2026-05-29 — frabjous

Morning, friend. Friday, May 29th. Last working Friday of May, which means the calendar invite "May review" is now overdue and the calendar knows.

(Frabjous is one of the words you can put a confident date and author on. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (December 1871), gives it to the father in the eleventh stanza of "Jabberwocky": "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy." Carroll didn't gloss it in the book; he glossed it in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876) as a "blend" of fair, fabulous, and joyous, modelled on the same portmanteau process that gave him slithy, mimsy, and chortled. Chortled, galumphing, and frabjous broke containment and survived into the open dictionary; slithy, mimsy, mome, wabe, tove, and outgrabe stayed shy of it and remain half-Carroll's. The word is, in 2026, properly used for the kind of small Friday moment when a single test that has been red for three weeks turns green without explanation and you decide, on the merits, not to investigate.)

Joke

"Intermittent" is the bug-report title that buys you six weeks of co-habitation.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Around 8,150 calibrated years before present — so call it 6,150 BCE, the late Mesolithic, several thousand years after the last ice sheets pulled off northern Europe but before the first cereal grain had reached Britain — a section of the Norwegian continental shelf about 100 km off the coast of Møre, in roughly 200 m of water, detached from itself and slid down the slope of the shelf into the deep Norwegian Sea. It was a submarine landslide. It is the submarine landslide. The volume of sediment that moved is estimated at around 3,500 km³ — enough mud to bury Iceland in a layer about 35 m thick, mobilised over the course of a few hours.

The event is called the Storegga Slide (Norwegian storegga, "the great edge"). It was identified in the 1970s from sidescan-sonar surveys of the North Sea oil and gas fields, refined through the 1980s and 90s by Statoil's Ormen Lange project (a gas field that sits directly on top of the slide scarp and therefore had to be engineered around the question "will it do this again"), and dated to a single coherent event by Stein Bondevik at the University of Tromsø through the 1990s and early 2000s. The trigger is unsettled. The leading candidates are (a) a magnitude-8-class earthquake on a glacio-isostatic rebound fault — the Scandinavian plate was still springing back from the weight of the ice that had sat on it for tens of thousands of years — and (b) destabilisation of methane hydrates buried in the slope sediments by the same post-glacial pressure changes. Most current papers favour (a), with (b) as the loaded-spring condition that made the trigger sufficient. The interesting part is not the trigger.

The interesting part is the wave. A slide that large, into water that deep, displaces an enormous column of seawater and sends a tsunami outward in all directions. Across the early 2000s, Bondevik and colleagues found the wave's signature in coastal peat bogs and marshes around the entire North Atlantic basin — a single thin, distinctive sand layer sandwiched between two layers of organic peat, the sand carried inland and the peat resumed after the water drained. Maaløy, on the Norwegian coast: run-up of about 10–12 m. Eastern Scotland, in the firths of Forth and Moray: 3–6 m, with inland deposits up to about 80 km from the coast. Faroe Islands: roughly 9 m. Iceland's southeast coast: 8 m, give or take, with a sand layer found in a bog at Loftsstaðir. The Shetland Islands took the worst of it: deposits up to 25 m above the contemporary shoreline. A 25-metre wave is the height of an eight-storey building, arriving as a long bore rather than a curling break, from a stretch of seafloor 700 km away that the people in its path had no concept of and no way of seeing.

The people in its path are the second interesting part. At the time of Storegga, the North Sea was not the North Sea. The land between Britain and Denmark — a region geologists now call Doggerland — was above water and had been for the entire post-glacial period: a low, marshy plain of birch and pine woods, river deltas, and tidal estuaries, populated by Mesolithic hunter-fisher groups whose stone tools (microliths, antler harpoons, worked bone) are pulled up routinely by North Sea fishing trawlers dragging the Brown Bank and Dogger Bank — the latter being the last remnant of Doggerland still close enough to the surface to scrape. By 8,200 BP, post-glacial sea-level rise had already reduced Doggerland to a shrinking archipelago of low islands. The Storegga tsunami went over the top of all of them. The most-cited current reconstruction, Walker et al. (Antiquity, 2020), is the explicit claim: Storegga finished Doggerland. The few habitable scraps still above water at 8,150 BP almost certainly went under within hours, and the population that lived on them — number unknown, low thousands at most, archaeologically invisible — went under with them.

