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 ( 6824 )
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Top 10 Words for 2013
The folks at Mirriam Webster keep track of how many time words are looked up in their online dictionary. That, in turn, means that they can compare lookups... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cece’s Jam
That’s Cece looking straight at the camera. The photo was taken a year ago, when she was eight. That’s her dad, Wymie, with his head turned. It wasn’t quite... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Literary Criticism in the Contemporary Intellectual Milieu
All of which is to say that literary studies cannot effectively enter into dialogue with the newer psychologies by simply by adopting them as tools in the way... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Deciding That Cognitivism is of Limited Value in Literary Criticism
Ripeness is all.– ShakespeareResearch in artificial intelligence (AI) has always been torn between two poles: On the one hand there is the desire to understand... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Portrait of the Mind as an Artificial Enigma
Imagine That – MacPaint digital image, 1985Inside a MacIntosh Computer – Inhanced Digital Photograph, 2006Along the Waterfront –Enhanced Digital Photograph, 2007 Read more
Posted on 13 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
To Jeff Turpin: Stop Whacking the Post-Structuralists, They’re NOT the Problem
A few days ago I sent out a broadcast email on the topic, Ring Form and the Importance of Description in Literary Studies. I had no idea what response I’d get,... Read more
Posted on 12 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ring Form Opportunity No. 2: The (Classical) Chinese Novel
While working on another post I took a quick stroll through Franco Moretti’s pamphlet, Network Theory, Plot Analysis. I found this paragraph (p. Read more
Posted on 12 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Testimonial: The Tantric Trumpeter Toots His Horn
This is a short companion to my earlier story about Fitzhugh Regensberg, horn maker to the American Dental Association and offers further testimony on the... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sushi Ecstasy
I am willing to believe that the sushi was THAT good. But I'm sure this writing is ripe for parody:I remember precisely the dull luster of Mr. Read more
Posted on 11 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind
I was looking at Mary Douglas’s checklist for ring forms and realized that each item on it had a plausible interpretation in the domain of computation. So that’... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Notes on Literature, Form, and Computation
This post is a concatenation of three older posts, all dealing with the idea of actual process of computation. These notes are intended for people who find the... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ring Form Opportunity: King King – and Some Notes on How to Do It
David Bordwell just sent me the following note:Long ago I remember the French critic Thierry Kuntzel giving a talk (which he never published, I think) on KING... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola: A Working Paper
I've uploaded another working paper to my SSRN page. It is edited from two blog posts, From Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now and Lévi-Strauss and Contemporar... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Andy Variations & the Evolution of Macintosh Graphics Over 20 Years
The Andy, of course, is Andy Warhol. And the influence should be obvious, even if the tools are not. He used silkscreen printing to produce various versions,... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity
No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.—Bruno Latour...we are not to attempt t... Read more
Posted on 08 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Burke on Nelson Mandela
Tim Burke is a historian on the faculty at Swarthmore. He studies Africa in the 20th Century and has done fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The IBM Watson Team: Collective Creativity
The team that built IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson was put together by David Ferrucci. This is from an article he wrote for the NYTimes last January:From the... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Art Market: Chinese Up, Contemporary Up, Everything Else, Down
So says the NYTimes:Mr. Moses said his data indicated that traditional Chinese art had gained a compounded annualized rate of return for the 10 years ending in... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Don't Forget the Flowers
What I did during my summer vacation.July 13, 2010, on 11th Street in Hoboken, NJ.Though it wasn't a vacation, really.July 21, 2010, on 11th Street in Hoboken,... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola
This one's going to take awhile; it's got 5800 works, plus several tables. You might want to have some snacks ready and make sure the cell phone's been silenced. Read more
Posted on 06 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY