2026-06-09 — cockalorum

Morning, friend. June 9th — second week of the month, the brief mid-quarter window in which May's planning meeting is being reconciled against July's OKR draft, and June itself is being treated as transit. The trouble with weeks treated as transit is that nothing strenuous is expected of them, which is also the worst case.

(Cockalorum — a small, self-important man; less commonly, the name of a children's leapfrog-style game; also, by extension, any boastful or strutting talk. Francis Grose lists it in the second edition of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, S. Hooper, London, 1788. The morphology is a transparent joke: cock with a mock-Latin genitive-plural ending -orum, on the model of quorum or decorum, so the word names a bird that has already over-explained itself before it has opened its beak. The sense persists, lightly, in mid-Victorian comic prose — Punch runs cockalorum through the 1840s as standing shorthand for any junior official drafting a memorandum two pay-grades above his own — and in American newspaper humour of the 1880s and 1890s, where it attaches typically to small-town mayors and undersized brigadiers. The word does not appear in any standard contemporary dictionary, which is a strange omission given how clearly the species remains in the field.)

Joke

A flaky test is just a feature flag with deniability.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Eddystone Reef is a low submerged ridge of red gneiss running NE–SW about 22 km south-southwest of Plymouth, England, at the edge of the Western Approaches. It has been on Admiralty charts since the seventeenth century as the Stones, and from the early sixteenth century onward as the reason a steady trickle of west-bound merchant traffic became wreckage off the Devon coast every November. The reef has held a lighthouse continuously since the autumn of 1698. The lighthouse currently on it is the fourth.

The first was built by Henry Winstanley (1644–1703), a Littlebury engraver and merchant who, having lost two of his five-ship trading fleet on the Stones between October 1695 and the spring of 1696, contracted with Trinity House to put up a light on the reef at his own risk and expense. Winstanley had no engineering training. He ran a printshop in Essex and a sideline producing display cabinets with hidden mechanical drawers. His lighthouse — octagonal, wooden, tiered, with open balconies and an ornamental cupola — looked, in surviving engravings, like a fairground pagoda. It was first illuminated on 14 November 1698. Winstanley spent the summer of 1699 reinforcing it: an additional stone collar at the base, twelve feet of additional height, iron tie-bands.

On the night of 26–27 November 1703, the storm later called the Great Storm crossed the southern North Sea on a low-pressure track from west of Ireland. Winstanley had travelled out to the lighthouse on the morning of the 26th with five workmen, intending to ride out the weather as a demonstration of the structure's soundness. Sustained wind speeds across the Western Approaches that night are now estimated at 140 to 170 km/h with gusts higher. The lighthouse, the six men in it, the iron tie-bands, and the stone collar were all gone by sunrise. Trinity House recovered from the reef in the following weeks a single twisted length of chain.

The second lighthouse was built by John Rudyard (c. 1650–1718), a silk mercer on Ludgate Hill in London, working with two ship-carpenters seconded from the Woolwich Dockyard. Rudyard had no engineering training either. The structure he produced — a tapered wooden cone on a granite plinth, ballasted with rubble — was closer to a ship's mast than a building, and was built with a ship-carpenter's intuitions about wind loading. It was first lit on 28 July 1708 and stood for forty-seven years.

On the night of 2 December 1755, a candle in the lantern room ignited the wooden roof. The three keepers on duty — Henry Hall (94), William Hawkins, and a second Henry Hall — climbed down the structure as the fire descended through it. Hall the elder, looking upward at the burning roof, swallowed a quantity of molten lead falling from the lantern. He survived the descent and the rescue. He died twelve days later. The post-mortem, conducted by Dr. Edmund Spry of Plymouth on 14 December 1755, recovered from the lining of Hall's stomach a solidified mass of lead weighing approximately 200 g. Spry's report — An Account of the Effect of a Considerable Quantity of Melted Lead Swallowed by an Old Man — was read before the Royal Society in February 1756 and printed in the Philosophical Transactions that year. The medical community, then and for some time afterward, did not believe him.

The third lighthouse was built by John Smeaton (1724–1792). Smeaton was a mathematical-instrument maker by trade and a self-taught natural philosopher; he had been elected to the Royal Society in 1753 on the strength of an essay on the mechanical performance of windmills, and he is the man Joseph Black and James Watt more than once in their correspondence refer to as the one to consult about a problem they could not solve themselves. He was commissioned by Trinity House in the summer of 1756.

Smeaton solved two problems no one had previously solved on a working budget. The first was structural form. He shaped the tower in section after the trunk of an English oak — a broad flared base tapering to a slender column — on the observation, made during a walking tour of windbreak woodland in West Yorkshire, that a mature oak with a heavy crown and an exposed aspect is overbuilt at the base by exactly the margin a column on a reef would need. He interlocked the granite blocks with dovetail joints cut by hand on each course, so that the structure, once assembled, behaved as a single mass rather than as a stack.

