How it reads
What happens between the photograph and the words that come back.
What happens to the photograph
You photograph the inside of the cold cup, and software does the reading. It names the shapes it can make out from a fixed list of eighty-five, so a bird is called a bird in every reading and the same shape keeps the same name across every cup you photograph. It also notes where each shape sits, because a shape at the rim and the same shape at the base are read differently. Then it writes the reading back to you in prose.
Where the meanings come from
From the people who read cups, by way of wherever they wrote it down, which for the meaning of a shape is mostly newspaper fortune columns. Where two of those disagree about a shape, the atlas keeps both, because the disagreement is the interesting part. Where nothing is written down, the entry says what the shape is read as and stops there.
What we will not do is fill a gap with a meaning of our own, or hang an unsourced one on a named culture. When an entry names who reads a shape that way, we read the source. The rest are dictionary lines, and nothing grander.
What we will not tell you
How often any shape turns up. We could count what our own software names, and the count would be about the software: swap the model behind it and a different shape comes top, with the same cups in front of it. That is a fact about us dressed as a fact about grounds, so no such number is printed here, and the atlas is in alphabetical order for the same reason.
