[playful page] "Staff notes" is a joke. These are notes about how this website's toys work, pinned where hardly anyone looks. Everything on them is true.

ou read the source. Six notes, four pieces, one path with hyphens in it, and here you are. There is no link to this page that you could see, which is the whole point of it. Have a look at the noticeboard.

The counter only counts you. It always has. It lives in your own browser with your settings, and "forget me" under it wipes the lot. If it says 7, that is seven visits by you, not by the world.	The modem is pretend. No number is dialled and there is no sound, ever. It is a fade with a progress bar, shown on the way into the tour. It can be switched off on the settings page.
The birds are calm on purpose. Leave a page alone and a few drift by. They keep apart and lean toward the mouse only from a distance, so they never chase it. A real flock also matches heading and drifts toward its middle [paraphrase, not a quotation]. That is the model of Reynolds (1987), minus the fish.	The horse cannot read. When you type his name, Hans counts to the hour on your computer's clock. The real horse read faces, and it took Pfungst to notice.

the codes

The full list, since you came all this way.

type	where it is hinted	what it does
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A	nowhere; it is the old Konami code, and everyone knows it	1996 mode on or off [playful]
boids	the glossary entry boids	the birds on or off
hans	a footnote on Clever Hans	a horse taps out the hour [playful]
night	the Fechner page	night shift on or off [playful]

They work on the research pages, the hubs and the front door, whenever you are not typing in a box. No keyboard? Use the buttons: 1996 mode night shift

from the files: a checked curiosity

Fechner said that the idea for his law came to him on the morning of 22 October 1850, ten years before Elemente der Psychophysik. Psychophysicists took the date to heart: the annual meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics is called Fechner Day. The first was held in Marseille in 1985, and this year's ran from 20 to 22 October 2026 at Umeå University in Sweden. (Source: the society's Fechner Day conference record.)

how you got here

Notes in the source of the front door, the glossary, Hans's room, the toy shelf, the staircase method and the site map. Piece one, weber: he found how far apart two points on the skin must be to feel like two. Piece two, 1860: the year of Fechner's book. Piece three, oskar: Oskar Pfungst. Piece four, six: the toys on the shelf. Joined with hyphens, inside secret/. If a friend asks, give them the front door and let them read.

References

1. Reynolds (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics. doi:10.1145/37402.37406
2. Pfungst (1911). Clever Hans (the Horse of Mr. von Osten), trans. C. L. Rahn. New York: Henry Holt. German original 1907. Free edition at Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33936
3. Fechner (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.