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 ( 6320 )
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Hoboken Magic Lights Pier A
Posted on 04 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Short Notes on Photography: Equipment and Community
Technique, method, equipment Ever since I got “serious” about my photographs, I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my equipment and, yes, I said it, my techniqu... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Rating of Academic Fields by Insiders and Outsiders
Philosophy as a field shows other signs of delusion. In a survey asking PhD holders to rate fields by brilliance and importance, philosophy was the most... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Six Improvisors on the Continuum
There is an unfortunate tendency to talk of improvisation in jazz as a "pure" act of spontaneous creation, of playing something unlike you'd ever played before... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Austerity
Click on the photo to get the full effect. Read more
Posted on 03 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ramble for the New Year, 2024: Keeping the Balls in the Air (ChatGPT, Lit-Crit,...
I’ve been putting this off for at least a month, but it’s time, time to get the balls in the air and see how they fly. ChatGPT I’ve got two big projects... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LeBron James 40K: Human Excellence is a Sometime Topic Here on the Savanna
My most systematic look is in a series of posts over the years about the MacArthur Foundation's so-called genius fellowship, which I eventually consolidated int... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Invention of the West
Steven Poole reviews, Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West (2024), in The Guardian. The opening paragraph: Like the railway and the telegraph, western... Read more
Posted on 02 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mickey D's Does It All for Us, the Manga Way!
Posted on 02 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Of Lit Crit “Stars” and AI “Godfathers” – In What Way is Geoffrey Hinton Like...
Back in 1997 David Shumway published “The Star System in Literary Studies” in PMLA. He begins with a paragraph about George Lyman Kittredge, of Harvard’s Englis... Read more
Posted on 02 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Matisse Pincushion [stars]
Posted on 02 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mind Regulation in the 4th Arena
I’ve been thinking and writing a bit on the theme of a coming Fourth Arena, where the First Arena is the world of inanimate matter, the Second is the world of... Read more
Posted on 01 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where We Are with Generative LLMs
Yes, the explosion that was ChatGPT wasn't the heel of the curve before the exponential sweep up, it was the shoulder of a plateau. It took as to a new region o... Read more
Posted on 01 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Right to Disconnect
Over at Crooked Timber John Quiggin has a piece, Back to the office: a solution in search of a problem (feb. 27, 2024) where I read: But the rise of working fro... Read more
Posted on 01 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: From Yesterday's Walk from North Hoboken to the Terminal
Posted on 01 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Thoughts on Maestro, Ethical Criticism, and Calibration [Media Notes 102d]
I have now posted various materials about Maestro, including a number of YouTube reviews as well as three posts I’ve written about the film. Read more
Posted on 01 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Fun with a Hydraulic Press That Can Generate 300 Tons of Pressure – Crushin...
Can you press steel screws or bolts and nuts back to solid piece of metal using our new 300 ton hydraulic press? We will find that out on this experiment! Read more
Posted on 29 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Did You Know That Tulips Track the Sun Across the Sky? [phototropism]
Posted on 29 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Intelligence is a Process
That's the title of the most recent blog post by Arnold Kling. In the case of artificial intelligence, we have a problem. There is no clear, settled definition... Read more
Posted on 29 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Power, Persuasion, and Influence in The Valley
Henry Farrell has a new post at Crooked Timber: Dr. Pangloss’s Panopticon (Feb. 27, 2024). He's replying to Noah Smith's negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson... Read more
Posted on 28 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY