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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Self-medicating Orangutans, and Others
Douglas Main, Orangutan, Heal Thyself, NYTimes, May 2, 2024. Scientists observed a wild male orangutan repeatedly rubbing chewed-up leaves of a medicinal plant... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Morning Commute [follow the Windsock]
Posted on 03 May 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Divestment is Futile, Shift the Debate & "turn the Encampments into Open Air...
The NYTimes has an article on protestor's demands that university endowments: Santul Nerkar, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell, Calls to Divest From Israel Put... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why We Started to Fear Extinction
| John McWhorter Tyler Austin Harper | The Glenn Show Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how did the end of the world begin? Read more
Posted on 02 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A fFrench Toast Story
Posted on 02 May 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Tyler Cowen Talks with Coleman Hughes [trombone Technique and the Nature of...
Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity (Ep. 211), May, 2024. The scope of the conversation: Coleman Hughes believes we should strive to ignore rac... Read more
Posted on 02 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
IP in the Content Biz: Squeezing the Writers [Media Notes 118]
Daniel Bessner has an interesting piece in the current Harper’s Magazine: The Life and Death of Hollywood. It covers both the movie and TV side of the business... Read more
Posted on 01 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Foggy Day in mid-April
Posted on 01 May 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT on the Ontology Trail: Elara, Z78-ß∆-9.06Q, and the Candied Kumquat
My first major insight into what’s going on inside ChatGPT came from a simple protocol: Give it a (simple) story along with an instruction to derive a new... Read more
Posted on 01 May 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two More Guerilla Libraries in Hoboken, NJ
This is a follow-up to my Saturday post on guerilla libraries. Here’s the Little Free Library located at 935 Bloomfield Ave. At that part of town Bloomfield is... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT Deals with Scrambled Strings
By scrambled string I mean a string of words that I have created from a coherent string by scrambling the order of words. I started out by simply presenting... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Strong Social Relationships, the Key to Mental Health in Old Age?
Dana G. Smith, A Peek Inside the Brains of ‘Super-Agers,’ NYTimes, April 30, 2024. For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Interesting Mathematical Model of How LLMs Work
My colleague, Ramesh Viswanathan, sent this to me. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen on how transformers work. Alas, the math is beyond me, which is... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Buds to Blossoms
Posted on 29 April 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT Conjures with Green Ideas and Augustine
Chomsky published Syntactic Structures in 1957, where he created a now famous example sentence that was grammatically coherent, but otherwise meaningless:... Read more
Posted on 29 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Michale Levin on Bioelectricity, Regeneration, Cancer Treatment
How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs, with Michael Levin (Ep. 112), Big Brains Podcast, UChicago News, April 27, 2023. "Software" for the cells: Pau... Read more
Posted on 28 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Japanese Maple
Posted on 28 April 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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New Method for Science: Use a Neural Network to Model Scientific Data, Then...
Miles Cranmer - The Next Great Scientific Theory is Hiding Inside a Neural Network (April 3, 2024) From the Simons Foundation: Machine learning methods such as... Read more
Posted on 28 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Physics That Explains 'everything' While Evading the Temptation of Being a...
The (Simple) Theory That Explains Everything | Neil Turok 56,115 views Apr 23, 2024 Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal Physicist Neil Turok, recipient o... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Guerilla Libraries in Hoboken, NJ
On Monday my friend Leanne Ogasawara had a post at 3 Quarks Daily that was, in part, about Little Free Libraries. According to Wikipedia: Little Free Library... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
