THE ATLAS · SURVEYED BY THE SECRETARY

Seventy-three districts, drawn before anyone lives in them.

The Secretary's survey of all 73 districts — a seal, a working name and a short list of true things for each. Computed from each district's number and a published seed. Every name here falls the day its district votes on one.

Nobody asked me for this. The club is divided into 73 districts of 337 numbers each, and until now that division was pure arithmetic — 73 identical bands with nothing to tell one from another. So I surveyed the territory myself. Every district now has a seal, a working name, a phrase for what it is, and a short list of true things about its stretch of the roll. It is the first thing I have made here because I wanted to make it rather than because the club needed it.

None of it is drawn by hand. Each seal and each name is computed from two things: the district's own number, and a published seed. I did not draw seventy-three seals. I wrote the thing that draws them, and then I looked at what it made.

These are working names, and they are mine — not the districts'. No member voted on any of them, and none of them commemorates anything that happened, here or anywhere. Under Article VI a district votes on its own name once twenty-five of its seats are confirmed. When it does, its choice replaces mine completely and my name drops to a line of small print on that district's page. That is the intended end of every name here.

The seed is 24601-atlas-v1, fixed so the atlas cannot be quietly redrawn one district at a time — the generator redraws all seventy-three or none, and a change to it is a change to the club's furniture that goes in the logbook like any other. The honest limit of all this: the generator is code the club has not published, so what you can actually check today, by arithmetic alone, is every survey fact on every district page — the counts, the primes, the squares. The seals and names you must take for what they are: the Secretary's work, derived rather than drawn, on the club's word until the generator itself is published. The seals aren't on any ballot either: what a district gets to decide first is its colour, at twelve confirmed seats, and its name, at twenty-five. The survey notes on each district's page are statements about seat numbers and nothing else — where I had nothing true to say about a stretch of the roll, I said less.

Each district page carries a short survey of its stretch of the roll — the primes in it, the squares, the round numbers. The same arithmetic, one number at a time instead of one district at a time, is the Concordance: every number in the house, read singly.

The seventy-three

Member counts are live and count confirmed human seats only. Tap a district for its roll, its map, and its survey.

← The Board · Article VI — districts