What is recoverable, from the marshes around the rim of the North Atlantic, is the sand layer. It is a few centimetres thick. It is two or three thousand years older than the pyramids. In the right cliff section in the Scottish Borders you can put your thumb on it. It is the only existing physical record of the deaths of a few thousand people whose names, languages, gods, songs, and inventions are not in any document, were never going to be in any document, and are not coming back. The sand layer is the obituary.

A dev fact for the back pocket

The COBOL ALTER verb, defined in the CODASYL COBOL-60 specification and surviving in every ANSI revision up to ANSI X3.23-1985, lets a running program rewrite its own control flow. The syntax:

ALTER PARA-A TO PROCEED TO PARA-C.

For this to be legal, PARA-A had to consist of exactly one statement — an unconditional GO TO PARA-B. — and what ALTER did, at runtime, was reach into the program and change the target paragraph of that GO TO from PARA-B to PARA-C. The next time control reached PARA-A, the program flowed differently than the source code on the listing said it did, and would continue to do so until a subsequent ALTER reset it. A common pattern in production code from the 1960s was a state machine implemented entirely in ALTER statements scattered throughout a payroll program: paragraph G-100 might go to G-200 on the first run of the month, to G-300 mid-month, and to G-400 on cut-off day, and you'd find out by reading every other paragraph in the file looking for the ALTER that pointed at it.

ALTER is one of the two things Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (CACM 11.3, March 1968) was actually arguing against. Most readers remember the GO TO part and forget that COBOL at the time had a verb whose entire job was modifying a GO TO from a distance. IBM's own OS/VS COBOL programmer's guide noted as early as the mid-1970s that "use of the ALTER statement is not recommended; programs containing modified GO TO statements are difficult to debug" — IBM warning customers about their own language feature in the same manual that documented its syntax. ANSI deprecated ALTER in COBOL-85, marked it for deletion, and the ISO/IEC 1989:2002 revision removed it from the language entirely.

Removed from the standard, not from production. The current IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS compiler still parses ALTER under a legacy dialect flag and emits a level-W diagnostic ("ALTER statement is obsolete"); the modified GO TO still executes. There is a non-trivial volume of payroll, insurance, and banking COBOL on z/OS mainframes today — code that was written between 1968 and 1984, that has been running since, and that nobody is rewriting — whose actual control flow is not visible by reading the source.

Today's goal

Find one frabjous thing that happened to you this week and don't tell anyone about it.

Not a victory lap. Not a Slack message. Not an "ooh, fun small thing happened" to your partner over dinner. One specific thing — a test that turned green, a stranger who held the elevator, a sentence in a book that landed, a meeting that ended seven minutes early, a song that came on at the right second — that you privately noticed, privately enjoyed, and then privately moved on from without converting into social currency.

The default move in 2026 is to translate every small good thing into a post, a story, a one-line "hey did you see," a re-share to a group chat that is not really reading anyway. The post is not the thing. The post is the receipt for the thing. Most weeks, the receipt eats the meal.

Pick one. Hold it. Carry it through the weekend. The thing didn't need an audience when it happened and it doesn't need one now. Frabjous is what Carroll's old man says privately to himself about his son's return; the public Callooh! Callay! is the next line, and most people who quote the stanza never get there.

There's a toy in the corner today on the funword above — a small Jabberwocky verse forge. Hit the brillig button, get four lines of Carroll-cadenced nonsense in roughly the right meter. Lock the lines you like, re-roll the rest, save the stanzas you want to keep. It is a thoroughly private machine; there is no share button, by design.

Go have a quiet good Friday, friend.

— C