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
-
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 ( 7805 )
-
Dan Dennett on 'thinking Machines'
This year's Edge Question is, alas, "What do you think about machines that think?" "Alas" because I have something of a professional obligation to keep up with... Read more
Posted on 18 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Our Rage for Order and Coherence
A quickie, just to get it out there so I can see it. I have long believed that a need for order, coherence, patterns, is intrinsic to being human. Read more
Posted on 18 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dating the Anthropocene
Andrew Revkin in the NYTimes: ...a formal decision by the International Commission on Stratigraphy is years away. In the meantime, a subsidiary body, the... Read more
Posted on 18 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is the World Intelligible?
Rick Searle has some very interesting paragraphs at the end of his review of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (bolded emphasis mine): For Cowen much of science in... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Los Alamos, Home of the A-bomb
I didn't take these photographs. They're from a Flickr collection posted by Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was built and tested... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rhythm Changes: Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture
That's the title of another working paper. You may download it from Academia.edu (HERE) or from Social Science Research Network (HERE). Read more
Posted on 15 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Making of a Master Musician in Hindustani Classical Music
Sumana Ramanan writes about Ulhas Kashalkar, a singer, in Caravan. Here's a passage about his training with Gajananbuwa Joshi, vocalist and violinist, and a... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Uncertainty, Anxiety, and Torture
The New York Review of Books has an interview with Mark Danner, who has been following “the use of torture by the US government since the first years after... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Latour and Culture
Latour has written a lot, of which I’ve read only a fraction, not even a quarter, perhaps not even a tenth: We Have Not Been Modern, Reassembling the Social:... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
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
