Phyllotaxis
the spirals are counted, not admired
Concept

Periodicity — where it appears

Whether a wrecked stem's displacements repeat at the lag it kept, judged by the worst spread within a residue class. The spread is proportional to how many organs are read, so the verdict is about a stretch of run rather than a window-free property of the stem.

Named by 3 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Also named here as reading window — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.

Each cut's class spread at three reading windows. The worst spread within a residue class, measured over the last 60, 120 and 180 organs of the same runs. A quantity that is steady with noise on it would give a flat line; a quantity drifting steadily along the run gives a line through the origin. Nearly every row gives the second, so the classes this thread calls steady are sliding slowly and the number that says how much depends on how much of the run is read. The dashed guide is exact proportionality.

A spread that grows with its window

A spread over a sample of a steady quantity does not depend on how big the sample is. These spreads triple when the window triples, on nearly every row of the census, which means the classes this thread calls steady are sliding — slowly, and invisibly at any single window.

mechanism · two windows Which cuts count as periodic, at each reading window. One row per wrecked cut and one column per window. A filled cell is a cut whose worst class spread is under the ten-degree line and is therefore called periodic. At 60 organs 28 of the 30 cuts are, at 120 organs 25, and at 180 organs 25. three rows change side, all of them losing their periodicity as the window widens, and they are marked.

The window nobody moved

Three instrument settings sit between the ablation census and every statement it makes. Two have been varied and both decided answers. The third is a hundred and twenty organs at the top of a run, it has never been moved, and moving it changes the verdict on three rows.

mechanism · two windows Where each window begins, against where the pattern begins. The run is drawn left to right, one bar per cut. The pale stretch is the disturbance still healing, up to the organ from which the profile holds its levels for the rest of the run; the dark stretch is the pattern repeating. The marks are the organ each of the three windows starts at, since a window is the last N organs of a run. On these rows the widest window starts inside the pale stretch, so it is reading the healing and calling it the pattern — which is why widening the window takes them off the periodic list.

Three rows a window moves

Three of the census's thirty cuts are periodic when a hundred and twenty organs are read and not when a hundred and eighty are. Their spreads do not grow in proportion to the window, they grow by twenty and forty times, and the reason is that a window is the tail of a run.

mechanism · two windows

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

ArtefactClaim testingDamage profileHonest limitsInstrument settingMeasurement errorReading windowResidue classOnsetAblationDriftNoise floor

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