The Shape of Things

The two clocks on the east wall of Varga Clock Repair had kept the same time for thirty-one years, and nobody had ever asked them to.

Read the story Odd Sympathy, about 12 minutes. An illustration, not evidence: the key at the end says what it stands in for.

This site holds one idea about how things fail, and the stories, lines, evidence and stance that go with it, in separate lanes so that a metaphor never passes for a finding.

Nonfiction Cannabis Is Food Why Your Body Needs It Raw, Not Heated A plain-language translation of the Floyd and Benjamin preprints on what the endocannabinoid system is fed, with recipes. Its central claim is a hypothesis, and the book's A1C Challenge is an open observational study of it. Read it here, chapter by chapter Fiction Current Drift A near-contemporary novel aboard a research ship. Heat that will not rise from a rock on the sea floor survives every explanation meant to kill it, and the crew has to separate what one of them sees from what survives being doubted. Fiction: the data are invented. Read it here, chapter by chapter Fiction The Warden A Lagos story about two platforms that tell informal workers what they can be trusted to do. One grows fast with no one holding the gate. The other refuses to vouch for what it cannot see. Fiction: the names, figures and events are invented. Read it here, chapter by chapter

The map

Down the side, four ways to learn. Across the top, three subjects. A cell is empty when nothing honest belongs in it yet.

Lanes by threads. Empty cells are empty on purpose.
	Geometry	Human Health	Financial Inclusion
Mimetic	Slower to answer. Nobody could say where the bank would stop. Anyone with a shovel could say where it couldn't go. All 11 lines	You don't smoke it. You eat it. Most of the contradiction was in how the record was re-cited. All 6 lines	Authority at one scale is citizenship at the next. What survives into the record is set by whoever controls the channel. All 17 lines
Metaphoric	Current Drift Two Hundred Thousand Miles From a Second Opinion The Bottom Drawer Odd Sympathy A funnel, not a fence The notebook with the same four points Sensor, controller, restoring force The cat Why the stories and the science stay apart	The Golden Thread of Clarity Set-Point	The Warden A defensible claim carrying an indefensible signal A frame made of true things A right diagnosis can produce a harmful remedy Atmosphere is what evidence is planted into Conclusive to you is not evidence Identical in the record Legibility is not insurance Legibility works on a rumour by making it checkable No sensor, no reading, no defence Put it in front of the people with authority Satisfying answers are stopping rules Selection is an act The spec sheet clears the tool, not the operator The entry, and the number others could stand on The rule that refuses you when you are right Two marks that are not the same kind of object Two questions a source may ask a researcher Two ways to catch a pattern What the record covers, and what it does not What would have had to exist for this to be impossible? Where the loss lands, not where it is booked Witness statements that read as admissions
Scientific	Run a control that can embarrass you, and set it up before the data exist A clean retreat shows which claim carried the weight Credit does not transfer, and a conclusion needs its middle Design the test Possible is not explained Say where a result came from, including the part you added afterward Set the search criteria before you see the map Write the test down before you run the check, including what would sink you Schematic Taxonomy (26 entries) Erratum, 2026-11-06 Claims ledger (14 claims) Papers (2)	Cannabis Is Food Artemisinin and the cold recipe Claims ledger (9 claims) Papers (11)	Claims ledger (6 claims) Papers (1)
Metaphysical	Curiosity, the case with no model behind it Seeing and testing are different jobs, done in sequence Theorems	The Dance Is In Us	The organ was relieved, not removed The thing that swallows you Who Reads the Warden

Four ways in

Withdrawn 2026-11-06: the claim that a hinge announces itself with a scale-free cascade and falling recovery time; a fold with Gaussian fluctuation of rising variance. Read the erratum.

Why the lanes are kept apart.