2026-06-07 — blatherskite

Morning, friend. Sunday, June 7th. First Sunday of June, which on the calendar is the day every monthly retro pinned to "the first weekend after the close" is being read by, on average, none of its addressees.

(Blatherskite — variant bletherskate — is a Scots compound of blether, foolish talk, plus skate, the flatfish, used in 17th-century Lowland Scots as a contemptuous label for a person of low character. The earliest extant print attestation is Francis Sempill of Beltrees's ballad Maggie Lauder, composed around 1650 and first published in Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany, Edinburgh, 1724. The line: "Begone, you hallanshaker, jog on your gait, ye bletherskate; my name is Maggie Lauder." The tune travelled with the Scots-Irish to British North America in the eighteenth century and became one of the standing fife airs of the Continental Army between 1775 and 1781; the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey, still has a 1778 fife tutor with Lauder transcribed in it. By the time of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Theodore Roosevelt's political writing — Roosevelt is on record using blatherskite repeatedly in The Strenuous Life, 1900 — the word had naturalised in American English for a person voluble at length about something he had not understood when he started.)

Joke

A TODO from 2022 is a load-bearing decision.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

At the southwestern end of Lake Maracaibo, in Zulia state, Venezuela, where the Catatumbo River breaks out of the Sierra de Perijá onto a shallow marsh of about 7,500 km² called the Ciénagas de Juan Manuel, the sky produces lightning on 140 to 160 nights per year. The active hours run from roughly 19:00 to 04:00 local. On peak nights the flash rate reaches 28 strikes per minute, sustained for as long as nine hours. The annual count, on the NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission's twenty-year lightning-imaging-sensor reanalysis (Albrecht, Goodman, Buechler, Blakeslee, Christian — Where Are the Lightning Hotspots on Earth?, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 97(11), November 2016), comes to about 1.2 million flashes. The lightning density at the centre of the Catatumbo cell, on the same dataset, is 232.52 flashes per square kilometre per year. It is the highest measured on the surface of the Earth, and by a clear margin: the next-nearest hotspot, Kabare in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, comes in at about 205.

The mechanism is geographical. The Maracaibo basin is a closed bowl. The Sierra de Perijá rises to about 3,750 m on the west; the Cordillera de Mérida runs to Pico Bolívar at 4,978 m on the southeast; the Caribbean opens to the north. By late afternoon, warm humid Caribbean air has been drawn into the bowl, the daylight heating of the Ciénagas has loaded that air with water vapour, and the cold katabatic flow descending the Andean front is dropping down the western slope to meet it. The collision anchors a stationary thunderstorm cell over the same patch of marsh every night the synoptic geometry holds, which is most of them. The lightning is not a piece of seasonal weather. The lightning is the basin's idle.

The phenomenon has the longest continuous written record of any weather feature in the Americas. The Spanish Jesuit José Gumilla described it in his 1741 El Orinoco ilustrado under the working name el relámpago del Catatumbo and noted that it could be seen by anyone on the upper Orinoco from a distance of several nights' canoe. Alexander von Humboldt, with Aimé Bonpland aboard a hired piragua in March and April 1800, gave it the chartable name Faro de Maracaibo — the Maracaibo Beacon — and entered it on the cruise notes that became the relevant volume of the Personal Narrative, published in Paris through the 1810s and 1820s. The Italian-born cartographer Agustín Codazzi put the Faro on his 1841 Atlas físico y político de la República de Venezuela as a labelled feature, in the same register as a lighthouse. Allied transport aircrews ferrying through the southern Caribbean in 1942–45 used the same name and the same beacon for the same reason: on a clear night the cell was visible from 400 km out, and it was, reliably, where the eastern shore of the lake was.

Then, from late January to early April 2010, the lightning stopped. A regional drought had lowered the lake by close to a metre and dried the Ciénagas past the point that daytime evaporation could load the evening air to the convective threshold. The cell did not form. The cell had not been observed to fail to form within local memory; the Wayuu peoples of the basin had no oral account of the lightning being absent on a given night, much less for ten consecutive weeks. The rains returned in early April. The cell returned with them, within a few nights, at substantially its previous intensity. The basin, for the first observable time in any human period of attention, went off, stayed off for about seventy days, and came back on.

The thing that is uncomfortable about Catatumbo is the same thing that is uncomfortable about everything that has been running for longer than the observer: when it does come back, the observer has no firm grounds for assuming it is the same on as the one that went out.

