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 ( 7356 )
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Siri, Getting to Know You
A recent study found that computers can judge your personality based on your pattern of Facebook "likes": In the study, a computer could more accurately... Read more
Posted on 13 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Variations on a Moon Shot
Here's photo of the Moon that I took the other day. Nothing special, just a nice clean shot of the Moon in sky empty of clouds, contrails, birds, helicopters,... Read more
Posted on 13 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Containers: A New and Better Kind of Code?
From the NYTimes: Docker is at the forefront of a new way to create software, called containers. These software containers are frequently compared with... Read more
Posted on 13 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nuclear War: What Are the Boundaries of the Real?
Last week I asked whether or not exoplanets are real. Sure, we can learn about it through a high-tech instrument up in space, and so know that, yes, it’s out... Read more
Posted on 12 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The West and the Rest
In today’s post at 3 Quarks Daily I argue that while the West has a certain historical reality, it is not a coherent cultural identity. We may talk of Western... Read more
Posted on 12 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Investing in Educational Technology Start-Ups is on the Rise
From the NYTimes: Venture and equity financing for ed tech companies soared to nearly $1.87 billion last year, up 55 percent from the year before, according to ... Read more
Posted on 12 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Entropy
There's an interesting discussion of entropy HERE, where we learn: Briefly, spontaneous processes tend to proceed from states of low probability to states of... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Think About Science, and the Machines, and Who We Are
Leon Wieseltier delivers a jeremiad in the NYTimes. It's a brilliant confusion of salience and missed-the-boat. Here's a good paragraph: Aside from issues of... Read more
Posted on 10 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Citizen Science: Help Untangle the Connections Among the Brain's Neurons
I'm knee-deep in reading a NYTImes Mag article about Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist who hopes to map the connections among neurons in the human... Read more
Posted on 10 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Issues in Cultural Evolution 1: Cultural Stability in the Mesh
This is the first of a series of three posts – I hope it’s only three – in which I explore the relationships between my views on cultural evolution and the view... Read more
Posted on 09 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Porky Pig Goes Surreal
Another workping paper, this one about Porky in Wackland. You can download it HERE. Abstract and introduction below. * * * * * Abstract: Porky in Wackyland is... Read more
Posted on 08 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Comparing the Response of Canadiens and Congolese to Music
Given that only two different groups were investigated, albeit very different groups, the assertion of universality seems a bit overstated. Read more
Posted on 08 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where in the Brain Does Symbolic Computation Reside?
It's an old and thorny question that Norbert Hornstein is addressing over at Faculty of Language. He's commenting on a paper by Randy Gallistel (which you can... Read more
Posted on 07 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Rise of Surface Reading
Jeffrey Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education (5 Jan, 2015), midway through the article: "Reading" as we know it has a relatively short history. Read more
Posted on 07 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are These Exoplanets Real? What’s Real?
Dennis Overbye, NYTimes, So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes: Astronomers are looking for earth-like planets, planets that might harbor life (as we... Read more
Posted on 07 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graffing the Future: Is the Next Phase of Human Cultural Evolution Being...
The Bottle, by DUNE UNO, Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011 I have a bias about the future, the deep future. We can’t predict it, for it’s too strange. It’s not simply... Read more
Posted on 06 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Beings Evolving in the Mesh
This one wrestled me hard. In it I use new terminology and concepts–coordinators, phantasms, cultural beings–as though I know what they mean and am comfortable... Read more
Posted on 05 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Constructor Theory an Object-Oriented Physics?
Over at Edge.org Chiara Marletto talks about constructor theory in physics. Concerning how a bacterium uses DNA to construct an exact duplicate of itself: The... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunday Night Music
was a music program that aired on NBC in the late 1980s. I was vaguely aware of it back in the day, but never watched it. I've now watched three or four episode... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rereading Goethe’s Faust 5: Word and Deed
I have now finished the whole of Part I, and will make some remarks about it in my next post. In this post I will confine my remarks to a key passage at a... Read more
Posted on 02 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
