The thread: Determined up to something — page 6
The quadrilateral that finds the middle
The harmonic conjugate is usually built from four points. Built instead from four lines — the dual construction, the same number of straightedge steps — it lands on the same fourth point to 1.2 × 10⁻¹⁵ of the range's own length, gives a cross-ratio of exactly −1, and refuses the midpoint, whose conjugate is at infinity.
Light and mirrorsHow many shadows determine the object
One lamp's shadow says only that a convex section lies inside a wedge 10.5 times its own area; four already cut that down to 1.17 times, and 128 close a convex section's boundary to 0.10 mm everywhere. The identical sweep on a section with a bite taken out of it stalls at 70.3 mm, 675 times worse, because an outline is the boundary of the smallest convex body with that shadow and no direction ever sees inside a concavity.
Light and mirrorsThe lamp and the floor cannot both be recovered
Every member of a one-parameter family of lamp-and-floor pairs draws the identical photograph to a fraction of a thousandth of a pixel — one member swings the lamp 90 cm and tilts the floor 4.3° and the picture does not move at all. A tape measure or a post of known height each pin the true member uniquely, and so does a wall known in advance to be square to the floor, whose angle to the recovered floor peaks at exactly 90° at μ = 1.000 and nowhere else; a receiver merely known to be parallel drifts thirteen times more weakly.
What survivesThe picture contains what is behind the camera
A pinhole maps a direction, and a line has one direction, so a point behind the eye lands on exactly the same mark as its reflection in front — here to 6.4e-14 pixels. The sign the division throws away is why cheirality is a fact supplied from outside the picture rather than measured in it.
Drawn confidentlyThe rule is exact for a floor that lengthens
The constant-ratio rule for spacing receding boards is an exact perspective — to the last digit, on the panel's own horizon — of a floor whose boards grow by the inverse of the ratio, 0.74 braccia deep at the front and 1.31 at the back on an eight-braccio pavement. The orthogonals agree with that floor. What says the tiles were meant to be square is a diagonal, which bends 8.1 pixels off straight where the reader's fitting test finds a sixth of one.