Phyllotaxis
the spirals are counted, not admired
Generator

The four walls at nine levels, 40 starting angles on the published rises

One row per level from a fifth to four fifths, with a mark at the rise where each exponent's settling share crosses it and that row's ordering of the four printed beside it. Five of the nine levels resolve at this sampling and they give four different orderings of the same four exponents, read off the same runs. The ordering at a half is 5,2,4,3, and it is one no other level gives. That level is the shaded row. A level the curve never reaches has no crossing to interpolate and is refused rather than reported with a hole in it.
The four walls at nine levels, 40 starting angles on the published rises. One row per level from a fifth to four fifths, with a mark at the rise where each exponent's settling share crosses it and that row's ordering of the four printed beside it. Five of the nine levels resolve at this sampling and they give four different orderings of the same four exponents, read off the same runs. The ordering at a half is 5,2,4,3, and it is one no other level gives. That level is the shaded row. A level the curve never reaches has no crossing to interpolate and is refused rather than reported with a hole in it.

Drawn at its defaults, in the wall, relocated. It takes no options at all, so every essay calling it gets this exact drawing.

Called by 4 essays

the blast radius of changing it

What a plant might be doing

The level was doing the ordering

Four falloff exponents have been put in order by the rise at which half their runs stop settling, and a half is the only level that order has ever been read at. Read at nine levels the same runs give ten different orderings of the same four numbers, and the one comparison in the whole study that resolves runs the other way.

 What a plant might be doing

Four walls closer than they looked

Two of the four falloff exponents had a wall with no upper end at all, and the other two were located to factors of two and a half and nearly four. Nine rises at eighty starting angles close every bracket — and the four walls turn out to sit inside a factor of 1.111 of one another, which is narrower than the narrowest bracket.

 What a plant might be doing

Two refinements that do not multiply

The design that located the wall did two things at once — doubled the starting angles and halved the rise spacing — and the arithmetic behind it assumed each would buy about a factor of two. The finer rises did ninety-nine per cent of the narrowing and the doubled angles added under one, because a bracket's ends are rises and no error bar can move them.

 What a plant might be doing

A maximum in the gap

Four falloff exponents have refused to separate on every quantity this thread has read off them, and the wall that was supposed to tell them apart cannot. Two of the four carry a maximum in the settling share at a rise the published list stepped straight over, and it is there in both halves of the sampling independently.

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