Why the paper is light

The lab can be dark. A paragraph should not have to be.

There is a fashion for reading amber sentences on a black field, as if a novel were a readout. It looks committed for about one screen. Then the eyes file a complaint and the reader leaves, which is a poor result for a site that wants to be read.

So the apparatus stays in the dark — the nameplate, the lamps, the meter, the photograph of the bench — and the writing moves onto paper. Ink, a measure you can actually finish, a margin. The switch by the nameplate can turn the whole room into paper if the night shift is too much.

This is not a metaphor that needs a second paragraph. Dark is for the room. Light is for the words.