New Savanna has 911 tags as of 13 May 2026 [my 16-year production function is 57 tags per year]

Here’s my previous post on this topic: New Savanna has 665 tags as of 13 Nov 2023 [my 13-year production function is 48 tags per year]. You can find all my posts on this topic at this tag: tag_count.

This is how I explained my production function in that earlier post:

If you are a fan of Tyler Cowen, as I am, then you know that in his Conversations with Tyler he often asks his guests about their production function, how they do whatever it is they do. Well, I now have a way of estimating the output of my production function over the course of this blog. Let’s divide the total number of tags, 655, by the age of the blog in years, 13 years and 7 months is 13.6 years, giving me an output of 48 tags per year.

Given that a large fraction of my intellectual output turns up on New Savanna in one way or another, that’s not an unreasonable number to consider. It would be easy enough to calculate how many posts I produce a year if I wished, but I’m not going to do that, because that particular number is not what I have in mind. What I’m thinking is that that count would thereby give me two measures.

As a first approximation, I’m going to say they measure different things. The post count is a simply a word count, or rather, a words-plus-photos count. The tag count is a new-idea count. To be sure, it’s a very crude approximation to new ideas, but, on first glance, it does seem to me that that’s what it is. I only add tags when I want a convenient way to refer to a new topic. One could, of course, write about the same thing year after year, in which case the tag list would remain constant from year to year. That’s how you succeed in the academy, publish the same three ideas year after year after year until you go emeritus. That’s just not how I roll.

For this time out the number of tags is 911 and the age of the blog is 16.1 years. Divide the former by the latter and you get 57 tags per year.

Here’s the full list of tags as of May 13, 2026:

(the) singularity #Canon/Archive #ccourses #ccresearch #DH #gpt3 #GVM002 #GVM003 #GVM004 #GVM008 #GVM019 #GVM021 #GVM022 #GVM023 #GVX #HEX01 #HumanProgress #LARB #longwoodgardens #nugget #whyiteach 2_war 2set 3300 node graph 3blue1brown 3QD 51 Alley 51 Pacific 5FF 60s abstraction abundance academia academia_stats activism Adam Savage Adam_neeley Adam_Roberts ADHD adolescence adulthood adventure aesthetics affective_tech Africa African-American AI AI Alchemy AI Limit AI values AI_Agents AI_Backlash AI_Chess_Lang AI_companion AI_Emo_Support AI_hallucination AI_idolatry AI_Paradox AI-creativity AI-epistemology AI-future AI-integrate AI-whaling AI30 Alan Liu alien alien phenomenology alignment altered states of consciousness altieri Altman America American myth Amodei analog-computing analogical_reasoning Andreessen Andrew_Piper animals animation anime Anthropic anthropology anti-nuke anti-Semitism ants anxiety AOC apocalypse Apocalypse Now Araki archaeology Arena Arena_4 arithmetic art art_club artificial minds arts ASC attachment Attractor-net Attridge&Staten autobiography awesome B_Russell bacon Baltimore_Years BAM BAnvil BAPC bardolatry BB & Computing BB-reflects BBjazzEdu BCSmith bees behavior behavioral mode bell benchmarks Bennett Bergen Arches BFJO Bill_Gates billionaires-in-space biology bird black black church blogistan blogs blues body Bordwell Born2Groove Bostrom Bostrom-simulation Bourdain brain-as-computer brain-to-brain brains breakfast breaking bad Brian Phillips British Bruce_Jackson Bryant Buddhism Buffalo bundling business C_Keil Carroll cartoon CE Direction CE workshop center-point Chain_of_Thought change change-mind Changizi charting-AI-space Chat_paints chatbots ChatGPT ChatGPT conversation ChatGPT interpretation ChatGPT MTL ChatGPT stories ChatGPT summary ChatGPT_poems ChatGPT-memory cherry_blossoms chess chess_lang_core Chess_Lang_Series childhood children chimpanzees China Chinese-room chocolate factory Chomsky chrysler bulding chuck jones citizen science classify Claude Claude stories claude_colab Claude_describes Claude_partner claude_summary Cld_melancholy_notes clouds coaching Coates Cobra_Kai cog poetics cog-poverty cogart cognition cognitive science Coleridge collapse collective creativity Collier color comedy comfort common sense knowledge communication community complexity compositionism computation computational envelope computers conduit metaphor connect-course consciousness contrail control copyright corruption cosmos coupling COVID-19 creativity culler Cultural Beings cultural evolution cultural identity cultural ranks culture cyberization cybernetics cyberspace daffodil DamiLee danah boyd dance dandelion davidsimon death deep learning DeepSeek default mode deGrasse_Tyson demonstration Dennett depression DeptofPeace description design development DGH Diamond_Age Dick_Macksey digital humanities digital wilderness digital_doppelganger disarmament Disney Dizzy Gillespie DOGE dolls Douthat Douthat-decadence downsize drugs duckdodgers Duke_Ellington Dumbo Dwarkesh eating Ebert eclipse ecology econ_growth economics economy ecstasy education Egypt emergence emergent-ventures emotion empire state building EndofScience energy engineering entangle environment epistemic_struct_cosmos Eric_Jang Erie Cut erotic essay Ethan_Iverson ethical criticism Everett evol-force evolution EVs exploration expressive systems eye Ezra_klein F Me Pump Facebook family Fantasia Farrell fast lane Father Faust FBorFreedom FDR federal government Felski Feyerabend fictional characters Fifty_Shades film flix flow flowers fluid mind food foraging foreign_policy form forsythia fractal free range kids Freeman French toast Friday Fotos Fridman FTH FTH_Class fun funny fusion future G_Hinton g-zone gags game theory garden Gärdenfors Gary_Marcus Gavin Gavriil gender genius genji genre gift Girard GITS glenn_loury glia global warming globalization GOATLiC god Godfrey-Smith Goethe gojira golf Golumbia Gopnik GPT GPT_classroom GPT-3 GPT-4 gpt-4.5 GPT-5 graf-then-now graffiti graffiti aesthetics graffiti chaos graffiti detail graffiti essay graffiti site graphic novel grass Great Chain greatest siam green grief Groucho groups Guillory Haggard Halloween hallucinate hallucinated-city handbook happiness Harman Harold-Bloom Hartman Hassabis HCRichardson HCW health heart darkness Heather_Cox_Richardson Henry Lau high culture Hillis Miller Hiromi history Hoboken Hoboken_2225 Hollis_Robbins home homeless Homo_economicus Homo_ludens hope Horgan Hossenfelder House_MD Howard_Jam Hudson River human nature human_origins human-swarm humanities humans vs. machines humor hunter-gatherer Hurricane Sandy hydraulic_press hyperobjects identity ideology-intellect Iliza_Shlesinger illusion immigration implementation improvise India Industrial_Revolution inequality information Inside_Out Instagram institutions_broken intel_case intellectual history intelligence intention interdisciplinary international affairs internet interpretability Interpretation intuition invent_future IP Iran irises Israel-Palestine Issues-in-CultEvol its complicated Jakobson Jamie jamming Japan jasmine Jaws jazz JC Rising JCPhotoEssay JCwall Jersey City JGGChronicles jim morrison jivometric Jockers Joe Rogan John_Oliver JumpandKong justice K-Pop Kambhampati kami Keil_12/8 Kelly Sax Keynes Kim Stanley Robinson Kimono Mom King Kong Kisangani2150 KK encounter Korea Kubla_Khan Kwak DaKyung LAARB Lafayette_Garden language language-computation-litform Lantz LARB-DH Latouor-modes Latour Latour Assemble laughter law leaks learning leaves LeCun Lee_Morgan Leonard_Bernstein Letterman Lévi-Strauss life light linguistics links literary criticism literary Darwinism literature LLM LLM_collab LLM-Meta Loser love low culture lump MacArthurFP MacPaint macroanalysis maestro magic maker malick man_machine man-in-space man-machine-interaction mana mandala manga manhattan Maplewood marilyn_monroe Mark_Twain mark-turner Mars Mary_Douglas masculinity math maynard McCarty McCulloch McDonalds meals meanderings meaning meaning_semanticity meaningful_life media notes medicine meeting_of_minds melancholy_mind memes memory mental health Meta_struct_world metalingual definition method mhacks Michael_Jordan microchips Miles Davis Millennium_Park mimi and eunice mind mind-inside mind-or-machine mindfulness Miyazaki Mnozil mom moon moral injury morality Moretti Morton Morton-Spacecraft MR-Notes music Musk my intellectual life my_mood myth-logic narrative NASA nation-state nationalism natural geometry naturalist criticism nature NCIS networks neural-holography neural-weather neuromorphic neuroscience neurosymbolic new government New Hope City new humanities new savanna New York City new-descriptivists next-word Nina Paley NLH rejection No_Kings Northrup Frye notes novel NY2140 NYTimes Obama object-oriented ontology objectification Occupy ontological cognition OOCRnB open letter OpenAI operadoc orange orgasm Oshii P_Thiel pansies parsons party Patriotism_3QD patterns PB Graff Jam peace peak experience perception percussion performance performing Perper personal perversion philosophy philosophy new photo photography photontology phrasal lex physics Piaget pinckney Pixar planning plants play pleasure pluri-core poem poetry politics pollution polyrhythm polyviscous polyviscous_core pond pop culture pop culture aesthetics Pope_Leo population Porco Pounds_typology poverty predict prehistory President 2020 Presidential 2016 printing_press prodigy progress projection protest psychedelic psychoanalysis psychology public-private-interest pyramids Queen Mary 2 race race-symbolic-universe Ramble Ramsay Rank5 ratatouille read_macroanal read-hyperobjects reading reading>reading reality regulate-mind RelationalNets religion research retire RGB rhythm Rick_Beato ring-form risk RNA-primer Supplement Road Not Taken Road Runner Robert Frost Robert_Wright robot-rights robots rock art RodneyBrooks Rogue-AI romantic love Rubicon-Waterloo Salerno-Sonnenberg sally Sant_Andreu Satch scale scaling_in_ML science science fiction Scott_Aaronson scratching my head search Searle Séb_Krier seder-masochism Segmented_sleep Seinfeld self selfie serendipity series_humans_loop sexuality sexuality25 Shakespeare shaky-cam shame Shine/Titanic shoes silver simulation SK8 sky sleep sleep_reorg SMP_linked snow social media society Sowa space speech Spider-Man sports SPSH SSTB stagnation StanfordLitLab star trek state_dependent_memory StateofAI statistics Steve Pinker Steven_Spielberg strange_land street art sunrise sunset superintelligence supreme_court surface_reading surveillance Sutskever swisher Sydney_Lamb synchrony tablescape taboo tag tag_count TalentSearch Tantra tassles tech evol techbro technology television tell me blues terror-management terrorism text texture Tezuka the rez the-crown theater theology theory of mind Theory stars therapy throwie time toast topic models touch toy being transformer transition transnational trees Trump trumpet tulips TV tweet Tweet-of-Day twitter Tyler Cowen UBI underbelly Underwood Underwood&Sellers2015 Unfrosted unityofbeing universal_kid_space urb design center urban urban geometry urban pastoral Utopia vacation Vehicularization Vermont Vexta vibe_coding video violence VirtFeud virtual reading vision visual resonance visualization wackyland waffles war war boys wayquay's weather web weeds Why CE Wickwire Wind Rises window_shot WiP wires_images wisdom WLB_art WLB_Mandala wlb_melancholy WLB_religion WLBjazz WmPowers Wolfram women word illusion work work-mode working paper World-spanning thoughts World-Wide Wall WorldIsland writing Wuthering Heights Xanadu yevick youth Yudkowsky ZAR Zeal_Greenberg Zhang Zizek zuckerberg

Traffic at New Savanna remains up, but very spikey

Where’s it going? During the middle of the month – look at the 30-day chart below – I thought that maybe things were settling down after the dramatic action of July and June.

