The slide rule

A map of the ERCOT interconnection drawn in one ink on limestone, with a slide rule laid across it: the four days of May are the rule's giant graduations, every session is a tick, the cursor prints coordinates, and the mind answers by drawing pins on the map.

The story

The venue is not announced, so the city and the grid are the venue. Texas runs the only interconnection in the lower 48 that is its own country: 90 percent of the state's load, severed from the Eastern and Western grids except for five DC ties. That severed organism is already a map, and an energy executive recognises it in a second. The site treats the whole summit as one technical document, sheet 01 of a set: a Lambert conic drawing of the state in a single ink, the ERCOT territory washed at 6 percent, the 345 kV backbone as the heaviest line on the sheet between real cities and plants (Comanche Peak, the South Texas Project, Fayette, the Panhandle wind collector at Pampa), the state boundary as a thin line beneath it, and the DC ties to SPP, MISO and CFE drawn as stubs with cut marks and their real ratings. The grid reads before the silhouette does. Across the lower third lies the rule itself: a solid granite band carrying 3, 4, 5 and 6 knocked out of the ink and standing whole on the rule, with hour ticks and session ticks along its top edge and a cursor whose chip reads "Mon 3 · 09:15 · ETS Opening Remarks" at rest. The map's geometry continues through the band in reverse at 20 percent, as if the rule were a transparent cursor laid on the sheet; its labels stop at the band's edge, so the rule's own words always sit on solid ink.

The facts live in the corners, as a drawing's do: ETS27 with FREE YOUR MIND as the sheet's title top left; the dates, the city, a live countdown and the price top right, so the first screen keeps a price even with a consent strip across its foot; a title block (sheet 01, subject, drawn with its revision, venue) bottom left; Tickets bottom right. The right-hand column is the field notes: a composer that is a hairline with a caret carrying the question that was asked, "who speaks tuesday", two more verbs, and the answer directly beneath it, composed and numbered, "01 · Who's speaking Tuesday", whose six Texas-based speakers are pinned to the map with hairlines running from each row to its city, Igloo-style. Every map label wears a paper halo and is printed above the hairlines, so an answer drawn across the sheet never strikes through a city.

Scrolling slides the rule to the top of the page, where it shrinks to a 64 px instrument that keeps the day labels, the ticks, a cursor that lives in the tick strip and a "now on the rule" readout of the session nearest the reading line; off the agenda the cursor parks, at rest above it and at "end of the rule" below it. Below the fold the sheet continues: the theme set three words tall; an editions ruler of fourteen summits on a broken axis, so the five named editions each get a column; the lineup as a ledger of 77 portraits printed in one ink through a posterising filter, with its own small rule in the left column (speakers per day drawn as graduations; pick a day and its speakers print in full ink while the cursor moves to that day); the agenda as four vertical rules with sessions as graduations; tickets as four prices on one scale; and a schematic of downtown Austin with the unconfirmed Eventbrite pin drawn dashed, Lady Bird Lake as a 6 percent wash and the bats under the Congress Avenue bridge. The footer exposes the state lab-notebook style.

Typography

One family: Martian Mono (Google Fonts, variable, wdth 75–112, wght 100–800). It is the one monospace that works as display, and a mono is a decision when it is the single face of a vernacular object. Three sizes only:

• Display: 200 px (the theme words, the agenda day numerals) and 147 px on the rule (78 percent of the band, so the numerals stand whole with clear paper below them), weight 800, width 112, line-height 0.85, letter-spacing −0.025 em to −0.04 em. Ratio to text 13:1.
• Text: 15 px, weight 400, width 100, line-height 1.5. Names at weight 700, session titles at 600. The sheet's title, FREE YOUR MIND, sits under ETS27 at text size, weight 700, width 112. The mind's "say" line is the same family on a different axis: width 84, weight 300.
• Labels and readouts: 10.5 px, weight 500, width 112, tracked +0.08 em, uppercase, tabular numerals.

The instrument never truncates. The cursor chip, the stuck readout and the answer rows print each session's short title (the words before its colon or dash, with the breakout letter kept, so "Breakout A: From Firewalls to Frequency"), and the full title stays in the agenda and in the row's hover title. Agenda type labels are single words (Opening, Documentary, Break, Reception) so they never run into a title.

On the phone: 112 px display, 14 px text, 10 px labels, 60 px numerals on the rule. Weight and width carry the hierarchy; nothing is italic, nothing is a second face.

