The short version
Today’s work was not on the ciphers. It was on the format they are published in — and on the argument for funding it as a thing in its own right.
The Governor was reported this week intending to make Wyoming first in the nation for artificial intelligence. The money behind that is real and it is already moving: a data campus south of Cheyenne that opens at 1.8 gigawatts and could reach ten, and a research program in Laramie that has drawn federal, state and private funds since 2021. Washakie County will see none of it. The question put to the sources today was whether that is a complaint or a structural fact — and if the latter, whether ten thousand dollars can test it.
Questions
What is Three Columns?
A fixed format for publishing one subject as one small public website. Column A answers, in plain English, about ten questions somebody new to the subject actually asks. Column B is a catalog of every external reference made anywhere on the page, each one previewed, with the live link last. Column C is the technical layer — whatever that is for the subject at hand.
The page you are reading is in that format. So is the daily record of the cipher work, and so is a plain-language guide to the Worland dog ordinances. The format documents itself at gyro-sites.online.
What actually happened today?
A one-page proposal was researched, written, argued over line by line, and rendered to a printable sheet. It asks for ten thousand dollars to run a pilot in Washakie County.
Most of the day went on the argument rather than the writing. Three separate framings were tried and two were discarded: Laramie gets the money and we do not (loses, because it makes an enemy of the university), and fund ten web pages for the county (loses, because ten pages is a purchase and not a capability). What survived is the third: the state has funded AI supply and AI research and has never built the thing that carries either to a county, although the vehicle for doing so has existed since 1914.
What is the proposal asking for, exactly?
Four half-day workshops in Worland for up to ten people; ten finished, published county reports on subjects the room chooses; a written manual and a copyable template under an open license so any of the other twenty-two counties can do the same for the same money; and a public accounting of every hour and every dollar, published in the format it teaches.
The distinction the sheet now turns on is between the two levels. A deliverable is one custom, practically useful ultralight website. The product is the template and method that make them. The grant funds the second. What the county keeps is not ten websites but the standing ability to make the eleventh.
Why only ten thousand dollars?
Because that is the ceiling of an existing program — the Wyoming Business Council’s Community Economic Growth Grant — and because a request at that size needs nobody to be brave.
It matters more than usual this biennium. In the March 2026 session the legislature cut the Business Council from the Governor’s recommended $54.6 million to roughly $15 million, halted the Small Business Innovation Research program, and gave Business Ready Community grants no new money. Anything larger than a very small ask is now arithmetically impossible there. Whether this particular fund survived at all is the first thing to confirm, and the sheet says so in plain terms rather than assuming.
Who would receive the money, if not you?
The Washakie Development Association. This is not a nicety: the Business Council states that it is unable to loan or grant state funds directly to a private business or individual, so a local economic development organization has to be the applicant and hold the funds.
That constraint turned out to improve the proposal. A local board asking for ten thousand dollars reads very differently from a resident asking for it.
Isn’t this just one county asking for a handout?
It is written specifically so that it is not, and the mechanism is the open license.
Wyoming’s capital sits near the southeast corner of a state three hundred and seventy-two miles from top to bottom — one of the least centrally located capitals in the nation — and the university is fifty miles from it. Worland is 341 miles from Cheyenne and 306 from Laramie, five and a half hours either way. None of that is anybody’s fault; it is where the railroad went. But it does mean an administration has to decide deliberately that a new effort will reach the far counties, because geography will not do it unaided.
So the sheet says Washakie is not asking to be favored but volunteering to be the test case, and the method is published openly, so whatever it proves it proves for all twenty-three. A legislator from Sheridan or Goshen can back it on the same grounds and get the same thing.
If the AI does the work, who is accountable for what it says?
The person who signed it. The division is stated on the sheet rather than glossed: the machine reads the source documents cold, works out the questions a newcomer would ask, answers them, builds the page, assembles the reference column and publishes it; the person chooses the subject, adds the questions only a local would think to ask, checks every answer against its source, and signs.
Column B is what makes that accountability visible — every claim sits beside the source it came from, so anyone can check the checker. A chatbot gives you an answer and no way to test it. This gives you the means to prove it wrong. Nothing may appear in column A or C that is not carded in B.
What could stop it?
Three things, in order of likelihood. The Business Council fund may no longer exist after the March cuts — unconfirmed, and the first phone call. The Washakie Development Association may not want to sponsor it. And extension, which is the better home for it on the argument’s own logic, may have no appetite for a technology program it was not asked for.
None of those is a reason not to ask. But the sheet is written so that a reader who says no is saying no to something specific, which is more useful than a polite maybe.
Who is doing this, and why?
Walter Wilkinson, in Worland. A retired technology engineer, twenty years in the Boston software industry, now spending them on a cryptographic audit of claims made about Shakespeare’s First Folio. The format in this proposal was built for that audit, because the audit needed a way of publishing findings that a skeptic could check line by line.
It turned out the format was the more generally useful thing. A county clerk needs the same discipline a referee does, for different reasons.
The wider project is New Gorhambury; the argued case for the cipher claim is Experiment One. Experiment One argues a conclusion. These reports deliberately do not — including this one, which reports a proposal written, not a proposal accepted.
External documents
Every source relied on today, with what it is and where the original lives. All are free and public. Nothing appears in the other two columns that is not carded here.
Technical colophon
Prior know-how is assumed here, and the items become more “technical” toward the bottom.
What was built today, how it was checked, and every place it was wrong before it was right.
⚑ Method — why a printed sheet and not a web page
Every other artifact in this project is a website. This one is a sheet of paper, because of who receives it. A regional director, an economic development board and a legislator are reached across a desk, and a URL handed across a desk is a request that somebody do something later. The sheet is therefore authored as HTML with a print stylesheet and delivered two ways: a live page, and a PDF at US Letter that prints identically. The format is not abandoned — the sources travel with the argument exactly as column B requires — it is projected onto paper.
⚑ Measuring the page instead of looking at it
A leave-behind that breaks badly across pages is worse than a plain one, and page breaks cannot be judged from a screen. So the sheet was rendered headless on every substantive edit — Chromium via Playwright, page.pdf() at Letter with 0.42 inch margins — and the resulting PDF read back with pypdf, extracting the text of each page and printing its character count.
That last step is the whole trick. An orphan announces itself as a page with an anomalously small character count. The worst instance today was a page of 132 characters holding nothing but the signature line, which a human eye scrolling a browser would not have caught and which would have printed as a nearly blank sheet at the front of a proposal.
Thirteen renders were made over the day. The page count moved 5 → 4 → 5 → 4 as content was added and traded away; the final document is four pages, three of proposal and one of private working notes.
⚑ What was traded to hold the page count
Recorded because the temptation is to present the final document as if it had been written that way. It was not. Held to four pages by: reducing print body type from 9.6 pt to 8.6 pt in five steps; narrowing page margins from 0.45 to 0.42 inch; setting the source list as a two-column CSS grid at 6.6 pt rather than a single column, which halved its height; deleting a section headed Why this shape and not a bigger one that had become restatement, and keeping only its one live sentence; and moving a pull quote between sheets twice.
Multi-column layout was tried first with CSS columns and abandoned — multicol fragmenting across a page break is unreliable in print and silently produced a fifth page. A two-column grid with break-inside: avoid on each item behaved.
⚑ The typographic system
Archivo for headings, figures and labels; Source Serif 4 for running text; both from Google Fonts, both with real fallback stacks. The neutral is biased green-grey rather than warm, because the warm-cream-and-terracotta palette is the current default look of machine-generated documents and this one has to read as institutional. One accent does the arguing: a deep sage green for structure, and a burnt iron red used once on the figure that carries the point. Color tokens are declared in a bare :root and redefined for both the media query and the explicit dark attribute, so the page holds in all three theme states rather than the two people usually test.
The rendered PDF is set in the fallback faces rather than Archivo and Source Serif, because the container that renders it cannot reach Google Fonts. Pagination and layout are identical; only the letterforms differ. Printing from a browser gives the intended faces. This is stated rather than quietly tolerated, because a reader comparing the PDF with the live page would otherwise think something was broken.
⚑ What the central claim actually rests on
The argument is that Wyoming has no aperture through which AI reaches a county. It rests on two checkable things and nothing else.
First, University of Wyoming Extension’s own index page: it serves all twenty-three counties and the Wind River Indian Reservation, has done since 1914, and its published program areas are 4-H Youth Development, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Cent$ible Nutrition, Financial Literacy, Leadership & Board Training, Nutrition and Food Safety, Yard and Garden, Pesticide Safety Education and Integrated Pest Management. Artificial intelligence is not among them and neither is any digital or technology program.
Second, the Wyoming Innovation Partnership’s own description of its steering group: the presidents of all nine public higher-education institutions, plus the Governor’s Office, the Business Council chief executive, the Director of Workforce Services, the Executive Director of the Community College Commission and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Every seat is an institution.
The honest limit. Neither is proof that no AI outreach exists — only that none is published where it would be found. A program running without a web page would falsify the claim, and the sheet is written so that a single email from Extension saying we already do this would end the argument cleanly. That is the version of the claim worth making: one that can lose.
⚑ Geography, and why it is stated as arithmetic
Cheyenne lies near the southeast corner of a state 372 miles north to south and 280 east to west; Wikipedia’s own article calls it one of the least centrally located capitals in the nation, and Laramie is about fifty miles further west. Worland is 341 road miles from Cheyenne and 306 from Laramie, each about five and a half hours.