As you can see, however, things began shooting up in the last week of August.

Here’s the 12-month view:

And here’s the all-time view:

Notice that we’ve crossed the 2 million mark for the first time.

As for Academia, the action’s been moving back and forth between the 99th and 99.5th percentile.

New Savanna traffic went Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! in July

Here’s the traffic for July 31, 2025:

Notice the peak at over 1.5 million. The earlier period of peak traffic in 2017 to 2018 has been eclipsed by a considerable margin.

Here’s where things stood on June 1, 2025:

The peak is over 250 K and that earlier peak year, 2017, still looms large in the distribution.

And here’s how things looked on March 1, 2025:

Now the 2017 peak is just a bit higher than the current peak.

It appears, however, that this current run may be over. Here’s how things looked for the last 12 months:

There’s a definite dip at the end of July. The three month totals give us a clearer view:

I haven’t got the foggiest idea what accounts for these numbers.

New Savanna traffic shot up during June

Here’s the all-time traffic as of May 30, 2025:

Notice that the peak is just above 250K. Now, here’s the all-time traffic for June 30, 2025:

The peak is now almost 800K, more than double the previous peak, which shows up down there above 200K.

Here’s the 12-month graph ending on June 30:

Most of the action has been since April. So let’s look at the three-month graph:

So, we had a little spurt in April, and then a somewhat longer one from the end of May to mid-June. Then things shot way up at the end of June. How long will that last and how high will it go? I don’t know.

More generally, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what these spurts of activity are about, not the one in 2017 nor the current one.

Traffic’s Up: New Savanna Stats, May 1, 2025

Traffic is definitely up at New Savanna, May 30, 2025:

Notice that spike at the right. It’s above 250K. Compare that with what we had two months before, on March 1, 2025:

The period from Jan. 2023 through the present is definitely longer than the earlier rise during 2017 and into 2018, and, with the most recent data, it’s higher as well. We’ll see if that holds up.

In either case, however, I don’t know what’s responsible. The earlier rise was only temporary. Will this rise prove temporary as well? Who knows?

By the numbers, New Savanna and Academia, a quick update

Here’s where things currently stand with overall views at New Savanna:

There’s that big jump for 2017. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what that’s about. Nor do I understand the big rise that’s been going on since late 2023, but at this point it’s been going on longer than the previous one. I have no idea what’ll unfold over the next year.

Now look at this, which compares my overall performance on Academia.edu with Steven Pinker’s:

We’re both in the top 0.5% of views for the last 30 days. The last 30 days. That would seem to imply that I’m running neck in neck with Pinker, which is absurd. He’s one of the best-known intellectuals in the world, while I’m unknown. He’s got 75 times the number of followers I have and 2.9 times as many total public views. But for the last 30 days, there we are.

Balancing things: I'm cutting back on Sunday blogging

I'm working on a book and I've decided to devote Sunday to that. That means I'm not going to do any long-form blogging on Sundays. I'm not going to write long posts and I'm not going post carefully chosen excerpts from article. Those things take time, time I need to work on my book. 

I will, however, post some things that don't take much time or thought, photographs, tweets, videos.

Report Card: New Savanna and Academia.edu, end of 2024

Time to report on traffic here at the Savanna and over at Academia.edu. As of Jan. 1, 2025, this is the traffic at New Savanna over the past year.

Now look at all-time traffic:

Notice that big rise in 2017. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what happened there, but whatever it was, it didn’t last. Traffic was back down, though perhaps just a big higher than before that period. Then we got a big jump at the end of 2023 and that stayed with us through 2024. I don’t know what that’s about either, but it does seem to be dropping off. How far down it’ll go, I don’t know.

Here's the top posts over the last year:

The top two have been riding high for a long time. The second one, about Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, is one of the oldest posts here, and it’s about sex, a surefire winner. The third post, Shakespeare on the wane? went up in October of last year. The reason it has so many hits is that Tyler Cowen mentioned it over at Marginal Revolution, which has a huge following. Similarly, GOAT Literary Critics went up on December 4, 2023. It also got a boost from Cowen. But the last one down, Claude 3.5 Sonnet visits Times Square, didn’t get a boost from Cowen. It sent up on December 9, 2024 and got over 600 hits on its own (the tallies in Blogger’s multiple-post listings tend to be lower than the tallies you get at the posts taken individually). I’m not sure why this one got so many hits, way more than any of the other “Claude describes” posts.

Now, to Academia.edu. At the beginning of the year I was, I believe, at the 99.5th percentile in total hits, however it is that Academia measures that (I believe it’s over the previous 30 days). I’d been as high as 99.9 sometime during 2023. It dropped to 99.0 during the middle of the year, but now I’m back up to 99.5.

Here's the traffic for the last 60 days. The green line is paper views and the black line is unique visitors. The blue line is for profile views.

This table is sorted by most all-time downloads in descending order (rightmost column). Notice the document with the most downloads is a paper with practical advice on how to play relatively simple polyrhythms on a tongue drum. An encyclopedia article on Visual Thinking is third.

