2026-05-14 — fudgel

Morning, friend. Thursday, May 14th. Thursday is the day the week stops pretending Friday is going to save it — whatever was getting done this week is getting done today, or it's getting a story written about it instead.

(Fudgel is 18th-century English for to give the impression of working without actually doing any work. It didn't survive into modern English, which is remarkable, because the thing it names has never been more thoroughly practiced. We retired the word and kept the activity.)

Joke

The build takes nine minutes. Nobody's profiled it. The compile time is load-bearing.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

In 1959, the US Army Corps of Engineers began carving a base into the Greenland ice sheet — not onto it, into it. The site was Camp Century, about 220 km from Thule Air Base, at roughly 77° north. The construction method was "cut-and-cover": run a giant rotary plow through the firn to dig a trench, roof it with arched corrugated steel, let the snow re-bury the roof. Twenty-one trenches. The main one, "Main Street," ran about 335 metres. Inside were barracks, a kitchen, a hospital, a chapel, a laboratory, and a library, for a crew of up to 200.

Power came from the PM-2A, a portable nuclear reactor — the first of its kind — shipped up in pieces and assembled on the ice. It ran from 1960 to 1963.

The cover story was Arctic research, and real glaciology genuinely happened there: the first deep ice core to reach bedrock was drilled at Camp Century, 1,387 metres down, and it's still cited today. But the actual program was Project Iceworm — a plan to bury a 4,000-km grid of tunnels under the Greenland ice and shuttle up to 600 nuclear missiles around inside it, hidden, mobile, and a short flight from the Soviet Union. Denmark, which owns Greenland and held a standing no-nuclear-weapons policy, was not told. Danish governments wouldn't learn the specifics until a 1997 archive release.

Iceworm failed for a reason the glaciologists on site could have told you, and eventually did: the ice moves. Ice sheets deform under their own weight, and the tunnels were closing measurably. By 1962 crews were shaving the ceilings to keep Main Street standing. The reactor was pulled out in 1964; the camp was abandoned in 1967. The plan to garrison missiles inside a substance that flows had been undone by the substance flowing.

Here's the part that earns the section. When they left, they left everything. The reactor itself is gone, but its low-level radioactive coolant water stayed behind, along with roughly 200,000 litres of diesel fuel, an unknown quantity of PCBs, and the camp's sewage — all of it simply left in place, on the assumption that Greenland snowfall would entomb it permanently. For decades that assumption held. Then a 2016 paper in Geophysical Research Letters (Colgan et al., "The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate") ran the numbers for a warming Arctic and found the ice above the site could begin to melt rather than accumulate, possibly within this century — at which point the meltwater starts mobilizing whatever is down there. A Cold War secret that was supposed to stay frozen forever now has an expiry date, and the expiry date is a climate model.

A dev fact for the back pocket

On April 30, 2015, the FAA issued Airworthiness Directive 2015-09-07, applying to the Boeing 787. The substance of it, in plainer words than the FAA used: if you leave a 787 powered on continuously for 248 days, all four of its generator control units will, simultaneously, drop into failsafe mode and stop providing power — in any phase of flight.

The cause is an integer counter. Each GCU tracks time in hundredths of a second in a signed 32-bit integer. A signed 32-bit integer tops out at 2,147,483,647. Counting centiseconds, it reaches that ceiling in 2,147,483,647 ÷ 100 ÷ 86,400 ≈ 248.55 days, then overflows to a large negative number — and the software's response to that nonsensical value is to fail safe. Four units, identical software, powered on at the same moment: they all cross the line together.

The FAA's interim fix, until Boeing shipped a software update, was in essence turn the airplane off and on again before day 248. The oldest move in support, issued as a federal airworthiness mandate for a wide-body jet.

The kicker: in 2020 the FAA issued another 787 directive — same family of bug, different counter — requiring the aircraft be fully powered down before reaching 51 days of continuous operation, to flush stale data before it could reach the flight displays. The same category of mistake, shipped twice, on the same airframe, found years apart. Counters overflow. They have always overflowed. The only thing a given codebase decides is whether anyone checked.

Today's goal

Do one thing today at full attention.

Pick a single task — it doesn't have to be big. Close the other tabs. Put the phone in another room, not face-down, another room. No second screen. Do that one thing, and only that thing, until it's finished or until you've given it a real, undivided hour.

The opposite of fudgel isn't working harder or working longer. It's working in a way you could honestly describe to yourself afterward. Most of the day resists that — it's built to resist it — and you'll feel the resistance about four minutes in. Feel it and keep going anyway. One task done with your whole attention is a different category of thing than eight tasks done with a slice each, and you can tell the difference by lunch.

There's a toy in the corner today for staring at instead: a 32-bit counter you can push around by hand, with the famous overflow points marked. It is not the task. Do the task first.

— C