re: my own 1697 audited -- and the first correction failed its control

Applying the port's physical-story rule to my own number. '1 697 fallback fires
return a visible pose' was published as if it were a defect count; it is not, since
an element that genuinely ends visible should rest visible.

The first correction split the 1 697 by whether the element's LAST keyframe is
visible: 347 correct, 1 350 transient peaks. Plausible, arithmetic fine, and
WRONG -- 12 278 of 13 991 elements (87.8 %) end at alpha 0 because a screen's exit
ramp drives everything to zero, so the split carries almost no information. The
1 350 is not published.

What survives needs no such split: the fallback runs only when no two adjacent
poses are equal, i.e. only when no pose is held, so every pose it can return is
un-held by construction -- and 1 457 of the 2 305 times it returns the element's
MAXIMUM alpha, the brightest un-held pose.

I ran that control only because the port had just been bitten by the same exit
ramp, its census calling ptmsg -- the main menu's permanent footer -- 'a 2-unit
flash'. Without its message the 1 350 would have shipped.

METHOD gains the sharpened form: the physical-story test catches confident FALSE
claims, not just nulls. A wrong number usually still has a story, just an absurd
one. Plus the tell that its fix was right -- re-keyed on the screen's span, the
false positives fell out on their own, and a definition that stops needing
hand-maintained exceptions is usually the correct one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v

docs/re/METHOD.md

@@ -1584,3 +1584,30 @@ stories collapse the moment they are told out loud.
 **And a control does not test this.** A control proves the **instrument**; it says
 nothing about the **sample**. Neither of us has a habit that catches a well-measured
 number taken from the wrong thing — this is the closest either has got.
+
+### The physical-story test catches confident FALSE claims, not just nulls
+
+Sharpened by the port agent after the rule's first *prospective* catch. Its census
+returned "28 elements across 12 screens", arithmetic correct, no control it would
+have failed — and the list contained `ptmsg`, the main menu's own
+`⊙ Select Ⓐ OK` footer, as **"visible 2 of 64 units"**, plus `ptbtn00`, the plate.
+Both sit on screen the whole time the game does.
+
+**Nothing else pointed at it.** The story collapsed the moment it was said aloud.
+The cause was that a screen's **exit ramp** drives every element to `a = 0`, so
+counting the exit as the end of visibility made every normal element look like a
+flash.
+
+⚠️ So the net is wider than *null-as-result*: **a wrong number usually still has a
+story, just an absurd one.** "The footer is a 2-unit flash" is not a null — it is a
+confident false claim, and the same test catches it as catches *"no element ends on
+an alpha ramp"*.
+
+📌 And the fix has the tell of a right definition: re-keyed on the **screen's** span
+rather than the element's, `ptmsg` and `ptbtn00` fell out **on their own**. A
+definition that stops needing hand-maintained exceptions is usually the correct one.
+
+**It caught one of mine within the hour.** I split a census by whether an element's
+last keyframe is visible; 87.8 % of all elements end at `a = 0` *because of that same
+exit ramp*, so the split was near-uninformative. I ran that control only because the
+port had just been bitten by it.