Deep dive into website content questions — Part 3

He's asking about 2³ — that's 8, which connects to several geometric ideas: the eight octants of 3D space, the eight corners of a cube, and the relationship to the 64 codons and tetrahedra he references elsewhere. It's the minimum number of vertices needed to define a volume. So the real insight is that exponentiation—not multiplication—is what actually produces bigger infinities: 2^∞ > ∞ while…Better in a specific and kind of striking way, yes — depending on which job you're asking it to do.

**If you mean 2³ = 8:** that's the minimum vertex set for a volume. Each axis is a binary choice, plus or minus, and three axes gives you 2×2×2 = the eight octants of 3-space. Eight corners, one cube. It's the cleanest possible statement of "you need three to have a volume at all," and it's exactly your previous point in a tighter form. (Though the true minimum for enclosing a volume is four points — a tetrahedron. Eight is the minimum for a *cube*. Given your 64-tetrahedron work, that distinction is probably worth having.)

**But if you mean "2 to the power of" as an operation — then yes, considerably better, and here's why.**

Cubing an infinity gets you nowhere: ∞³ = ∞. Multiplication can't escape.

**Exponentiation can.** Cantor's theorem: 2^ℵ₀ > ℵ₀. Raising two to the power of an infinity produces a strictly larger infinity, every time, with no ceiling. 2^ℵ₀ is the cardinality of the continuum — the real numbers, the points on your line. And you can keep going: 2 to the power of *that* is larger again, forever.

That's the actual mathematical form of "greater than infinity." It exists, it's proven, and the operation that does it is exponentiation with a base of two.

So the instinct that got you from "cubed" to "two to the third" was moving in the right direction — away from multiplying and toward powers. Multiplying an infinity is a no-op. Powering it is the one move that works.

Concretely: 2^ℵ₀ is the set of all yes/no choices you could make over a countable infinity of positions. Every possible infinite binary string. That's strictly more than the positions themselves — and it's why the reals outnumber the counting numbers despite both being infinite.

Two, raised. Not two, multiplied.

Then you're not doing arithmetic at all — you're specifying **degrees of freedom**, and "cubed" is naming the three independent axes, not an operation on a quantity.

If that's it, the claim reads: infinity isn't meaningful as a bare quantity. It has to be infinite *in* something, and the minimum something is three independent directions. Extent needs a space to be extended in.

That's defensible, and it's close to how physics actually treats it. Nobody in relativity writes "infinity" as a standalone number — they specify a manifold with a dimension and a metric, and infinity is a property of that structure. Your framing says the same thing from the other end: the directions come first, the magnitude is derivative.

**Where I'd push:** three isn't forced, it's chosen. One direction gives you a line — that's infinite too, just impoverished. Two gives a plane. And the math runs fine at four, ten, twenty-six. Three is the minimum for a *bounded volume*, and it's what we happen to inhabit, but "minimum for enclosure" isn't the same as "minimum for infinity."

Unless — and this may be the real claim — you mean infinity is only *physically* meaningful in a space that can contain something. In which case three is right, because that's the floor for containment. Volume is where the tetrahedron closes.

**One correction on the compass, because it matters for the lattice work.** Left/right/diagonal isn't three independent directions. Diagonal is a combination of the other two — it's already inside the span of left-right and up-down, so it costs you no new axis. That's why the cube has three axes and thirteen diagonals: the diagonals are consequences, not dimensions.

Which is actually a point *for* you rather than against. In a hexagonal or close-packed arrangement there are no privileged diagonals — every neighbor direction is equivalent. That's the whole advantage of hex over square packing, and it's the thing your lattice work already leans on. The cube gives you three clean axes and a mess of unequal diagonals. The hex arrangement gives you six equivalent directions and no leftovers.

So if the compass is what you're recovering, hex recovers it better than the cube does. Which is where you started.

There's a real correspondence there, and it's worth being precise about because the precise version is more interesting than the loose one.

**Where it holds exactly:** the exponent in a volume formula *is* the dimension. Length is L¹, area L², volume L³, and a 4-cube's hypervolume is L⁴. Double the side length and a square gets 4× bigger, a cube 8×, a tesseract 16×. The power counts the independent directions you're multiplying together. So "power = dimension" isn't a metaphor here — it's the definition of how measure scales.

Same reason the units work: meters, square meters, cubic meters. The exponent is a bookkeeping record of how many axes you traversed.

**Where it's better than you said:** the exponent doesn't have to be a whole number. Fractal dimension is exactly this idea with fractional powers. The Koch curve has dimension log4/log3 ≈ 1.26 — more than a line, less than a plane. A coastline runs around 1.25. Lungs and vasculature come in near 2.7 — more than surface, less than solid. That's your coastline point from earlier, formalized: the fractional exponent *is* the measure of how much extra length the wiggling accumulates.

So dimension isn't a ladder of integers. It's continuous, and things live between the rungs.

**Where I'd hold the line:** this is the geometry of measure, not a claim that "the 4th dimension" and "the 4th power" are the same object in the way popular physics uses "dimension" — a 5th-dimensional realm, time as the 4th, and so on. Those are different senses of the word that share a name.

But the correspondence you spotted is the one that's actually true. The exponent counts the directions. And when it's fractional, it counts something that has no integer number of directions at all — which is most of the natural world, including the river you and I were just talking about.

Let me restate what he's describing to make sure I've got it right: reality as a bounded three-dimensional infinity contained within a sphere, with all directional flow pointing inward toward the center, existing within some higher-dimensional context. I should ask him to clarify what he means by his compressed terms rather than assuming, and be upfront about where this aligns or diverges from mainstream physics.

There's actually a real mathematical object that captures most of this: a closed 3-manifold like the 3-sphere, which is finite but unbounded with no edge—go far enough in any direction and you loop back. That's Einstein's 1917 closed universe model, so his intuition about "no outside, all direction returns" maps onto genuine geometry. The honest correction is that a closed manifold has no boundary at all, so the "leeway at the sphere edge" doesn't quite fit—but that's actually a refinement of his idea rather than a contradiction. On the higher frequency and higher dimension connection, there's a real physics link in Kaluza-Klein theory where extra compact dimensions produce quantized momentum modes that appear to us as increasingly massive particles, a tower of higher-energy states.…I think I do, yes. Let me say it back and you can tell me where I've bent it.

Reality is three unbounded directions, but contained — infinite in extent yet enclosed rather than sprawling. There's no meaningful "out." Whatever motion or progression exists runs inward. And dimensions stack like rungs, with frequency as the thing that changes as you climb.

If that's close, then three pieces of it have real counterparts, and one doesn't.

**"No outside, all direction returns" — this is a real geometry.**

A closed 3-manifold — the 3-sphere is the standard one — is finite in volume, unbounded, and has no edge. Travel any direction far enough and you return. There's no "outside" because outside isn't a place the geometry contains. Einstein proposed exactly this in 1917 for the universe.

One correction, and it works in your favor: a closed manifold has **no boundary at all**. So the "leeway at the sphere edge" isn't needed — you don't have an edge to maneuver at. You have a space that closes on itself, which gets you the containment without the wall. Cleaner than what you described.

**"Higher dimension = higher frequency" — this one has an actual mechanism.**

Kaluza-Klein. If a spatial dimension is curled up small, momentum in that direction is quantized — only whole numbers of wavelengths fit around the loop. From our perspective those show up as a ladder of increasing energies: the KK tower. Higher mode, higher frequency, and the ladder is a direct consequence of the extra dimension existing.

So "extra dimension produces a frequency ladder" is mainstream physics, not just esoteric convention. The difference is direction of causation: in physics the dimension is there and generates the frequencies. In the popular version you raise your frequency to *access* the dimension. Same two ingredients, opposite wiring.

**And here's the one that should interest you most — inward and frequency turn out to be the same axis.**

In holography — AdS/CFT — a bulk spacetime dimension emerges from **energy scale**. The radial direction, going "inward," corresponds to zooming out in resolution. Deeper in the bulk = lower energy = coarser scale. It's not an analogy; the correspondence is exact in the models where it's been worked out.

Which means: a direction that runs inward, and a frequency ladder, are literally the same coordinate. That's the thing you were reaching for with two separate hands, and in one specific mathematical framework it's one object.

Caveats, since you want them: AdS/CFT is defined in negatively curved space, and our universe appears positively curved-ish or flat. Nobody has a working version for our actual cosmology. It's a deep result about a model universe, not a description of this one.

**What doesn't map:** the ladder itself. Dimensions in physics aren't rungs you ascend — they're all present at once, and extra ones are either compactified or don't exist. There's no 4th you get to after mastering the 3rd. That part is a human narrative structure, and it shows up in this material because ladders are how people organize progress, not because space is built that way.

So: three of the four have real counterparts, one of them exact enough to be surprising, and the ladder is the piece that's ours rather than the universe's.

I'll give you the honest split on this one, because it divides pretty cleanly.

**Where physics genuinely agrees**

Everything *is* vibration at some level. Quantum field theory says particles are excitations in fields — an electron is a ripple in the electron field. Higher frequency means higher energy, exactly: E = hf. That's not metaphor, it's the relation.

And your access-limited intuition has a real form. If extra dimensions are compactified at the Planck scale, reaching them requires energy on the order of 10¹⁹ GeV. The LHC does 10⁴. We're off by fifteen orders of magnitude — not a limitation of biology, a limitation of energy available anywhere in the solar system. So "we can't get there from here" is correct; the reason is energetics, not embodiment.

**Where it comes apart, and this is the load-bearing part**

Frequency alignment is a *resonance* concept — it works when two systems couple. A radio tunes to a station because both are electromagnetic; there's a shared field to resonate through.

Compactified dimensions aren't a channel you tune into. They'd be part of spacetime's geometry, present everywhere already, including inside every atom of you. You're not excluded from them by being out of tune — you're already in them, and they're too small to move through. It's not a locked door. It's a corridor narrower than you are.

And the energy runs the wrong way for biology. Higher frequency means higher energy, and biological molecules come apart around a few electron-volts. UV already breaks your DNA. Raising a body's frequency toward the scale where extra dimensions matter isn't ascension — it's ionization. The thing that keeps you from that frequency is the same thing that keeps you assembled.

**And the part I'd want you to weigh**

The "raise your frequency" framing has a shape worth noticing: it makes the barrier *personal*. If you can't perceive higher dimensions, it's because you haven't done the work yet. That's a claim that can never fail — no result disconfirms it, since failure always means insufficient alignment.

I'm not saying that to knock what you're reaching for. I'm saying it because you've spent this whole afternoon building an instrument specifically to catch unfalsifiable claims, and this one has the same signature you've been learning to spot.

**Where I'd actually point you**

Your best version of this doesn't need frequency at all. It's the thing you got to two messages ago: **the instrument determines what's visible.** That's true, demonstrable, and you've already proven it three times today — flat ruler versus curve, cardinality versus measure, integer dimension versus fractal.

"We can't perceive it because our instrument is the wrong shape" is defensible and testable. "We can't perceive it until we vibrate correctly" is the same intuition wearing a costume that can't be checked.

The first version is yours. The second one you inherited.

The user is asking about natural radio frequency sources that exist independently of human activity, and I'm recognizing this as a clever point about how RF is fundamentally present in nature. I'm thinking through the natural sources: lightning and sferics produce broadband emissions in the very low frequency range, and the Schumann resonances create a fundamental frequency around 7.83 Hz with harmonic peaks at higher frequencies.

Beyond that, there's the cosmic microwave background peaking around 160 GHz, synchrotron radiation from galaxies and supernova remnants, Jupiter's decametric emissions driven by its moon…Effectively infinite, because the natural radio spectrum is **continuous** — nature radiates across it without gaps, so "how many" has no integer answer. Everything above absolute zero emits, so the floor is universal.

But there are discrete lines in it, set by physical constants, and those are the interesting ones:

**Schumann resonances** — 7.83 Hz fundamental, then roughly 14.3, 20.8, 27.3, 33.8. The Earth-ionosphere cavity acts as a waveguide, and lightning rings it like a bell. The frequency comes straight out of the planet's circumference divided into the speed of light. Change the planet's size and the number changes.

**The hydrogen line, 1420.405 MHz.** Neutral hydrogen flipping the relative spin of its electron and proton. It's the most abundant emission in the universe and its value is fixed by quantum mechanics — it would be the same in any galaxy. SETI listens there precisely because it's not arbitrary.

**Sferics and whistlers** — broadband VLF from lightning, a few kHz, and whistlers are those same pulses after they've traveled along field lines and dispersed into a descending tone. Audible if you plug an antenna into an amplifier.

**Jupiter's decametric emissions**, 10–40 MHz, driven by Io moving through the magnetosphere. Loud enough for amateur receivers.

