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 ( 7149 )
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A Note on Assembly Theory from Carl Zimmer [via Tyler Cowen]
Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 235: Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe COWEN: Is Lee Cronin right or insane? [laughter] ZIMMER: Lee Cronin is... Read more
Posted on 06 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Understanding Transformers and Communication Among Sperm Whales
Mar 5, 2025 Allen School Colloquium Series Title: Discovering Engineering the Computation Underlying Large Intelligent Agents Speaker: Pratyusha Sharma (MIT)... Read more
Posted on 06 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Digital Doppelgangers
Vijayalaxmi Methuku, Praveen Kumar Myakala, Digital Doppelgangers: Ethical and Societal Implications of Pre-Mortem AI Clones, arXiv:2502.21248v1 [cs.CY],... Read more
Posted on 05 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Water, in the Morning
Posted on 05 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Computation, Text, and Form in Literary Criticism: A Conversation with Claude 3.7
I've posted a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu: https://www.academia. Read more
Posted on 05 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Empathy is Not in Our Genes
Cecilia Heyes, Empathy is not in our genes, Neuroscience Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 95, 2018, Pages 499-507,ISSN 0149-7634,... Read more
Posted on 05 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Zelinsky Meeting: What DID Happen, Anyhow?
Trump vs. Zelensky: The Morning After | Robert Wright Andrew Day 0:00 Andrew’s new gig (and gifts) 3:15 Play-by-play of the Oval Office blowup 9:06... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Vistas [looking for the Mother Ship]
Posted on 04 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Why the Printing Press Didn’t Drive Either the Scientific Or the Industrial...
Soon after ChatGPT hit the web both the progress punditocracy and the high-tech evangelists were busy chattering away about how this is the greatest thing... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI and the Future of Legal Practice
Schwarcz, Daniel and Manning, Sam and Barry, Patrick James and Cleveland, David R. and Prescott, J.J. and Rich, Beverly, AI-Powered Lawyering: AI Reasoning... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Confabulist Real [dream Time]
Posted on 03 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Confabulation, Dylan’s Epistemic Stance, and Progress in the Arts: “I’ll Let...
I continue to think about the tendency of LLMs to confabulate, that is, to make stuff up that is simply not true of the world. Read more
Posted on 03 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Most Rapid Change in Human Written Communication Ever?
The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication everBy. September 2024, 18% of financial consumer complaints, 24% of press... Read more
Posted on 02 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bipedalism, Hominin Fetuses, and Musical and Linguistic Evolution
Matz Larsson and Dean Falk, Direct Effects of Bipedalism on Early Hominin Fetuses Stimulated Later Musical and Linguistic Evolution, Current Anthropology,... Read more
Posted on 02 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Return of Shaky-cam [night Crawler]
Posted on 02 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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A Drop in Zero-sum Thinking, America and Beyond
Damien Cave, Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? NYTimes, March 1, 2025. The lede: “Zero-sum thinking has spread like a mind virus, from... Read more
Posted on 02 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
My Favorite Comfort Food
Posted on 01 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Fareed Zakaria on Trump's Destruction of American Foreign Policy
Ezra Klein, The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy, NYTimes, March 1, 2025. Klein interviews Fareed Zakaria. Here's Klein's statement of Trump's foreign... Read more
Posted on 01 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Algorithms That Rule the World
đŸ”ĽđŸ”ˇSearch Algorithms ⭢ Efficiently locates items in datasets.↳ Uses: search engines, databases,... Read more
Posted on 01 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Has America's Position in the World Changed Forever So That the Country's Word...
From the Bulwark: Eric and Eliot bemoan the shameful meltdown in the Oval Office between VP Vance, President Trump and President Zelensky. Read more
Posted on 01 March 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY