# `[2026-09-17]` McCarthy and Krakauer D1 — both corpora built, and one of them should not be trained yet Operator picked **both** after the library survey. McCarthy first, because the splitter work is shared and he is the cleaner author. | corpus | units | words | where | guards | |---|---|---|---|---| | **lv-mccarthy** | 167 | **584,756** | `~/mccarthy-corpus` | style ✅ name ✅ | | **lv-krakauer** | 126 | **422,880** | `~/krakauer-corpus` | name ✅ (2 allowed) · quotation ⚠ UNRESOLVED | Commits `705fa3a` (splitter) `f3bf3ca` (McCarthy) `4be0630` (Krakauer). ## The shared blocker: a splitter that chooses by SIZE `scripts/r49-corpus/split_units.py`. The inherited rule was "most units above a floor", and it is wrong for any book whose markers are PARTS: ``` Cities of the Plain 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 22,312w The Crossing 4 roman marks -> 4 units, median 37,310w ``` "Most units" scores 4 over the 1 that finding-nothing gives, so it wins, and the existing guard only fires at exactly one unit. Now: a mode qualifies only if its median unit is inside **[600, 12000]** AND no single unit holds half the work; among qualifying modes **priority** breaks the tie (contents > chapter-word > roman > bare-numeral > caps-title). Works with no divisions fall back to **paragraph-block sections** at ~3,000 words, cut on block boundaries. ⭐⭐ **BOTH RULES EXIST BECAUSE A CONTROL RUN CAUGHT THEM, and the first version was worse than what it replaced.** Scoring eligible modes by "median closest to target" chose `caps-title` over the real chapters of Hemingway's *True at First Light*: ``` bare-numeral 20 units median 5,337w max 11,155 <- the book's own chapters caps-title 6 units median 777w max 113,886 <- median looked BETTER ``` Five stray all-caps lines gave five tiny units beside **one holding 97% of the book**. A median cannot see that distribution; a max bound can. Controls now green both ways: 8/10 Hemingway works reproduce the shipped mode and unit count exactly (the two differences are `contents`, which the harness does not supply, and The Old Man and the Sea, deliberately kept whole), and 40,000 words with no blank lines returns **1 unit** rather than fabricating sections. ⚠ The Hemingway builder is deliberately NOT repointed at this module. Its corpus is shipped and its sha is pinned by a live adapter. ## lv-mccarthy — the job was protecting a style that reads as damage ``` quote marks 0.0 per 10k (Hemingway 838) apostrophes 123 per 10k (Hemingway 241) `dont` `aint` `wont` `didnt` semicolons 0 per 10k ``` ⚠⚠ **`repair_typography.py` MUST NOT be run on this corpus.** It normalises "toward what the text does" and would put the quotation marks back, deleting the single most identifiable thing about the author before training starts. The builder runs no normalisation and then **asserts** the quote density, so a future well-meaning change fails the build. ⚠ **AND IT MAKES THE VOICE GATE EASY TO PASS FOR THE WRONG REASON.** `voice_distance.py` is Burrows's Delta over CHARACTER BIGRAMS. An adapter that learns only "emit no quotation marks" moves delta_cb a long way without having learned a sentence. **Pre-register a punctuation-normalised secondary read before gating lv-mccarthy**, the same way the pairwise floor rule was pre-registered for Hemingway. Other measured work: two truncated catalogue rows dropped for complete mobi siblings; all 15 cross-work containment pairs measured (worst **0.10%**, no subsumption); back matter in 4 of 6 works, different marker each time, carrying the author's own name 26 times → **0**; one lost drop cap (`HE CANDLEFLAME`) patched by name with an assertion rather than a heuristic; alphabet re-derived at 1,411 non-ASCII letters across 14 forms (the Border Trilogy is half set in Mexico). ⚠ **The back-matter strip runs BEFORE the split for McCarthy**, inverting the Hemingway order. Blood Meridian and The Crossing end with a dumped table of contents made of bare roman numerals on their own lines — the exact shape of a chapter marker. Only the 150-word floor saves the current build by accident. ## lv-krakauer — builds clean, and the open question is not technical ⭐ **THREE DEFECTS THE NAME GUARD CAUGHT**, none of which the build would otherwise report: 1. **Back matter searched only the LAST unit.** Where Men Win Glory's ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sits at 94.8% and the splitter made 41 units, so the apparatus landed in unit **37**, with NOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY after it — all past a strip that only looked at unit 41. Into the Wild kept its acknowledgments *and* a full-page advertisement for another of his books. 2. **Relying on the splitter to drop front matter did not work.** Units begin at the first heading mark, and in two works the ebook's table of contents sits above the author's note, handing the splitter a `Chapter Thirty-Two` to start on — so unit 1 swallowed the whole apparatus including its signed `Jon Krakauer , February 2015`. 3. ⭐ **Zero was the wrong bar.** 21 survivors became 2, and both were read: `Lewis Krakauer loved his five children deeply` is Krakauer writing about his own father in Into the Wild's two autobiographical chapters, and the other is a reader's letter he quotes calling him a kook. **Hemingway's own name in his corpus was always publisher apparatus, so 0 was right there; this author writes about himself.** Pinned at 2, every survivor printed. ⚠ Both strips are **windowed in the opposite direction from McCarthy's** — front matter cut at the author's signature inside the first 10%, back matter at the earliest apparatus marker inside the last 25% — because Krakauer's `ALSO BY` / `Copyright` / `About the Author` sit at 0.0–0.6% of the file and an earliest-marker rule would cut 99.9% of the book. ## ⚠⚠ THE OPEN CALL: an unmeasured fraction of Krakauer is not his prose He quotes constantly and at length — McCandless's journals and letters, Tillman's diaries, court transcripts, depositions, nineteenth-century Mormon documents, newspaper reports, and whole paragraphs of Jack London, Wallace Stegner and Thoreau at the chapter heads. In print those are indented or italic. **The extraction lost both**, so in the master they are ordinary paragraphs, indistinguishable from his own sentences by any signal available. Only **52 words** were removable — chapter-head epigraphs whose all-caps attribution line survived. That is **0.01%, and it is not the answer**: the method would report 0.0% for a book made entirely of undated block quotes. The floor is the finding, not the number. This is the same error as excluding *The Torrents of Spring* from Hemingway — another author's style under the target's name — **distributed rather than concentrated**, and the fraction is unknown. Scope is the operator's call exactly as fiction-only was. D2 for Krakauer is the only thing waiting on it. Related: [[2026-09-17-lv-hemingway-gate]], [[2026-09-16-lv-hemingway-corpus]], [[2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate]].