survivor-census
Drawn at its defaults, in the hop a cut leaves standing. It takes no options at all, so every essay calling it gets this exact drawing.
Called by 6 essays
the blast radius of changing it
A period that is not a count
Eighteen wrecked stems settle into a block whose period is one of their own spiral counts, and one settles into a block of four on a lattice counted 8 and 13. The odd one is not noise. It is the case that shows what the rule is actually conserving, and it is the reason this thread is about lattice steps rather than about spirals.
Where the angle comes fromThe hop that survived
A stem that never repairs after an organ is removed settles into an exactly repeating block of angles, and the period of that block is a spiral count of the lattice it was cut from. Nobody could say why. Read the wrecked stem by lags rather than by neighbours and the answer is one line: one family of the original lattice is still standing, organ by organ, and the block is its period.
Where the angle comes fromOne turn per survivor
If a wrecked stem keeps one family of its old lattice exactly, then the angle it settles at is not free. Over the period of the family that survived, the pattern has to come back to where that family left it — which means the whole change in the divergence is a whole number of turns spread over a small whole number of organs. Measured, it is one turn, at seventeen of nineteen.
Where the angle comes fromThree organs and no mirror
A coarse stem cut of two organs can end up as its own mirror image — the same lattice wound the other way, counts unchanged, handedness reversed. Finer stems never do it, and two accounts of why were on the table: coarseness, or the share of the neighbourhood removed. A three-organ cut at the finer arrangements settles it, and the answer is the first.
Where the angle comes fromThe share was not the thing
Two organs out of a front of five reverses a stem's handedness; three out of eight does not, and neither does five out of eight, which is a larger share of a larger neighbourhood. The hypothesis under test was that the dose decides the destination. It decides whether a stem falls off its lattice and nothing about where it lands.
Where the angle comes fromA wreck has a short list
Cuts of one organ through five, over two hundred and forty-six stems that never came back, land on six settled divergences between them. Removing five organs instead of one wrecks nearly everything and reaches nowhere the single cut had not already found — and half the list turns out to be the old lattice slipped by a turn, while the other half is not the old lattice at all.