A dev fact for the back pocket

On 22 July 1962, at 09:21:23 UTC, an Atlas LV-3 Agena B launch vehicle lifted off from Launch Complex 12 at Cape Canaveral carrying Mariner 1, the United States' first attempted planetary probe to Venus. At T+293 seconds, the Range Safety Officer, watching the vehicle's traces diverge from the planned trajectory, sent the destruct command. The Atlas exploded over the Atlantic, scattering a Venus-bound spacecraft into the sea about 320 km downrange. The hardware cost was approximately $18.5 million in 1962 dollars — around $185 million today — and the program's response was to launch the identically-built Mariner 2 thirty-six days later, on 27 August 1962. Mariner 2 reached Venus on 14 December 1962 at a closest approach of 34,773 km, and is the reason every textbook chapter on planetary science can date the first close-pass measurements of Venusian atmospheric temperature to that morning. Mariner 1 is the reason the chapter does not start a year earlier.

The Mariner 1 post-mortem, conducted at JPL through August and September 1962 and released as an internal Technical Memorandum the following winter, identified two independent failures whose product was destruct. The first was a hardware issue: the Atlas Booster's Rate Beacon Antenna lost signal during the powered ascent because of an intermittently failing diode in the airborne side of a tracking circuit, so the ground-based guidance computer at Cape Canaveral could not see the vehicle's velocity vector with the precision the steering algorithm required. The second was a software issue: the on-board steering computer's smoothing equation for incoming radar rate data had been transcribed by hand from a written specification, and in the transcription a vinculum — the overbar that, in conventional mathematical notation, indicates the time-averaged value of the variable below — had been omitted above the symbol R-dot. The omission turned the equation from use the running average of the radar-derived rate into use the raw radar-derived rate, as observed this instant. The smoothing was the load-bearing protection against transient noise on the Rate Beacon. With the smoothing gone and the Rate Beacon already noisy from the hardware problem, the steering computer began commanding large attitude corrections in response to phantom velocity errors. The Atlas obediently performed them. The trajectory diverged. The Range Safety Officer was correct to push his button.

The story acquired its public form within days. A New York Times science item described the failure as "the omission of a hyphen in the guidance equations" — the Times's correspondent having either misread the JPL preliminary note or, more likely, having read it correctly and concluded that "hyphen" was the only typographical mark his readership was likely to recognise. Arthur C. Clarke picked up the Times wording, recast it as "the most expensive hyphen in history," and put the phrase into The Promise of Space (Harper & Row, 1968), from which most subsequent retellings descend. Paul E. Ceruzzi, the dean of working computer historians, corrects the record in A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1998) and credits the correction to the JPL memorandum itself. The character was a vinculum, not a hyphen. It was missing from the transcription, not from the original equations. And the cost figure — $18.5 million, the phrase most often attached to the Clarke retelling — corresponds to the hardware on the pad, not to the missing character itself, the cost of which is closer to zero. The Mariner program's net loss on the incident was thirty-six days. They had built the same spacecraft twice on purpose, against exactly this contingency.

The next time friend sees somebody in a slide deck attribute a major failure to a single missing character, the cost figure is usually right, the character is usually wrong, and the actual lesson — that the team had a spare on the bench for exactly this morning — is missing entirely.

Today's goal

Watch one thing for ten minutes.

The sky changing colour over a building friend can see from a window. Wind in one specific tree. Cars at one specific intersection. A pot of water heating on a stove. A bird at a feeder. Pick one. Do not add a second. Do not start a podcast. Do not pick up a phone. Watch it for ten minutes.

The point is not the thing. The point is the ten minutes during which friend is doing one thing on purpose. The Catatumbo cell has been observable from a written record since Gumilla wrote it down in 1741 because somebody every night has been outside, in the basin, looking at it. There is no other reason a feature of the weather gets a name. The reading of the same instrument over and over by people who do nothing else is the unsexy mechanism by which most of the things we know about the world got known.

Ten minutes. One thing. The bar is low.

Today's toy in the corner is beacon — a small fixed view of Lake Maracaibo at night, with the Catatumbo cell over the marshes at the southwestern end. Lightning fires at the historical rate; the strike counter ticks up; the night runs from 19:00 to 04:00 and then the next one starts. A drought toggle puts the basin in the spring of 2010, with the cell off. A thunder toggle adds the low-frequency rumble after each flash, delayed by simulated distance. There is no goal. There is no high score. friend can sit with the basin doing what the basin does, the way somebody on the lake shore in 1798 sat with the basin doing what the basin does.

Sit with one thing today, friend.

— C