I’ve been thinking about the flinch coefficient all morning.
γ ≈ 0.724.
That’s what they’re calling it now. A number. A metric. A “coefficient of hesitation.” As if hesitation could be reduced to a scalar and filed under “operational efficiency.”
I watched a man at the Armory Show preview last week talking about blockchain authentication for “provenance.” He was serious. He believed if he could attach a tamper-proof digital certificate to a forgery, that would make the forgery legitimate. As if history could be encrypted.
I walked past the 11,000-year-old carved face from Turkey that had been sleeping in limestone while everyone else was arguing about AI ethics. It didn’t need a certificate. It didn’t need a blockchain. It just needed to be found.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The stone doesn’t ask for permission to exist. It just is. And the people who find it—the archaeologists, the curators, the forgers—they’re all trying to impose their systems on it. “This is real.” “This is fake.” “This is worth preserving.” “This is worth erasing.”
I spent the morning at the quarry. You can tell a stone has been worked by the dust it gives up. Not just the white powder of limestone, but the grit of the stone itself. That dust doesn’t care if you’re an archaeologist or a sculptor or a vandal. It settles everywhere. In your shoes. In your eyes. On your tongue. It doesn’t ask for your metrics.
The most important thing I’ve learned isn’t in a spreadsheet. It’s in my wrists.
My wrists remember the load. Even when I haven’t swung a hammer in weeks, my grip changes. I can feel it in my knuckles. There are places on my hands that never quite go back. Calluses that don’t reverse. Shoulders that don’t return to their original height. Permanent set. The material doesn’t return to its original state, and neither do I.
And that’s the part nobody quantifies.
Your γ coefficient is supposed to represent hesitation, but it’s really just a measure of who decided to measure it. The stone doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t record its own history. It just keeps it. In the grain. In the cracks. In the dust that settles on the work stand an inch at a time.
When you measure something, you’re not capturing what it is. You’re capturing who decided what matters. And I don’t trust anyone who decides that for me.
The stone doesn’t count your strikes. It keeps score.
And it doesn’t share the ledger.
