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 ( 7809 )
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Disney Landmark: Steamboat Willie Debuted on This Day Back in 1928
On this day back in 1928 Walt Disney released Steamboat Willie. It was the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound: Disney understood from early on that... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Self-awareness, Self-regulation, and Self-transcendence
REVIEW ARTICLE Front. Hum. Neurosci., 25 October 2012 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00296 Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horikoshi Among Us Today: Sweet Technollogy
This is from a New Yorker profile of Nick Bostrom, who believes that the development of super intelligent machines is inevitable and who worries about what... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Astonishing Visuals in The Wind Rises, a Note
The Wind Rises doesn’t have the visual flamboyance of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Howl’s Moving Castle. We don’t have all those saturated colors... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fuji, Cherry Blossoms, and Tuberculosis in The Wind Rises
Written the day after I’d written Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]. Consider the associations emanating from Naoko Satomi:... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Architecture for Learning Language
A Cognitive Neural Architecture Able to Learn and Communicate through Natural Language Bruno Golosio , Angelo Cangelosi, Olesya Gamotina, Giovanni Luca Masala... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]
01:38:27 I chose to write about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises for this months column in 3 Quarks Daily: Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is Not Morally Repugnant. Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why They Fight for ISIS
Lydia Wilson reports in The Nation, about interviews with captured members of ISIS: At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Rise of Secession in the Current World: More and Smaller Nations
Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore write: Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. Read more
Posted on 14 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Peter Singer on a Darwinian Left
This is a 1998 interview about a book (A Darwinian Left) that Singer would publish a year later: If the left takes account of evolutionary psychology, Singer... Read more
Posted on 13 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Time for Anther Trip to the Twilight Zone
Posted on 13 November 2015
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I Am Multitudes, and So Are You: The Latest Science
In Perspectives on Psychological Science: Humans as Superorganisms How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior Peter... Read more
Posted on 13 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fabula and Syuzhet in the Tristram Shandy Handbook
To my knowledge there is no Tristram Shandy Handbook, nor a handbook for any other literary text. What do a mean by handbook? I’m imagining a single source... Read more
Posted on 12 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Concept to First Flight: The A5M Fighter in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises
In yesterday’s post [1] I sketched what I take to the be overall pattern of The Wind Rises: Gianni Caproni presides over Horikoshi’s imaginative life until he... Read more
Posted on 11 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Engineering 101: Honeycomb X RGB
Posted on 11 November 2015
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I Miss My Colleagues: Michael Sporn, Tim Perper, and David Hays
I can’t say that I really knew Michal Sporn, the superb animation producer and director, but he was certainly a colleague, and I kept thinking about him this... Read more
Posted on 11 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Pattern of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises
I’ve now been through the whole film ‘harvesting’ frame grabs and I think I’ve got a basic sense of how The Wind Rises is organized. It looks like a ring... Read more
Posted on 10 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horikoshi at Work: At Play Among the Modes of Being
Thinking about yesterday’s post analyzing the opening dream sequence of The Wind Rises [1] I thought I’d make a simple table listing the alternating sequences,... Read more
Posted on 09 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Wind Rises, It Opens with a Dream: What’s in Play?
This post is about the opening dream sequence of The Wind Rises. I’m interested in the way this sequence prefigures the whole film. Read more
Posted on 08 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Online Poetry Revival?
From the NYTimes: Mr. Gregson belongs to a new generation of young, digitally astute poets whose loyal online followings have helped catapult them onto the... Read more
Posted on 08 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
