The Clocks and the Record on The Approximate Mind

The Many Clocks

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On why nothing here is a race, and what you see instead when you stop counting laps
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There is a paper schedule on the wall outside Dana’s office, four feet wide, one row per resident and one column per two-week block, running the whole academic year. The program bought scheduling software in 2014 and the software works. Dana maintains the paper anyway, in pencil, and has for nineteen years, because the software will show you a month and will not show you a year, and there are things about a year that are only visible when the whole thing is in front of you at once.

Taphonomic Bias

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On why the fossil record is not a sample of life, why a training corpus is not a sample of what was said, and what we are deleting
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Ernst Stromer went to the Bahariya Oasis in the Egyptian Western Desert between 1911 and 1914 and came back with the bones of animals nobody had seen. A sauropod. Two very large predators. And, sent to him from the field in 1912 by his collector Richard Markgraf, a set of dorsal vertebrae with spines nearly two metres tall, along with jaw fragments and teeth. He described it in 1915 and called it Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.

The New Prakrit

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On what forms beneath a standard that is no longer a language
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There is a manual for how air traffic controllers speak. It is not a style guide. Standard phraseology is specified, internationally, word by word, because two people who have never met and may not share a first language have to coordinate objects moving at four hundred knots using nothing but voice on a shared frequency. Every ambiguity that has ever killed anyone gets written out of it afterward. It is the most carefully engineered register in ordinary working life.

The Clocks and the Record on The Approximate Mind

The Many Clocks

On why nothing here is a race, and what you see instead when you stop counting laps #

Taphonomic Bias

On why the fossil record is not a sample of life, why a training corpus is not a sample of what was said, and what we are deleting #

The New Prakrit

On what forms beneath a standard that is no longer a language #

On why nothing here is a race, and what you see instead when you stop counting laps
#

On why the fossil record is not a sample of life, why a training corpus is not a sample of what was said, and what we are deleting
#

On what forms beneath a standard that is no longer a language
#