Time for another ramble: Melancholy, Claude, Bloom, Claude, Ring composition, and Other Stuff

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; May 29th was the last one. If you look over there to right at the Blog Archive you’ll see I’ve been on a posting slump, with 3-figure monthly totals from January through June, then a dip to 61 for July, August: 18, September: 15, October: 30, and now 33 for November as I write this, and the month isn’t over. Maybe I’m pulling out of the slump.

Anyhow, I’m feeling a little backed up with things to post about, so it’s time to ramble on and see what’s up.

Melancholy, Mind (Mine), and Growth

That’s the tentative title for my next 3 Quarks Daily article. Starting back in November 2017 I’ve been making occasional posts about my monthly posting habits, which tend to drop during the winter. I’m thinking of using that as the point of departure for my next 3QD piece, which will go up on December 2nd.

During those down times I’m depressed to one degree or another (melancholy). But why? Since those down times have been in the winter, perhaps its seasonal affective disorder (SAD). But that doesn’t square with all of the evidence. There was no down-time in the winder of 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, but there was a slump in the summer of 2023. Something else is going on, and I think it has to do with creativity. To that end I want to discuss the ridiculous blither of tags here, 665 by November or 2023.

Claude

I’ve starting working with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot. I want to do some posts where I verify some of the work I’ve done with ChatGPT. I’m thinking of posts on stories, ontological structure, abstract definition, and the Girardian analysis of Jaws. I can then gather those into a working paper.

I also want to look at other things. At the moment I’m thinking of seeing how Claude summarizes longish documents. I’m thinking of the Hamlet chapter from Bloom’s Shakespeare book and Heart of Darkness.

Harold Bloom and GOAT literary critics

A year ago I began a series of posts on the theme of the greatest literary critics. I got bogged down in discussing Harold Bloom. It’s time to finish it off.

Bloom may well be as brilliant a literary critic as we’ve had in the last 50 or 60 years. But brilliance is one thing, greatness is another. Brilliance is a function of the individual, while greatness is a function of the relationship between an individual’s work and the arena in which they’re working.

I’m not sure about Bloom’s fit. While he’s got a wide readership, it’s not clear to me that scholars have taken up his work in any significant way. They may cite him – perhaps especially is concept of influence – but that they don’t much use of his ideas in his work. But we’ve also got to consider his work in the larger public arena, where he is hands-down the most prominent literary critic. I’m not sure of how to handle that.

However, if History wants to declare that Harold Bloom is one of the great all-time literary critics, maybe even the GOAT, what do I care? What would really bother me is if future critics should decide to take his work as a model and (attempt to) do more like it. Like most literary critics he’s neglected the study of form and he’s been deaf to the cognitive sciences. There’s little in his work that’s worth amplifying. It’s a dead end.

ChatGPT report

About a year or so ago I started writing a report summarizing my work on ChatGPT. I need to finish that report. I’d estimate the three-fourths or more are done. I’d like to be able to include some work with Claude. I don’t intend a lot on this, just enough to say that I’ve verified some things.

I’d like to finish this by the end of this year.

Why’s ring-form composition important?

That’s tricky. It has to do with the fact that literary works are extended in time, unlike the visual arts, which are static in time but extended in space. You can’t take the whole thing in at a glance like you can a painting.

There are constraints on how a literary work can unfold in time. There is a sense in which (the nature of) the end is inherent in the beginning. Ring-compositions are even more tightly constrained. Dylan Thomas consciously and deliberately plotted the ring-composition of the rhyme scheme in his “Author’s Prologue.” Rhyme is not about meaning; its patterns are arbitrary with respect to meaning. But Coleridge did not consciously work out the ring-compositions in “Kubla Khan,” not Conrad in Heart of Darkness. These patterns ARE NOT arbitrary with respect to meaning. On the contrary, they are central to how meaning is constituted.

Other Stuff

More Cobra Kai: Follow-up on my post where I explore the Freudian angle, saying a bit more about Girard, and extending that into history.

* *

More on meaning in LLMs: I’ve suggested that Ilya Sutskyver conflates mistakenly (and unknowingly?) conflates cognitive and semantic structure with the structure of the world and so suggests that robust next-token prediction requires knowledge of the world. In this post I argue that making that distinction is, in fact, difficult, and involves what I’ve been calling the word illusion. I first confronted the problem as an undergraduate when I was trying to understanding the difference between the signified, and mental structure, and the reference, something in the world, of a sign. I may not have gotten deep intuitions about that until I began studying cognitive networks in graduate school.

* *

Gila-monster venom and computational irreducibility: The idea is to start with a NYTimes article on drug discovery that starts with Gila-monster venom and ends up with Wolfram’s concept of computational irreducibility. This is about search, computation, and the complex and irregular structure of the (natural world).

* *

My work with Ramesh: Notes on conceptual ontology and hypergraphs in conceptual space.

* *

LLMs and literary study: Can we use LLMs to analyze the thematic structure of literary texts?

In particular, can we use them to examine Bloom’s these about Shakespeare as “inventing” the human. Are there themes that appear first in Shakespeare? We need more than Bloom’s vigorous assertion on this. We need to examine the thematic structure of prior texts and of Shakespeare’s texts and show that there are things new in Shakespeare. Do those new things then continue if texts after Shakespeare? To do this properly we need to examine a lot of texts.

I’d also like to know if LLMs could be used to find ring-composition in literary texts. It is by no means obvious to me that they can.

What’s been going on at New Savanna over the last year?

Here’s the action at New Savanna over the last year:

Notice the large increases in August and September of last year and in March through May of this year along with a more modest increase in December.

Now look at the all-time action:

There’s that big jump in 2017 and something similar this past year. I have no idea what’s going on in either case. In particular, in the current case, there doesn’t seem to be a big increase in interest in current posting, at least nothing I could see simply by eye-balling the hit rate. Whatever’s happening would seem to be more widely distributed. As I recall, it was like that for 2017 as well.

Here's a post from November 2017 where I note that older action, and one from January 2017, nearer the beginning of that older rise.

FWIW, here's the top 10 posts for the last year:

10,000 Posts at New Savanna!

9,981 and counting. How long before New Savanna has 10,000 posts?

I have published 9,981 posts at New Savanna since it first went live in April of 2010.

Some of those are long-form articles I have written, 1000 to three or four thousand words or more. Many are shorter, 100 to 1000 words. Many are excerpts from articles published elsewhere. Some are little more than a link or three.

Then we have articles that contain tweets. I've recently added one or two Instagram posts.

Some articles contain one or more videos, of various types, music and podcasts are the most frequent kinds. 

Finally, the photographs of various subjects: graffiti, Hoboken, Jersey City, Manhattan, the Hudson River, food, flowers, trees, grass, and so forth.

How long will it take me to post ten thousand more?

Keeping Score of my online action

It’s a lazy Friday afternoon, but then recently all Friday afternoons have seemed lazy. I’ve spent much the day doing this and that and taking stock, getting ready for the been weekend push on my next piece for 3 Quarks Daily. It’s currently titled, “Why We Need Philosophy, Now, More Than Ever [AI].” Perhaps it will have that title by the time I publish it. We’ll see.

Anyhow, I thought I’d report my latest states on Academic and here at the Savanna.

Academia

I’ve got 90,841 total views, which puts me in the top 0.5%. I’ve been there for months. At one point in the last year, Mar. 22, I was in the top 0.1%. That’s pretty good. I need to be in the top 0.001%.

The chart below shows my paper action over the last 60 days. The upper green line is paper views and the lower black line is downloads. Notice that all the data points except the rightmost one indicate totals for the day. I took the screenshot at 4PM; I won’t hazard a guess where thing will be at the end of the day.

Here's the most popular papers over the last 60 days (click on chart to embiggen):

Notice that the top paper, on the tech Singularity, is way behind the second paper, on Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, in total views (to the right), but ahead of it in downloads. The singularity paper is from 2014; the Ninja Scroll paper is from 2015. The corresponding Ninja Scroll post at New Savanna is the most popular post there. I’m particularly pleased with the performance of the Heart of Darkness paper, which is hard-core literary criticism, with quite a bit of close-reading and “distant” reading as well; it’s from 2019. The Visual Thinking paper is an encyclopedia article I published in 1990.

New Savanna

Here’s the views on New Savanna over the past three months. Very spiky.

Here’s the last year; notice the overall spikiness and the heavy action in August and September.

This is how things look over the whole life of the blog:

I have no idea what caused all that action in 2017, nor what’s the source of the recent, but highly variable, increase since August, 2023.

Here’s the most popular posts for the last three months (click on chart to embiggen):

Note particularly the most popular one: GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1.1, What do you mean, literary critic? That’s from December 4, 2023, and is the first post in my ongoing series on literary criticism. That series is a response to Tyler Cowen’s recently published book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? Cowen published a link to my post at his blog, Marginal Revolution, on December 6 and that drove a lot of traffic to New Savanna that day.

The second post on the list is my post on Ninja Scroll; as I indicated above, it’s the most popular one at New Savanna and dates from September, 2010, the first year of the blog. In third place we have one the posts in my series about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. That is now the third most popular post on the blog and dates from late 2015.

Who’s the GOAT of Economics? Tyler Cowen on His New AI Book & More! [Bonus: from double-entry bookkeeping to supply and demand] – that’s in fourth place and has some comments on a podcast in which Cowen discussed his GOAT economists book. During the conversation he mentioned that he couldn’t understand why 17th century thinkers had such trouble conceptualizing the phenomenon of supply-and-demand, which he could easily explain to a reasonably intelligent teenager. I did some thinking about it and made a variety of comments about it, giving special attention to a speculation that the conceptualization probably piggy-backed on the practice of double-entry book-keeping. Cowen apparently liked that and gave me another link.

More later.

Update: My mood over the long term [intellectual productivity]

As you may know, I use my posting pattern as a gauge of my overall long-term mood. The better my mood, the more I post in a month. I’ve written about this a number of times, most recently in mid-September of this year, New Savanna Moods: I was down, but I’ve started back up. The trend I reported in that post has continued through the end of the year, with a total of 112 posts in September, 120 in October, 132 in November, and 111 for December. Here’s how things look for the last three years:

And here’s how things look over the life of New Savanna, starting back in June 2010:

The overall trend is up. Last year (2023) is my highest annual total: 1004. Then we have 2019 (912) followed by 2018 (871).

I should note, however, that prior to September of 2018 I had not been posting tweets to New Savanna, though I joined Twitter in October of 2011. In terms of psychic energy, tweet posts are cheap posts, so I tend to think that some of the increase since has to be discounted in the sense that the increase doesn’t reflect my mood, rather it reflects ease of posting.

See also, A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns For that matter, take a look at this while you're at it, What is depression? [an umbrella term]..

New Savanna Traffic was UP in 2023

This chart shows the traffic here for the last three months.

It went way up in the last 10 days of November, back down for the first two weeks of December, and then up and down to finish the month.

Here’s the 12 month chart:

I have no idea what was going on back in April that we had that big spike. Things started picking up in June, then went up from August through to October. I have little idea what that was about, nor do I know what’s been going on in December either.

Here's the chart for all time:

I have no idea what was going on back in 2017, but we’re now back in that range. What will the new year bring?

Finally, here’s the top 10 posts of all time:

I know from past experience that these numbers (along the right) are too low, but I don’t want to dig out the correct numbers because they don’t matter for my present purpose. The Ninja Scroll post remains on top, where it’s been from the since I posted it in September of 2010, the first year of New Savanna. What’s got my attention is the sixth post on the list, “GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1a, What do you mean, literary critic?” That has almost 5000 hits, but it is quite recent, December 4, 2023. Why so many hits? Because Tyler Cowen gave it a boost on December 6 from Marginal Revolution.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! New Savanna now has 666 tags. [Mark of the Freakin' Apocalyptic Beast]

When I added that last photo post, from my recent breakfast at Turning Point in Hoboken, my breakfast joint now that the Malibu is toast – though perhaps it will be reborn, I decided that, I've got so many of these posts of my breakfast food and ambience, I really ought to add a new tag. So I did. "Breakfast" is now in the tag list.

That brings my tag total to 666, the Mark of the Beast (Book of Revelation 13:18). Dare I tempt fate in that way? Perhaps that would signal the AGI emerging from the web that it's time to take control.

The horror! The horror!

13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.... https://t.co/081eE7WaJ9 pic.twitter.com/roo0lWfXll

— Apocalypse Animated (@ApocalypseAnim) May 1, 2023

New Savanna has 665 tags as of 13 Nov 2023 [my 13-year production function is 48 tags per year]

I’ve been working on a little ChatGPT project involving the list of tags I use to label posts here at New Savanna. While the project doesn’t actually require that I know that number, I decided, while I’m at it, why not? To be sure, it’ll take a bit of time, and be a bit tedious, but why the hell not? So I counted them.

I’ve done this sort of thing before:

Once again, what's up with all the tags/labels? – 544 tags on December 11, 2016
https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/12/once-again-whats-up-with-all-tagslabels.html

Tags/labels at New Savanna: What's up with that? – 481 tags on November 7, 2017
https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/11/tagslabels-at-new-savanna-whats-up-with.html

And then I got carried away, threw caution to the wind, and went into the WayBack Machine to count up the number nearer the early days of the blog. While my oldest post is dated April 14, 2010, the Wayback Machine’s oldest snapshot of New Savanna is from July 21, 2011, when I had 252 tags. So, it took me a year and two months to accumulate 252 tags. Then – why not? – I decided to check another date. August 7, 2012 seemed like a good one to try. So I did, 292 tags. That means that I only added 40 tags in a bit over a year since July 21, 2011.

I’ve put those tag lists below. But first...

Estimating my production function

If you are a fan of Tyler Cowen, as I am, then you know that in his Conversations with Tyler he often asks his guests about their production function, how they do whatever it is they do. Well, I now have a way of estimating the output of my production function over the course of this blog. Let’s divide the total number of tags, 655, by the age of the blog in years, 13 years and 7 months is 13.6 years, giving me an output of 48 tags per year.

Given that a large fraction of my intellectual output turns up on New Savanna in one way or another, that’s not an unreasonable number to consider. It would be easy enough to calculate how many posts I produce a year if I wished, but I’m not going to do that, because that particular number is not what I have in mind. What I’m thinking is that that count would thereby give me two measures.

As a first approximation, I’m going to say they measure different things. The post count is a simply a word count, or rather, a words-plus-photos count. The tag count is a new-idea count. To be sure, it’s a very crude approximation to new ideas, but, on first glance, it does seem to me that that’s what it is. I only add tags when I want a convenient way to refer to a new topic. One could, of course, write about the same thing year after year, in which case the tag list would remain constant from year to year. That’s how you succeed in the academy, publish the same three ideas year after year after year until you go emeritus. That’s just not how I roll.

I suppose the next thing to do would be to create a GPT to help navigate New Savanna, with links to my repositories at Academia.edu, Flickr, and YouTube. Later.

Tag list for November 23, 2023

(the) singularity #Canon/Archive #ccourses #ccresearch #DH #gpt3 #GVM002 #GVM003 #GVM004 #GVM008 #GVM019 #GVM021 #GVM022 #GVM023 #GVX #HEX01 #hu #HumanProgress #LARB #longwoodgardens #nugget #whyiteach 2set 3300 node graph 3QD 51 Alley 51 Pacific 5FF 60s abstraction abundance academia academia_stats activism Adam Savage adolescence adulthood adventure aesthetics African-American AI AI Alchemy AI Limit AI values AI-epistemology AI-future AI-whaling Alan Liu alien alien phenomenology alignment altered states of consciousness altieri America American myth analog-computing Andreessen animals animation anime anthropology anti-nuke ants anxiety AOC apocalypse Apocalypse Now Arena arithmetic art artificial minds ASC attachment Attractor-net Attridge&Staten autobiography awesome BAM BAnvil BAPC bardolatry BB & Computing BBjazzEdu bees behavior behavioral mode bell Bennett Bergen Arches billionaires-in-space biology bird black black church blogistan blogs blues body Born2Groove Bostrom-simulation Bourdain brain-as-computer brain-to-brain brains breaking bad British Bryant Buffalo business Carroll cartoon cartoons CE Direction CE workshop change change-mind Changizi charting-AI-space ChatGPT ChatGPT conversation ChatGPT interpretation ChatGPT MTL ChatGPT stories ChatGPT summary ChatGPT-memory chess childhood children chimpanzees China Chinese-room chocolate factory Chomsky chrysler bulding chuck jones citizen science classify clouds coaching Coates cog poetics cog-poverty cogart cognition cognitive science Coleridge collective creativity Collier color comedy comfort common sense knowledge communication community complexity compositionism computation computational envelope computers connect-course consciousness contrail control copyright cosmos coupling COVID-19 creativity culler Cultural Beings cultural evolution cultural identity cultural ranks culture cyberization cybernetics cyberspace danah boyd dance dandelion davidsimon death deep learning default mode demonstration Dennett DeptofPeace description design development DGH digital humanities digital wilderness disarmament Disney Dizzy Gillespie dolls Douthat-decadence downsize drugs duckdodgers Dumbo eating Ebert ecology economics economy ecstasy education emergent-ventures emotion empire state building EndofScience engineering entangle environment Erie Cut essay ethical criticism Everett evol-force evolution exploration expressive systems eye F Me Pump Facebook family Fantasia fast lane Father Faust FBorFreedom FDR Felski Feyerabend fictional characters film flix flow flowers fluid mind food foraging form fractal free range kids Freeman Friday Fotos fun funny future g-zone gags game theory garden Gärdenfors Gavin gender genius genji genre gift Girard GITS global warming globalization god Godfrey-Smith gojira golf Golumbia GPT GPT-3 GPT-4 graf-then-now graffiti graffiti aesthetics graffiti chaos graffiti detail graffiti essay graffiti site graphic novel grass Great Chain greatest siam green grief groups Haggard hallucinate hallucinated-city handbook happiness Harman Hartman HCW health heart darkness Henry Lau high culture Hillis Miller history Hoboken home homeless hope Horgan Hudson River human nature human-swarm humanities humor hunter-gatherer Hurricane Sandy hyperobjects identity ideology-intellect illusion implementation improvise inequality information intellectual history intelligence intention interdisciplinary international affairs internet interpretability Interpretation intuition IP irises Israel-Palestine Issues-in-CultEvol its complicated Jamie jamming Japan jasmine Jaws jazz JC Rising JCPhotoEssay JCwall Jersey City jim morrison jivometric Jockers Joe Rogan JumpandKong justice K-Pop kami Kelly Sax Keynes Kim Stanley Robinson Kimono Mom King Kong Kisangani2150 KK encounter Korea Kubla_Khan LAARB language language-computation-litform Lantz LARB-DH Latouor-modes Latour Latour Assemble laughter law leaks learning leaves LeCun Letterman Lévi-Strauss life light linguistics links literary criticism literary Darwinism literature LLM Loser love low culture MacArthurFP MacPaint macroanalysis magic maker malick man-in-space mana manga manhattan Maplewood mark-turner Mars math maynard McCarty meals meaning meaning+semanticity media notes medicine memes memory mental health metalingual definition method mhacks Miles Davis mimi and eunice mind mind-inside mind-or-machine mindfulness Miyazaki Mnozil moon moral injury morality Moretti Morton Morton-Spacecraft mus music Musk my intellectual life myth-logic narrative nation-state nationalism natural geometry naturalist criticism nature NCIS networks neural-holography neural-weather neuroscience neurosymbolic new government New Hope City new humanities new savanna New York City new-descriptivists next-word Nina Paley NLH rejection Northrup Frye notes novel NY2140 Obama object-oriented ontology objectification ontological cognition OOCRnB open letter operadoc orange Oshii parsons party patterns PB Graff Jam peace peak experience perception percussion performance performing Perper personal perversion philosophy philosophy new photo photography photontology phrasal lex physics pinckney Pixar plants play pleasure pluri-core poem poetry politics pollution polyrhythm polyviscous pond pop culture pop culture aesthetics population Porco poverty predict prehistory President 2020 Presidential 2016 prodigy progress projection protest prugress psychedelic psychoanalysis psychology public-private-interest Queen Mary 2 race race-symbolic-universe Ramble Ramsay ratatouille read-hyperobjects reading reading>reading reality regulate-mind RelationalNets religion research RGB rhythm ring-form risk RNA-primer Supplement Road Not Taken Road Runner Robert Frost robot-rights robots rock art Rogue-AI romantic love Rubicon-Waterloo s sally Satch scale scaling science science fiction scratching my head Searle seder-masochism Seinfeld self sexuality Shakespeare shaky-cam shoes silver SK8 sky sleep snow social media society space speech sports SSTB stagnation StanfordLitLab star trek Steve Pinker street art sunrise sunset superintelligence Sydney_Lamb synchrony taboo tag TalentSearch tassles tech evol technology television tell me blues terror-management terrorism text texture Tezuka the rez theater theology theory of mind Theory stars throwie time toast topic models touch toy being transition transnational trees Trump trumpet tweet Tweet-of-Day twitter Tyler Cowen UBI underbelly Underwood Underwood&Sellers2015 unityofbeing urb design center urban urban geometry urban pastoral vacation Vermont Vexta video violence VirtFeud virtual reading vision visual resonance visualization wackyland war war boys wayquay's weather web weeds Why CE Wind Rises WLBjazz WmPowers women word illusion work working paper World-spanning thoughts World-Wide Wall WorldIsland Wuthering Heights Xanadu yevick youth ZAR Zhang

Tag List for August 7, 2012

60s abstraction abundance academia activism adventure aesthetics African-American AI alien alien phenomenology America American myth animation anime anti-nuke ants anxiety apocalypse Apocalypse Now art autobiography awesome BAnvil bees behavior behavioral mode bell Bennett Bergen Arches biology bird black blogistan blogs body brains British Bryant Buffalo business cartoon CE workshop change chimpanzees China chocolate factory chrysler bulding chuck jones classify cognition cognitive science Coleridge color comfort communication community complexity compositionism computation computers consciousness contrail copyright cosmos coupling creativity cultural evolution culture cybernetics cyberspace dandelion death demonstration description design development disarmament Disney dolls drugs duckdodgers Dumbo Ebert ecology economics ecstasy education emotion empire state bulding environment Erie Cut essay evolution eye family Fantasia fast lane Feyerabend film flix flowers fractal fun funny future gags garden genji genre gift globalization god golf graffiti graffiti detail graffiti site graphic novel grass greatest siam green grief groups Haggard Harman HCW health heart darkness high culture history Hoboken home homeless hope Hudson River human nature humanities illusion intellectual history international affairs internet Interpretation IP irises jamming Japan jazz JCwall Jersey City jim morrison jivometric JumpandKong justice kami language Lantz Latour law leaks leaves life light linguistics links liter literary criticism literature long-hair love low culture Lévi-Strauss magic malick manga manhattan memes mental health method mhacks mimi and eunice mind mindfulness Miyazaki moon morality Morton music narrative natural geometry nature neuroscience New Hope City new savanna New York City Nina Paley notes novel Obama obj object-oriented ontology ontological cognition operadoc orange Oshii party peace peak experience perception percussion Perper personal perversion philosophy photo photography Pixar plants play pleasure poetry politics pollution pond pop culture Porco poverty prehistory progress projection protest psychology Queen Mary 2 race ranks reading reality religion research rhythm risk Road Runner robots rock art romantic love science science fiction self sexuality Shakespeare silver sky snow society space speech SSTB street street art sunrise sunset synchrony taboo tag tassles technology television texture Tezuka theology theory of mind throwie time toast TOM touch toy being transition transnational trees underbelly urb design center urban urban geometry urban pastoral video violence vision wackyland war web weeds youth Zhang

Tag List for July 10, 2011

60s abstraction academia activism aesthetics African-American AI alien America American myth animation anime anti-nuke ants anxiety apocalypse Apocalypse Now art autobiography awesome bees behavior behavioral mode bell Bergen Arches biology bird black blogistan blogs body brains British Buffalo business cartoon CE workshop change chimpanzees chocolate factory chrysler bulding chuck jones classify cognition Coleridge color comfort communication community complexity computation computers consciousness contrail copyright cosmos coupling creativity cultural evolution culture cyberspace death demonstration description design development disarmament Disney dolls drugs Ebert ecology economics ecstasy education emotion empire state bulding environment Erie Cut essay evolution family Fantasia fast lane film flix flowers fractal fun funny future genji genre gift globalization god golf graffi detail graffiti graffiti detail graphic novel grass greatest siam grief groups health heart darkness high culture history Hoboken hobokien home homeless hope Hudson River human nature humanities illusion international affairs internet Interpretation IP Iris irises jamming Japan jazz Jersey City jim morrison jivometric language Lantz law leaks leaves life light linguistics links literary criticism literature love low culture magic manga manhattan memes mental health method mhacks mimi and eunice mindfulness Miyazaki moon morality music narrative natural geometry neuroscience New Hope City new savanna New York City Nina Paley notes novel Obama obj object-oriented ontology orange Oshii party peace peak experience perception percussion personal perversion philosophy photo photography Pixar plants play pleasure poetry politics pollution pond pop culture Porco poverty prehistory progress projection protest psychology Queen Mary 2 race ranks reality religion research rhythm risk Road Runner robots rock art romantic love science science fiction self sexuality Shakespeare silver sky snow society space speech SSTB street street art sunrise sunset synchrony taboo tag tassles technology television texture theology theory of mind throwie toast TOM touch transition transnational underbelly urban urban geometry urban pastoral video vision wackyland web weeds

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 up in spring: A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns.

This has been going on, it seems like, my entire adult life, starting in young adulthood (my freshman year in college). At one time a friend suggested that I had seasonal affective disorder (SAD). I never really checked that out, though earlier this year I thought about getting those bright lights that are supposed to stave it off.

Anyhow, things changed this year. Look at this chart, which depicts my monthly blogging frequency since 2021:

We see the standard pattern in 2021. There’s a big drop from August to October, to a low in November. I start back up in December, but don’t come back until April.

In 2022 again, have a big drop between August and September, a low in November, but then I shoot up in December up through April and then, whoops! back down for May. What happened?

At the end of November 2022 Open AI released ChatGPT to the web. I started playing with it, a lot, and got back to blogging, a lot. I kept that going through the end of April, when I lost intellectual and creative steam. But then, late in August, things started back up (I wrote over half of the August posts in the last week of the month). My thinking has come back.

Why? Interesting question. I don’t really know. Let’s just leave it for now and move on.

If my winter slumps were due to SAD, then that shouldn’t have happened. Sure, there’s ChatGPT, so what? Why should that make a difference if my mood is controlled by biochemical events that are cued by seasonal variations in illumination? But what if my moods are not cued by the weather? What if something else is going on and, whatever that is, it just happened to more or less coincide with seasonal variations in light?

NOTE: The bar for September of this year, at the far right of the chart, is a guess. I set the number at 90 so the chart would show what I think is going on. The month isn’t over yet. It’s the 16th. When this post goes up I’ll have 50 for the month. I’m over half way to 90 and I still have half a month left.

New activity peak at New Savanna [Aug 28, 2023]

Here’s the hit count at New Savanna for the last three months:

Action has been higher than usual through August. That peak is for August 28 and it may well be the highest number of hits I’ve gotten in a single day: 14,264. I have no idea what’s going on there.

This shows the top posts for the last thirty days.

The top post for that period got 126 views, the second got 109, and then we drop down on 57. That seems pretty normal and doesn’t look at all like a small handful of posts suddenly attracted a lot of attention on the 28th. Was there a bot scraping text from the web and it came through New Savanna on that day? Note that New Savanna only has 9310 posts published.

The next chart shows hits for the last 12 months. That spike in April was on the 7th and shows 13,498 hits.

This last chart shows traffic for all time, from the first day, from April 1, 2010 to the present. I have no idea what was going on from October 2016 through the end of 2017.