Colour world (hex)

• Limestone paper: #EDE8DC, flat, no texture. The material is the drawing's, not the paper's.
• Sunset Red granite ink: #A84B3E, one ink. Type, the backbone and the band print at 100 percent; the state boundary and the secondary labels at about 55 percent; section rules at 40 percent; row hairlines at 12 percent; the ERCOT wash and the lake at 6 percent. The band knocks the type out in paper, and the reversed map inside it is geometry only, at 20 percent paper.
• Nothing else. The ERCOT grid-conditions colours, the track colour hints in the data and the Black Marble palette were all considered and rejected: one ink is the point of a drawing. Portraits are posterised to five steps between ink and paper by an SVG filter, so the lineup is printed in the same ink as the map; the 19 speakers without a portrait (including Whova's monogram placeholder) are hatched.

Layout grammar

A technical sheet. The first screen is 100 vh split 66.7 / 21 / 12.3: the drawing with corner facts and the notes column, the rule, the bottom strip with the title block, the slide verb, the readouts and Tickets. The map is placed absolutely at 85 vh tall so it runs under the band and into the strip. It is one drawing printed three times from the same SVG: the geometry, the labels with paper halos above the answer hairlines, and the reversed geometry inside the band. Latitude labels sit on the sheet's left margin and longitude labels along its top edge, as a drawing's graticule does; the Western and Eastern interconnection names run down the margins outside the hairline corridor, and every label clears the notes column by at least 40 px.

Below the fold a 12-column grid with a 40 px gutter; each section carries its number and state in the label position ("03 · The lineup · sample data"). Rules replace cards everywhere: the editions rule (broken after 2022 with a cut mark), the lineup's day rule, the day rules with sessions as ticks, the price rule, the composer rule. The lineup's intro column is sticky, so the left third of the ledger is never bare paper. The only boxes are the title block and the 1 px portrait stamps, both borrowed from drawings and ledgers.

The phone keeps the sheet: the map sized to the screen's width with the big cities only, the band at 84 px with whole numerals, a two-row bottom strip, then the notes and the sections stacked. The composer's instruction sets on two lines, the two verbs on one, and each answer row wraps to name and organisation, then time and short title. The price rule becomes a two-by-two list; the editions rule becomes one line. Portraits are fetched once the sheet is drawn, so the ledger prints on every device rather than only where it has been scrolled.

Motion and life

• The ink is laid down once: the state outline and the corridors draw themselves over 2.4 s (stroke-dashoffset, CSS only), the boundaries and labels fade in behind them; at rest nothing moves except the caret, the slide arrow and the countdown.
• The countdown is a real T−DDD:HH:MM:SS to the opening remarks (2027-05-03 09:15 CDT).
• The cursor prints coordinates: moving over the drawing inverts the Lambert projection and the "Pos" readout prints 30°16′N 97°44′W plus the nearest node's full name.
• The runner slides along the rule to the session nearest the reading line as you scroll the agenda; off the agenda it parks (rest above, end of the rule below, a picked lineup day in between); clicking a day on the rule scrolls to it.
• The band becomes stuck at the top and shrinks from 189 px to 64 px with a 450 ms ease. Once stuck, the cursor lives in the tick strip and the day dividers stop above the readout, so nothing crosses the rule's words; at rest in the hero the cursor's hairline breaks at the day labels, and its chip reads on whichever side does not print over a numeral.
• An answer is drawn: the runner ticks for 700 ms, then the new section appears with a 120 ms stagger per row and the pins and hairlines fade onto the map. Nothing loops; "thinking" is the instrument moving.
• Motion · on/off is a control in the footer chrome, and prefers-reduced-motion gets the final frame of everything.

The fork and the mind

The fork is two verbs printed on the sheet, weighted differently. "Slide ↓ read in order" sits in the bottom strip with a nudging hairline arrow: the standard route is the sheet read top to bottom, with the stuck rule as the only navigation (day labels, ticks, a six-word jump list). "Type → ask the rule, it draws the answer on the map" sits at the head of the notes column over a hairline with a caret. The line carries the question that was asked, "who speaks tuesday", and the answer sits directly beneath it as 01, so the composer proves itself in the first frame; two more verbs follow the line ("or what does a pass cost · where is it"). No box, no pill, no send button and no Enter label: Enter is implied by the rule.

The mind manifests as drawing, never as a face: an answer is a numbered section in the page's own grid, with the question as its heading in sentence case, a 35-word say line on a narrower axis of the same family, rows that inherit the page's type, and a footnote naming the source. Its material is the map and the rule: Tuesday's Texas-based speakers become pins at their organisations' cities with hairlines to their rows; "where is it" drops a dashed ring on the unconfirmed address; "what does a pass cost" draws a miniature price rule inside the answer. Older answers collapse to their headings and stay, so the thread reads as a table of contents, not a transcript. On the standard route the same rule is omnipresent: the composer stays at the top of the sheet and the stuck band carries "↑ Ask" at its right end. The mockup answers three questions; a typed question outside them says so honestly.

