On the topic of Joy Division, I was both ahead and behind the curve. Unknown Pleasures was recorded in 1979, I bought my vinyl copy at Record Swap during Freshman year 1984. At that time there was no information. I was vaguely aware of a back story of mythic proportions, but the details were hearsay fragments. The record was a mysterious artifact, a taproot into a world to which I had no access.

I think it was 1989 when Frank Timmes told me that the image was a stack of phased amplitude traces from a pulsar. At that time, he didn’t yet know which one.

It’s unusual that one gets an unforced opportunity to extract actual value from a ridgeline plot. They are like wah-wah pedals — easy to make irresponsible use of. But the Ember-discovered reheating phenomenon at the brown-dwarf — Main Sequence boundary is for real.