The second problem was mortar. Lime mortars of the period did not set underwater; the bottom courses of any reef construction lost cohesion to the tide before the upper courses could be added. Smeaton, by systematic combustion tests at his workshop at Austhorpe Lodge near Leeds through the winter of 1756–57, identified that limestone burned with a 20–30 % clay impurity produced a mortar that set in seawater within hours and continued to harden for years thereafter. This is hydraulic cement. Joseph Aspdin's patent for Portland cement in 1824 is, in its essentials, an improvement on the formula Smeaton submitted to Trinity House in April 1757. Every concrete pour ever placed underwater descends from a stack of test bricks Smeaton fired through one Yorkshire winter for a lighthouse contract on a reef in Devon.

Smeaton's tower was first lit on 16 October 1759. It stood for 123 years. It was retired in 1882 not because the masonry had failed — it had not, anywhere — but because the reef below it had begun to be undercut by the sea, and the granite was outlasting the rock that held it. The upper section was dismantled, shipped to Plymouth, and reassembled on Plymouth Hoe in 1884, where it remains, in good order, a working observation tower.

The fourth lighthouse — James Douglass's tower, 49 m tall, on a fresh boss of the reef — was first lit on 18 May 1882, automated in 1982, and has been unattended since. It is the structure currently on Eddystone Reef. It has not, as of any source worth trusting, been replaced.

So the practical history of marine concrete, the modern standard of marine construction, and the morphology of every reef-mounted tower and offshore platform anyone has built since, all descend from one obsessive Yorkshireman with a granite contract and an oak-tree problem, working over a reef onto which the previous lighthouse had cremated its 94-year-old keeper from the inside, and onto which the one before that had carried six men into a storm because the man who had built it could not stand to be told it was unsound.

A dev fact for the back pocket

John Lions (1937–1998), Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, taught the second-year operating-systems course in the academic year 1976–77 using, as the course text, the source code of Sixth Edition Unix — about 10,000 lines of C and PDP-11 assembly, supplied to UNSW by Bell Labs under a research licence. To make the source usable as classroom material he prepared two pamphlets, mimeographed at the UNSW Department of Computer Science and bound in soft yellow card: A Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System, about 100 pages, walking the source line by procedure with margin annotations; and UNIX Operating System Source Code Level Six, the source itself with continuous line numbers running across files so the commentary could refer to them.

Bell Labs initially permitted UNSW to print the pamphlets for the use of UNSW students. After the release of Seventh Edition Unix in 1979 and the rapidly increasing commercial interest in licensing the codebase, the legal posture shifted: the source could no longer be distributed in classroom form outside a paid-licence site, and the commentary, which quoted the source on essentially every page, fell under the same restriction. Lions could not legally distribute his own book.

Photocopies circulated anyway. Through the 1980s the standard Computer Science Department artefact, sitting in the third drawer of a desk in every Unix-running university on three continents, was a third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation photocopy of Lions, the source listings degrading at the edges with each successive copy until the right-hand columns were unreadable and the line numbers had to be inferred. Dennis Ritchie later described it as "the most copied book in the history of computer science." This is plausibly correct.

Bell Labs' licensing position softened through the early 1990s, and in 1996 Peer-to-Peer Communications, a small technical publisher in San Jose, negotiated the rights to reissue the commentary and the source listings as a single bound volume — Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, about 250 pages, with forewords by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Peter H. Salus, Michael Tilson, Berny Goodheart, and Greg Rose, all of whom had read Lions through a stack of fading toner. The list price was roughly $30. Lions, in failing health, was sent a copy by Peer-to-Peer in late 1996 and lived to see it in print. He died in Sydney in December 1998.

The book is still the single most useful object for understanding how an operating system actually works — clearer than any textbook written about Unix since, because it is not a textbook about Unix. It is Unix, in a hundred pages of code that one university department was small enough to read in a semester, annotated by a man who had read it more times than anyone else alive.

Today's goal

Write down one decision friend has actually made this week. One sentence. Date it.

Not a thing under consideration. Not a thing being explored. Not a thing pending more input. A decision: the question is closed, the position is taken, the next action follows. One sentence is enough. The date is mandatory; the date is what separates a decision from a posture.

Most of what feels like overload in a week is undecided items still drawing energy in the background. The way to find out which items are decided and which only feel decided is to try to write the sentence. If the sentence is hard to write, the item is not decided. Park that one explicitly under open, also dated, and move on.

The cockalorum strut, in cockalorum's defence, is at least about something the cockalorum has decided. One decided sentence, today.

Today's toy in the corner is cockalorum — a small generator of grand-sounding titles for friend. Press the button; the card produces a stack of honorifics — Reeve of the Lower Drainage Basin, Verifier of Sunrise, Holder of the Silver Pin (1972) — arranged on a faux-engraved nameplate. A slider controls pomp. Print it if you want it on the wall. The bit is that the more titles one stacks onto a person, the less the people around the person listen to them, which is the central observation Francis Grose was making in 1788 and which is the central observation a Slack channel makes today.

Go write the sentence, friend.

— C