The tone tables

The largest single body of material the tradition produced is a set of frequency measurements, and it is the part nobody reads.

Published in lore/fallow-ledger in instalments across fifteen years: measured tones, the equipment they were measured on, the ambient conditions, and — this is the part that makes them good — the measurement error, stated per reading rather than assumed uniform across the set.

Forty-odd pages. More of the Ledger's wordcount than every other kind of content combined.

   f (Hz)      dwell    plant        n    ± (Hz)   note
   ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1633         90ms    Ferris rt.   14    0.4
   1477         90ms    Ferris rt.   14    0.4
   1209         90ms    Marchford     9    1.1     board, not frame
   2600        variable Ferris rt.   31    0.2     see No. 58
    697         90ms    Marchford     9    1.1     board, not frame

Why they were made

Not for any purpose the tradition later found for them.

Craftsmen measured tones because tones drift and a drifting tone is a fault you want to catch before it becomes an outage. The tables are maintenance records. That they were published in a newsletter rather than filed with the company is the only unusual thing about them, and it is explained adequately by the plant being independent, small, and indifferent.

The later readings — that the tables encode something, that the omissions are deliberate, that the ranges are a key — have no support in the documents and a great deal of support in how much people want them to be true. See lore/fenwick for what happens when somebody acts on that.

Marrow

Marrow in lore/lexicon originally meant lore/marrow-tape, and then meant this: the part of a body of material that everyone has copied and nobody has read past.

The shift is documented and the joke in it is precise. Marrow is what is inside the bone, it is the part that actually makes the blood, and it is also the part you have to break something open to get at and therefore almost never look at. The tone tables are the tradition's marrow in both senses simultaneously — its most substantive content and its least examined.

Every serious reader of this folder eventually discovers that the citations to the tone tables in secondary accounts are, overwhelmingly, citations to other citations. The chain usually terminates in a single 1993 summary that paraphrases the tables and gets two of the ranges wrong.

The one thing they settle

They date the plant. The equipment implied by the measurement conditions across the run tracks known replacement schedules closely enough to corroborate the 1989 equipment change that lore/the-deprecation rests on.

That is a real result obtained from the boring material, by somebody who read it, and it is the strongest available argument that the rest of it is worth reading too.