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 ( 7622 )
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Word Clloud of My Intellectual Interests Based on Google Scholar
Created with Scholar Googler Read more
Posted on 07 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ghosts
Posted on 06 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Vesuvius Scrolls Are Now Being Deciphered! A Win for Machine Learning and Human...
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the... Read more
Posted on 06 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neil deGrass Tyson's Cosmic Perspective
From the YouTube page: Join bestselling author and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, for a conversation about life on Earth and in the... Read more
Posted on 06 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
OpenAI Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever on the Mystical Powers of Artificial Neural Nets
Ilya on LLMs understanding the world: "predicting the next token well, means that you understand the underlying reality that let to the creation of that... Read more
Posted on 06 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why and How is It That Two Companies Dominate the Production of Advanced...
The two Companies I am thinking of are TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) in Taiwan, which Nicholas Kristof recently wrote about in The New York... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Into the Bopi, Me & Charlie Keil @3QD
My latest essay for 3 Quarks Daily went up last week: On the 12/8 Path with Charlie Keil It’s about my relationship with Charlie Keil, from the time I read Urba... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies
Harold Bloom (1928-2021) and Hillis Miller (1930-2019) are of the same intellectual generation. They were colleagues at Yale for a few years in the 1970s and... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Billionaires Bloviating in the Town Square
William D. Cohan, How Loud Billionaires Convert Their Wealth Into Power, NYTimes, Feb. 5, 2024. Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, is an annoying... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Machining World's First Transparent Hydraulic Press Tools
If you don't already have some experience with the Hydraulic Press Channel, the following text is probably not adequate to tell why this guy invested 3000... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Circular Objects + Stuff & Shadows
Posted on 04 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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From Species to Hybrids to Horizontal Gene Transfer; from Tree to Web of Life.
David Quammen, Blurring Life’s Boundaries, Anthropocene, 2019. From near the end of the article: Genes going sideways among animals? That was definitely suppose... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LeCun: "In 4 Years, a Child Has Seen 50 Times More Data Than the Biggest LLMs."
I've made that point before:- LLM: 1E13 tokens x 0.75 word/token x 2 bytes/token = 1E13 bytes.- 4 year old child: 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1E6 optical... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graffiti Writers Are on the Case
Rebecca Carballo, Multiple Floors of Los Angeles Skyscrapers Are Covered in Graffiti, NYTimes, Feb. 3, 2024. A bunch of graffiti writers recently covered a few... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Embrace Everything: Mahler and the Maestro
Leonard Bernstein had an affinity for the music of Gustav Mahler, as seen in the climax of the Oscar-nominated 2023 Netflix film “Maestro. Read more
Posted on 03 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lunch
Posted on 03 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Wrestlers: [Media Notes 109]
I was aware of professional wrestling when I was growing up. I watched a few matches on TV. I remember an especially colorful character who performed as Gorgeou... Read more
Posted on 03 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Arts Are Not the Cherry on the Cake — They Are the Cake.
“The arts are not the cherry on the cake — they are the cake.”Opening a debate in the House of Lords yesterday, Melvyn Bragg said the UK should realise the... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pattern, Conceptual Ontology, and the Well-Turned Story [ChatGPT]
I’ve spent a lot of time getting ChatGPT to tell stories. I’ve taken a particular interest in having it generate variations on some source story. Read more
Posted on 02 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: I'll Supply the Adventure, You Supply the Story.
Posted on 02 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
