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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AI Pause, Chuck Jones Style: Whoops! [aka AI Winter, We've Been There Before]
Back in August of 2020 I issued a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. On the first page, after the cover, but before the abstract and... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scaling Laws for Sparsely-Connected Foundation Models
Identifies the first scaling law describing the relationship between weight sparsity, number of non zero parameters, and amount of training... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Here Come the Sun
Posted on 18 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Cuban Trumpet
I don’t know Cuban trumpeters like I know jazz trumpeters, so commentary will be light to non-existent. Cuban Fantasy (Machito) “Cuban Fantasy” seems to have... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cities Are Not Start-ups
Jersey City's Urban Design LaboratoryMolly Turner, They’re Ultrarich Techies, and They Want to Build a City From Scratch. What Could Go Wrong? NYTimes, Sept. 17... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Savanna Moods: I Was Down, but I’ve Started Back Up.
I have, at various times, written about how my general mood is subject to long-term swings, apparently seasonal. I go down in the fall or winter and come back u... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to Turning Point
Posted on 16 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality
This post originally appeared in The Valve (now defunct) on October 6, 2006. It was part of a "book event," as it was known, in which a number of writers would... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Remark How on the Geometry of Photographs Doesn't Echo the Eye's Geometry
This photo exemplifies a phenomenon I've experienced many times. Look at that white statue, a bust that we're observing from the side, in the middle just to... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Syntax Acquisition, Phase Transitions, and Simplicity Bias in MLMs
New work w/@ziv_ravid @kchonyc @leavittron @nsaphra: We break the steepest MLM loss drop into *2* phase changes: first in internal grammatical structure, then... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: From Yesterday's Walk Along the Shore to the Train Station and a...
Posted on 15 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Unified Probabilistic Deep Continual Learning Through Generative Replay and...
That's (the stuff outside the brackets) is the title of a most interesting paper: Mundt, M.; Pliushch, I.; Majumder, S.; Hong, Y.; Ramesh, V. Read more
Posted on 15 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws: A Working Paper
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coming Home from Work in the Late Afternoon
Posted on 14 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I've Not Forgotten [flowers]
Posted on 13 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Entry Points into the Memory Stream: Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address
I’m continuing the investigation I began in To be or not: Snippets from a soliloquy, and What must be the case that ChatGPT would have memorized “To be or not t... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horizon's Edge from Stem to Stern
Posted on 12 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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To Be Or Not: Snippets from a Soliloquy
A week ago I uploaded a post with an ungainly title, What must be the case that ChatGPT would have memorized “To be or not to be”? – Three kinds of conceptual... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Crisis in the American Body Politic: Is Democracy Over?
Michelle Goldberg, The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans, NYTimes, Sept. 11, 2023. This is commentary on a new book by Steven... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Move in Hoboken
Posted on 11 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