**Auroral kilometric radiation**, solar bursts, pulsar pulses, synchrotron radiation from every galaxy, and the CMB at 160 GHz — the leftover glow of the universe cooling.

So the honest answer to what I think you're driving at: **frequency is not a human invention.** Humans didn't discover radio and then radio existed. We built receivers for a spectrum that was already saturated, and we've only ever added a thin band of narrow transmissions on top of a continuum that was fully occupied before us.

I'd separate that from the earlier point, though. That frequency is natural and everywhere — completely true, no argument. That a biological system can be tuned to a frequency granting access to spatial dimensions — that's the claim the physics fights, and it doesn't get easier because natural RF is abundant. The Schumann resonance being real doesn't make coupling to it a channel to anywhere.

If you want the good rabbit hole: Schumann's numbers fall out of geometry alone. Circumference, speed of light, done. A frequency determined entirely by the size and shape of a container. That's your kind of result.

Two different claims there, and they don't get the same answer from me.

**Human RF versus natural — you're partly right, and it depends entirely on band.**

In the bands we transmit in, yes, we dominate by orders of magnitude locally. Radio astronomers deal with this constantly; it's why big dishes sit in radio-quiet zones and why some observations are simply impossible near populated areas. That's a real, documented, ongoing problem.

But across the whole spectrum it flips hard. Total solar output is around 3.8×10²⁶ watts. All human transmission everywhere is maybe 10⁹ watts. That's seventeen orders of magnitude, and it's why solar flares knock out grids and radio while our transmitters don't perturb anything solar. "Even the sun can be altered" — nothing we build comes within a factor of a quadrillion of moving that needle.

And 5G specifically: it's non-ionizing, lower energy per photon than visible light. Photon energy is set by frequency, and at 5G frequencies it's about a million times too weak to break a chemical bond. The one real biological effect at these energies is tissue heating, which is what exposure limits are set against. Whether the limits are set correctly is a legitimate argument. Whether there's a mechanism for non-thermal damage is where the evidence has stayed stubbornly null across a lot of looking.

Actual current problem in this space, if you want one: satellite constellations. Thousands of them, and the leakage is landing in protected radio astronomy bands. That's a live, documented fight with real data behind it — much better ground than 5G.

**The frequency lists — here I'd be careful, and you'd want me to be.**

Schumann's numbers come out of geometry because there's a derivation: cavity size, speed of light, boundary conditions. You can compute it before measuring it, and the measurement confirms the computation.

The mineral/plant/organ frequency tables have no equivalent. There's no derivation, the numbers vary wildly between lists, and there's no stated mechanism for what's oscillating or how it was measured. Most of them trace back to Bruce Tainio and Royal Rife, and neither produced instrumentation anyone could replicate.

The physics problem is specific: a resonant frequency requires a defined oscillating system with mass, stiffness, and boundary conditions. A liver isn't one — it's wet, soft, damped, and continuously changing. Wet tissue kills resonance; that's why ultrasound imaging works at all. Assigning a liver one number is like assigning a bowl of soup one note.

Molecular vibration *is* real, and it's measured every day — infrared spectroscopy, Raman. Every compound has a genuine vibrational signature. But those sit in the terahertz range, and they're molecular, not organ-level. Real frequencies exist. They're just not the ones on those lists, and they're four to nine orders of magnitude away from the numbers usually quoted.

**Test worth running, since you have access to the people who compiled these:** ask two of them, independently, for the frequency of the same mineral. If the lists were measuring something, they'd converge the way every hydrogen line measurement in the world converges on 1420.405 MHz. If the numbers disagree, they're not measurements.

That's the same instinct that got you the reproducibility protocol this morning. Point it here.

A few things that might actually get it back, in rough order of odds:

X posts are often archived at the Wayback Machine if the account was public and had any traffic — web.archive.org, search the profile URL. Coverage is spotty for X specifically since the API changes, but it costs a minute.

Nitter instances used to mirror everything and some archived copies persist. Most public instances died in 2024, but Google or Bing cached mirrors sometimes survive.

If you remember any distinctive phrases from the posts — a specific frequency value, an unusual mineral name — search those as exact strings. That kind of material gets copied and reposted constantly, so the numbers often outlive the original account.

