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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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 -
American Heartache in Jersey City
The thing about graffiti is, it’s a fugitive art. Walls come and go – in the case of freight trains, literally – pieces get buffed, tagged over, and so forth.... Read more
Posted on 06 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Madam Wayquay's House of Crochet
Posted on 05 May 2014
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Digital Criticism Comes of Age, a Post at 3QD
I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age. I open with Moretti – natch – then to Willard McCarty’s 2013 Busa... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Working Paper on Computational Historicism
I've now taken my recent series of four posts on computational historicism and edited them into a single working paper. This required some reorganizing. Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Monumental Study of the Globalising Age That Was the 19th Century
‘The Transformation of the World’, by Jürgen Osterhammel. Review by David Cannadine. High quality global journalism requires investment. Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Maplewood, NJ: Sky and Tree, Orientation, Bridge and Tree
Posted on 04 May 2014
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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A Dream of Simulation and the Reality of Description, an Open Letter to Willard...
Hi Willard, I know you’re interested in the idea of computer simulations of human mental processes, so I thought you’d be interested in how I got from my... Read more
Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sheldon Klein on Computing Lévi-Strauss, a Blast from the Past
The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss was terribly important to humanistic thinking in the last half of the 20th Century. As Alan Liu has pointed out in a recent... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Town, Country, Blossoms, Sky
Posted on 02 May 2014
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Method in DH: Signal and Concept, Operationalization
Signal and concept: distinction employed by Ryan Hauser and Long Le-Khac: A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The... Read more
Posted on 02 May 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Varieties of Visual Thinking
Posted on 01 May 2014
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