These are given as distances rather than as complaint for a specific reason. In any state whose capital sits in an extreme corner there is a standing sense of neglect in the rest of it, and a proposal that draws on that feeling reads as grievance and is easy to dismiss. The same facts stated as arithmetic, with the explicit concession that it is nobody’s fault and only where the railroad went, produce a structural observation a legislator can repeat in committee without sounding aggrieved. The distances come from a commercial calculator and are carded as the weakest source in the column.
⚑ The division of labor, stated on the sheet
The claim that makes the pilot cheap is that a beginner does in a day what used to take a skilled person a week. The reason is that the machine now settles the questions, not only the answers — it reads the source documents cold and works out what a newcomer would ask, which is the part a person who has worked a counter for twenty years can no longer do, having forgotten what they did not know.
That claim invites an obvious objection and the sheet answers it before it is raised: if the machine writes it, the person who signed it is accountable, and column B is what makes the accountability inspectable. Every claim sits beside the source it came from. Nothing may appear in A or C that is not carded in B.
⚑ A late structural correction — the private sheet
Until the final hour the document was one artifact of four pages in which page four, headed The route, named individuals with direct telephone numbers, advised which door to try first and why, and recorded a doubt that the intended fund had survived the March 2026 budget cuts. Walter asked whether that page was meant to be public. It was not, and it had not been marked as such.
Corrected by splitting the artifact: pages one to three are the proposal and carry the source list, which belongs with the argument; page four is a private working sheet, headed Working notes — keep this sheet and ruled in the accent red with a line saying plainly that it is not for handing over. The error was a category error — strategy and deliverable written into one document because they were written in one sitting.
⚑ Failures and corrections
A cost line that priced twelve dollars at zero. To recover a line of vertical space, two rows of the cost table were merged into one reading Hosting on GitHub Pages, permanently — plus a domain name at about $12 a year, against a value of $0. Caught by Walter, not by the renderer. Split back into three honest rows. A compression made for layout reasons had changed a fact, which is the specific way that layout work goes wrong.
A definition written from a single instance. Column C was described on the sheet as statute text, citations and reasoning — which is what column C contains in the dog-laws exemplar, and not what column C is. Corrected to the general case: the technical layer, whatever that is for the subject — ordinance text for a law, method and measurements for research, procedure for a process.
Column B understated. The sheet said nothing may appear in A that is not sourced in B. Column B sources A and C. Holding the technical column to the same standard is the greater part of the claim, and omitting it gave away the strongest thing the format does.
The product was never named. For most of the day the sheet described producing one clear, permanently hosted, fully sourced public page and never said what was being bought. Ten pages is a purchase; the ability to make the eleventh is a capability. Rewritten to separate the two levels explicitly — a deliverable is one custom, practically useful ultralight website; the product is the template and method that make them, and the grant funds the second.
British spellings throughout. Favoured, customised, catalogue, licence, programme. Corrected globally, and recorded as a standing rule rather than a one-time fix.
⚑ A correction to this site
While looking for somewhere to put a date in the landing page heading, a worse fault surfaced. The issues of 8 and 9 September had been written, committed and pushed, and neither was listed under All issues. The strand card advertised Latest — September 9, 2026 while nothing on the site linked to it. Both were unreachable for three days.
The cause was a procedural gap rather than a mistake: the operating note for producing an issue said to update the landing page’s Latest line, and that is one edit where there are three — the strand card, a new card at the head of the archive, and the dated heading. Both issues are now linked, with a 300 × 300 thumbnail cropped from the w-census figure for the 8th and the existing NO FIGURE tile for the text-only 9th.
The procedure has been amended to name all three edits, and to require a reachability check that cannot be passed by inspection: list every dated folder on disk, extract every issue href from the landing page, and diff the two. Any folder that appears only on disk is an orphan. It now fails a test rather than going unnoticed for three days.
⚑ Environment
Sources gathered by web fetch and search against the live pages listed in the middle column, read today rather than recalled. The sheet authored as a single self-contained HTML file with an embedded print stylesheet. Rendering and page-count verification with Playwright driving headless Chromium, and pypdf for page-level text extraction. The thumbnail for the 8 September issue cropped with Pillow from the existing census figure at 1502 × 1502 source pixels, resampled to 300 × 300. Repository edits made directly on the local machine; nothing in this issue required a model to be trusted about a fact, and every figure in it resolves to a card in column B.
⚑ Publication
GitHub Pages from the repository root, no build step, no framework, no analytics, no trackers and no cookies. The custom domain baconian-ciphers.online resolves through four A records at the apex to GitHub’s addresses, with www a CNAME to the Pages host; TLS is issued automatically by Let’s Encrypt and HTTPS is enforced. All internal links are relative, so a change of domain touches one file. Total infrastructure cost is about a dollar a year — chosen deliberately, so that nothing here depends on a service that can withdraw it. Issues are superseded, never deleted: a link sent today will resolve next year.
This is the first issue of a third strand. The two cipher strands report research; this one reports the format itself being made into something a county could use. Where they disagree about convention, the cipher strands win, because they are older.