What to build next

1. Wire the composer to the mind with the component catalogue: pins, hairlines, rows, mini-rules and runner positions as the only vocabulary the model may choose from, so every answer stays a drawing.
2. Replace the approximate ERCOT boundary and backbone with the real transmission geometry (ERCOT's public GIS or the EIA transmission layer) and bake a daily grid snapshot (frequency, load, fuel mix) for the readouts.
3. Give the rule real hover: a tick shows its session title and the runner can be dragged to a time; the day blocks become the standard agenda pages with cross-document view transitions carrying the band.
4. Lineup cards on tap, in the same ink, with the portrait un-posterised on hover as the one moment of photography.
5. Speaker geocoding from organisation records so the Tuesday pins come from data, not a hand-made table; off-map speakers get edge arrows with distances.
6. The venue reticle: when the venue is announced, the dashed ring becomes solid and the Austin inset grows into a real site plan.
7. Serve 80 px portrait thumbnails. The mockup fetches the 59 Whova originals (about 6.9 MB) after load so the ledger prints everywhere; a build must not.
8. A per-height variant of the notes column for 1440×800 laptops (see known gaps).

Risks

• A LIDO clone: the cure is in place (a real state and grid instead of a festival ground, the numerals as the hero, the rule as the agenda, answers drawn onto the drawing), but the instrument readouts, the day ruler and the countdown in the top-right corner are a shared vocabulary.
• A map with pins: the pins exist only as answers, there are no icons, tooltips or embeds, and the base drawing must stay a document (graticule on the margins, title block, cut marks, halos) rather than a product map.
• The silhouette: Texas is still the largest shape on the first screen. Weighting the backbone over the boundary makes the grid read first; the next round could print the boundary dashed, as a drawing prints a political line.
• One ink at 4.6:1 is the floor of readable contrast for 15 px text; on a bad hotel projector the labels at 10.5 px will go first. If it fails in testing, the text ink deepens to #8F3D31 while the drawing keeps #A84B3E, which is still one ink at two coverages.
• Geographic accuracy: the ERCOT boundary is drawn from territory knowledge and labelled approximate; an ERCOT engineer will check it in the first ten seconds, so step 2 above is not optional before the site is public.

Revision B · 2026-10-15

Round one of the jury (three jurors, scored from pixels) held the idea at shortlist and the finish below it. Revision A, the version they scored, is kept unchanged in v1/ (page, document and renders).

Taken:

• One drawing, three printings: labels with paper halos above the answer hairlines, geometry only (20 percent) through the band. The ghost labels that printed over the Tuesday and Wednesday captions are gone, and a collision pass moved Fort Worth, Tyler, San Angelo, New Braunfels, the E DC tie and the load zones; Longview and Beaumont are labelled by their grids (SPP, MISO) with full names in the cursor readout. Measured label collisions at 1440×900 went from eight to none.
• The backbone at 1.9 and full ink over a 55 percent boundary, so the first second reads a grid before a state.
• The theme in the top-left lockup; the price under the countdown; the title block and the colophon agree (drawn 2026-10-15, rev B, sheet 01).
• The rule's numerals whole; the cursor kept out of its own words (tick strip when stuck, broken at the day labels at rest); short titles instead of every ellipsis; a cursor that parks off the agenda.
• The composer line carries the asked question with 01 beneath it; the Enter label and the DDD:HH:MM:SS caption, both terminal notation, are gone.
• The lineup's sticky day rule and filter; the monogram fallback hatched; the editions ruler on a broken axis; one-word agenda type labels; the place schematic with halos, a lake wash, the bridge and I-35 moved to the margin; a base line restored under the editions and price rules.
• The phone: no horizontal scroll (the map itself was 22 px too wide), the instruction and rows wrap, portraits print.

Not taken, and why:

• Folding all three questions into the sheet and leaving the composer as a hairline and caret alone: the jurors split, and this document and the synthesis both keep visible verbs on the rule as the mind's entry. The line now carries the asked question and the verbs drop to two.
• Moving "Slide ↓" into the band: the band's left end already carries the day label, the cursor chip and the day summary. The price, the fact a consent strip would hide, was duplicated top right instead.
• A full-width tempo break at row 40: the ledger is two flowing columns and a break would split them arbitrarily; the sticky day rule changes the lineup's tempo instead.
• A paper texture: the limestone stays flat, a stated decision.
• Dropping the load-zone names: they are ERCOT's own vocabulary and now sit haloed and clear at 42 percent.
• Moving the phone composer above the readouts: it already lands inside the first phone screen.

Known gaps

• At 1440×800 the notes column is 60 px short and scrolls inside itself, so the last answer row and the footnote sit below its edge while their hairline still points at them. At 1440×900 it fits to the pixel.
• The ERCOT boundary and backbone are approximate (unchanged from revision A).
• The portraits are full-size originals fetched after load (about 6.9 MB); thumbnails are a build task.