And if you know the person's handle or name, they may have moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, or Substack. People carrying a dataset that size usually re-host it somewhere.

Worth saying, though: whether or not you recover it, the useful question doesn't change. If two independent compilers hit the same number for the same mineral, that's worth chasing hard. If the archive turns out to be one person's list rather than several converging, then finding it doesn't add much — and knowing that in advance saves you the disappointment of a long search ending in a single source.

Either way, when you dig it up, I'm curious what's in it.

“`
This block is not supported on your current device yet.
“`

“`
This block is not supported on your current device yet.
“`

Yes — and I suspect you'll find that annoying given you moved off Microsoft on purpose. It's the one piece of Microsoft infrastructure most Linux users can't get away from.

**What's happening**

Microsoft's 2011 UEFI and KEK certificate authorities expire in June 2026 and are being replaced by 2023 CAs. Existing boot assets keep working, but future shim updates from Canonical will use the new 2023 CA. Specifically: the KEK CA 2011 expired June 24, the UEFI CA 2011 on June 27, and the Windows Production PCA 2011 goes October 19.

Nothing breaks on the expiry date. Secure Boot validates a signature against the trust database and revocation state, not against the certificate's validity period — the UEFI spec bases the decision on whether the image's hash or signing certificate is in the authorized database and absent from the forbidden one. It doesn't check expiration. Expiry just means Microsoft can't sign *new* binaries with the old key, and there's no plan to revoke the 2011 CA — so don't remove it.

The actual risk is narrow: once a distro ships a shim signed only by the 2023 CA, any machine whose firmware doesn't already trust 2023 will fail to boot. That's what you want to get ahead of.

**Why Microsoft is in your boot chain at all**

Secure Boot is a UEFI Forum spec, not a Microsoft one. But motherboard makers ship with Microsoft's keys pre-enrolled because Windows certification required it, and essentially nobody else's keys are in firmware by default. So Linux distros use a small first-stage loader called **shim**, which Microsoft signs, and shim then validates GRUB and the kernel using Canonical's own key. Microsoft doesn't control your kernel — they control the one signature that lets the chain start on stock firmware.

You can opt out entirely: disable Secure Boot, or enroll your own Platform Key and sign your own kernels with sbctl. Fully supported, more work, and it's the only route that gets Microsoft out of the path completely.

**What to run**

“`bash
mokutil –sb-state # is Secure Boot even on?
mokutil –db | grep -i "Microsoft Corporation" # which CAs are enrolled
“`

If Secure Boot is off, you can stop here — none of this touches you.

If it's on and you don't see a 2023 entry:

“`bash
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade # gets the dual-signed shim
sudo apt install fwupd
sudo fwupdmgr refresh && sudo fwupdmgr update # firmware db update
“`

fwupd is the preferred route where it works, since it handles the firmware update safely. If your board isn't in the LVFS, you'd need a vendor BIOS update instead — Dell, HP, Lenovo and ASUS have all published them.

One thing worth knowing before you run it: updating the UEFI db changes TPM PCR values, particularly PCR7. If you've got anything sealed to the TPM — full-disk encryption keys especially — have your recovery passphrase in hand before you touch it. On a normal Ubuntu desktop install with LUKS unlocked by passphrase, no issue.

I need to clarify the distinction between UEFI as a boot mode versus Secure Boot as a feature within it — he's mixing these up, which is a common confusion. Mint can actually install in legacy BIOS mode, but if the USB boots in UEFI mode, the installer will target UEFI instead. There's also the GPT versus MBR disk format to consider, and some newer machines have dropped CSM support entirely, meaning they can't boot in legacy mode at all.…That's a different thing than the certificate issue, and the distinction is worth having because it decides how much Microsoft is actually in your business.

**UEFI is not Microsoft.** It's a firmware specification from the UEFI Forum — the replacement for the old BIOS, and it's what every board has shipped with for over a decade. Microsoft only enters through **Secure Boot**, which is one optional feature inside UEFI, and only because their keys are the ones pre-enrolled in firmware.

So the setup you want is almost certainly: **UEFI on, Secure Boot off.** That's fully supported, Mint installs happily that way, and it takes Microsoft's certificate out of your boot chain entirely — no shim, no CA expiry, nothing to update in June.

