, a gradient from simple to complex, began with the Greeks, who called nature physis,... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sleep: 8 Continuous Hours is a Cultural Convention, Not a Natural Need
T. M. Luhrmann in the NYTimes: This obsession with eight hours of continuous sleep is largely a creation of the electrified age. Back when night fell for, on... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Digital Humanities and Graffiti
I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing about digital humanities recently, but from a particular point of view. Not only has my writing been about DH and... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
UFO Events, a Thought Experiment About the Evolution of Language
The problem of human origins, of which language origins is one aspect, is deep and important. It is also somewhat mysterious. If we could travel back in time... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Revising Prospero Yet Again
By Prospero I mean a thought experiment that David Hays and I proposed back in 1976 in a review article, Computational Linguistics and the Humanist, we publishe... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Descent of the Celebrity Profile
(3QD) But around 1920, the focus of the profile began to shift. Gradually, publications replaced the men of action and industry with sports figures and... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bootstrapping Recursion into the Mind Without the Genes
Recursion is one of the most important mechanisms that has been introduced into linguistics in the past six decades or so. It is also one of the most problemati... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Description as Redesign: Carving Nature at the Joints
In reply to my open letter Willard McCarty made an observation I want to look at: “So an act of description is creative, or more accurately, an act of redesign... Read more
Posted on 07 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?
(3QD): Basically, we want to know which problems computers can solve not only in principle, but in practice, in an amount of time that won’t quickly blow up in... Read more
Posted on 06 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY