https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/ Recent content in Arc 1 on The Approximate Mind Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US © 2026 Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-accumulation-period/ Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-accumulation-period/ <p><em>TAM-EAR.1-01 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind</em></p> <p>A king named Hāla ruled a stretch of the Deccan sometime around the first century, though the century is a guess and the scholarship has pushed it back and forth across several hundred years. The dynastic lists put him seventeenth in his line. One of them gives him five years on the throne. He fought no war that anyone bothered to remember, and what survives of him instead is an anthology and a nickname. The nickname was kavi-vatsala, which means something like the one who felt toward poets the way a parent feels toward children.</p> https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-vernacular-after-geography/ Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-vernacular-after-geography/ <p><em>TAM-EAR.1-02 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind</em></p> <p>Dante was banished from Florence in 1302 and never went back. Somewhere in the first few years after that, moving between the households of other men, he started a treatise about language. He planned four books. He finished one and part of another, and then the manuscript stops in the middle of a sentence in the fourteenth chapter of book two, and nobody has ever worked out why. It was lost for two centuries. It was written in Latin.</p> https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-standard-with-ears/ Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-standard-with-ears/ <p><em>TAM-EAR.1-03 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind</em></p> <p>In December of 1927 Zora Neale Hurston went to a penthouse on Park Avenue and signed a contract. The woman across the table was Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was seventy-three, rich by inheritance, and insisted on being called Godmother by the writers she funded. The terms were two hundred dollars a month, money for a car, and a camera. Hurston was named an independent agent, hired to seek out and collect the music, the poetry, the folklore, the hoodoo and conjure of Black communities in the American South.</p> https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-two-tempos/ Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://approximatemind.com/standard-with-ears/arc-01/the-two-tempos/ <p><em>TAM-EAR.1-04 · The Standard with Ears · The Approximate Mind</em></p> <p>In the autumn of 1879, a botanist at the State Agricultural College in Michigan walked out to a sandy knoll on the campus with twenty narrow-necked glass bottles. William James Beal filled each with damp sand and about a thousand seeds, drawn from a couple of dozen common local plants, and buried them twenty inches down in a row running east and west. He left them uncorked, mouths angled downward so water could not pool around the seeds. People who have handled them since say they look like whiskey flasks.</p>