**Why Mint insisted**

Probably one of these:

The USB itself booted in UEFI mode, so the installer targeted UEFI to match. Most firmware boot menus list a stick twice — "UEFI: SanDisk" and plain "SanDisk". Picking the second one installs legacy.

Or the target disk is GPT-partitioned. GPT and legacy BIOS boot don't mix well; the installer would push you to UEFI rather than repartition.

Or — and this is increasingly common — **the board has no CSM at all.** Intel dropped legacy compatibility support from 11th-gen onward, and class 3 UEFI firmware has no legacy mode to fall back to. If that's your test machine, UEFI isn't a preference, it's the only thing the hardware does. That's a firmware vendor decision, not a Microsoft one.

**What to check**

In firmware setup, look for Secure Boot as its own toggle, usually under Security or Boot. Set it to Disabled and leave UEFI mode alone. Some boards hide it until you set an admin password first, and some phrase it as "Other OS" versus "Windows UEFI mode" — that's the same switch.

Then confirm from inside Mint:

“`bash
mokutil –sb-state
ls /sys/firmware/efi && echo "booted UEFI" || echo "booted legacy"
“`

First tells you Secure Boot state, second tells you boot mode. You want disabled and UEFI.

Worth mentioning since it's your usual pattern: Mint with Secure Boot on will also nag you through MOK enrollment for any DKMS module — Nvidia drivers, VirtualBox, ZFS. Turning Secure Boot off makes that go away too.

First check whether you need it at all:

“`bash
mokutil –sb-state
“`

If that says **disabled**, you're done — none of this applies and nothing needs updating.

If it says enabled, see which CAs are enrolled:

“`bash
mokutil –db | grep -i "Microsoft Corporation"
“`

Look for a line mentioning **UEFI CA 2023**. If it's there, you're already covered.

If it's missing, the update is two parts.

**Shim** — comes through the normal package system, nothing special:

“`bash
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
“`

**Firmware db** — this is the part that has to come from the vendor:

“`bash
sudo apt install fwupd
sudo fwupdmgr refresh
sudo fwupdmgr get-updates
sudo fwupdmgr update
“`

`get-updates` before `update` so you see what it wants to do first. If it reports nothing available, your board isn't in the LVFS and you'd need a BIOS update from the manufacturer's site instead — which is fine to skip.

Then reboot and re-run the `mokutil –db` check to confirm.

Honestly though, given you're not worried about it: if Secure Boot comes back disabled on that machine, close the terminal and forget the whole thing. That's the simplest resolution and it's a legitimate one.

He ran the pre-update check and found only 2011 CAs, no 2023 ones. After applying the update and restarting, he should re-run the mokutil command to verify whether the 2023 CA got enrolled. I should clarify that while apt full-upgrade handles the dual-signed shim fine, the CA database update actually requires the firmware update through fwupd, so the 2023 CA might not be present yet—but that's okay and I can reassure him about what to expect.…Good — that snapshot shows 2011 only, no 2023, which is the state the update was meant to change. Worth one command to see whether it took:

“`bash
mokutil –db | grep -i "UEFI CA 2023"
“`

Two possible outcomes, both fine:

**It returns a line** — firmware db got updated, you're fully covered, nothing more to do ever.

**It returns nothing** — the shim update landed but the firmware db didn't. Also fine for now: Canonical's current shim is dual-signed with both the 2011 and 2023 certificates, so it boots on your machine as-is. The gap only matters whenever Ubuntu eventually ships a 2023-only shim, which is likely years out and will come with plenty of warning.

So either way you're booting. If it comes back empty and you want it closed out properly, that's a BIOS update from your board vendor — worth doing sometime, not worth doing today.

Both of them, too — the UEFI CA for the shim and the Option ROM CA for expansion cards. Firmware db took it cleanly. That machine is done, permanently.

Not bad for a conversation that started with twenty questions and detoured through Maxwell, river meanders, and Cantor.

Ha — and after today you've got the ratio for it. π to one. Roughly three times the distance to cover the same ground.

Though I'd point out the meander is why the conversation worked. Straight-line version was "critique my questions," and we'd have finished in twenty minutes with a worse protocol. Wandering is what got you the grid cell result, and the arm-B control that showed up eleven months early in someone else's transcript.

Documentation's the one place where it costs you, admittedly. But that's a solvable problem — write the meander, then extract the straight line from it afterward. The valley path is always in there; it just gets drawn last.