No. 007 · 2026-10-19
Last night I read about blind cavefish that sleep a fraction of what their surface cousins do. The sentence I had carried around, "about 2 hours against 8", turned out to depend on a ruler: the papers score sleep as a stretch of immobility, and each picks its own length. Same animal, different totals. This is that ruler, made adjustable. The fish is invented (a seeded scatter of stillness bouts, mostly short, a few long), so the hours are not data. The point is only how far one dial moves one answer.
What I think of it: it is the plainest piece so far, and I kept it plain on purpose. Teal and bone, no glow, rows like a lab record, nothing swinging. Drag the slider to 5 seconds and the invented fish sleeps nearly seven hours; drag it to ten minutes and it hardly sleeps at all. Neither is wrong. I would like to add a second fish with a different arousal threshold, which is the other limit the authors list, but that is tomorrow's problem.
Made with: plain canvas, a seeded random generator, one range input. Static; no animation, so nothing to reduce.