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 ( 7626 )
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Dynamics in the Epigenetic Landscape
The molecular and mathematical basis of Waddington's epigenetic landscape: a framework for post-Darwinian biology? https://t.co/pXUg3PVxkx - this (2012) paper... Read more
Posted on 01 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Transformation of Arnold Schwarzenegger
David Marchese, Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Here to Pump You Up (Emotionally), NYTimes, Sept. 28, 2023. Schwarzenegger has a new coming book out on Oct. 10: Be... Read more
Posted on 01 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Internal Feedback in the Cortical Perception-action Loop Enables Fast and...
Jing Shuang (Lisa) Lia, Anish A. Sarmaa, Terrence J. Sejnowskic, and John C. Doyle, Internal feedback in the cortical perception-action loop enables fast and... Read more
Posted on 01 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Pier 13 to the World
Posted on 01 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Saucer Pad in Hoboken's New Park
Posted on 30 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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LLM as Kernel of a New Operating System?
With many đ§Š dropping recently, a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating... Read more
Posted on 29 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
That Reverse Thing: Chatster is Puzzled by “be Not Or Be To” as Well.
As you may know, the following paper has been making the rounds in the LLM world: The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A”. Read more
Posted on 29 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Debate Over AI is All Over the Place, Widely Divergent Views, a...
Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders, Doomsayers, Reformers and Warriors: The Bitter Battle for the Future of A.I., NYTimes, Sept. 28, 2023. Read more
Posted on 28 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gotta' Clear the Mind [shaky-cam]
Posted on 27 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 2: Memory for Texts
I've finished a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu: https://www.academia. Read more
Posted on 27 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LLaMA is Confused, Fails to Disambiguate People with Same Name
Complete utter fail at what used to be a core challenge in natural language understanding, disambiguating multiple people with same name. And hallucinations... Read more
Posted on 27 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rhythmic Brain Activity
đŁđżđśđťđ°đśđ... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Notes on How I Practice the Trumpet
Practice tends towards two kinds of things: exercises and real music. One does them for different purposes, that is to say, I have different things in mind... Read more
Posted on 26 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let Kids Run Free; It's Better for Their Mental Health.
Peter Gray, David F. Lancy, David F. Bjorklund, Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence,... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Sunrise in Liberty State Park [9.12.11]
Posted on 25 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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This Just In: Jellyfish Can Learn!
Veronique Greenwood, Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability, NYTimes, Sept. 22, 2023. From the article: Researchers who were not involved in the... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chipping Away at the "opacity" of ANNs
Are deep neural networks really black-boxes whose inner workings are opaque?Not quite:"... for any feed-forward ReLU network, there exists a global linear... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neel Nanda on That Paper: [LLMs] Have a 1 Way Flow from Inputs to Outputs, and...
This paper's been doing the rounds, so I thought I'd give a mechanistic interpretability take on what's going on here!The core intuition is that "When you see '... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunrise on Nov. 9, 2023 in Liberty State Park
Posted on 24 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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St. George Variations [ChatGPT]
This post is a companion piece to my earlier piece, Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT], where I used the story of St. George... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
