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 ( 7809 )
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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 -
Lawfare Analysts on Trump's Immunity Case Before the Supreme Court
Matt Gluck, Hyemin Han, Quinta Jurecic, Natalie K. Orpett, Roger Parloff, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, “For the Ages”: The Supreme Court Hears the Presidential... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
To Which Values Should an A.I. Be Aligned?
Nathan Gardels, The Babelian Tower Of AI Alignment, Noema, April 26, 2024: As generative AI models become ever more powerful on their way to surpassing human... Read more
Posted on 27 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Collective Intelligence: A Unifying Concept for Integrating Biology Across Scale...
Patrick McMillen Michael Levin, Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates, Communications Biology,... Read more
Posted on 26 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How is an LLM Like a Mechanical Clock?
Let's think about LLMs a little more here, but first let's think about mechanical clocks.A clock movement is an arrangement of gears and springs and levers... Read more
Posted on 26 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Let's Play in the Park!
Posted on 26 April 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Take Your Kids to Work Day – to Mt. Kenya [Don't Punish Women Scientists...
Toby Kiers, A Simple Act of Defiance Can Improve Science for Women, NYTimes, April 26, 2024. sci They don’t tell you beforehand that it will be a choice... Read more
Posted on 26 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Industrial Revolution Started Earlier Than Conventional Wisdom Would Have...
Fred Lewsey, ‘Nation of makers’: Britain industrialised over a century earlier than history books claim, University of Cambridge, 5 April, 2024. Read more
Posted on 25 April 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
