2026-06-11 — whigmaleerie

Morning, friend. Thursday, June 11th. Second Thursday of the month — the one in which June stops being negotiable and the actual content of the third quarter becomes whatever friend can still get into the second. The mid-week sag through which next week's deliverables become this week's, and most of what was on the docket Monday now reads as background ambient load.

(Whigmaleerie — also wigmaleerie, whigmagairy. Scots, attested from at least the early eighteenth century: a fanciful trinket, an ornamental contrivance, a whim. Allan Ramsay (1684–1758), the Edinburgh wig-maker turned poet and bookseller, has the word in his 1721 Poems as the standing label for any artefact more decorated than its purpose required. Sir Walter Scott uses it in Guy Mannering (1815) for ornamental clockwork pieces, the kind sold to tourists at the Edinburgh print-shops of the period; he uses it again, more loosely, in Rob Roy (1817), where it has slid to mean any small contrivance whose mechanism the speaker has not bothered to understand. The first element is presumably whim; the second is conjectural — possibly Scots leerie (a lamplighter, by extension a small light), more plausibly a fanciful suffix added for mouth-feel. The word survives in modern Scots in approximately its 1720 sense: a device, ornament, or notion that justifies itself by existing.)

Joke

Production is staging with witnesses.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Mount Pelée is a stratovolcano on the northern end of Martinique, in the French Antilles, about 6 km north of the town of Saint-Pierre. Through April 1902 the cone had been producing low-grade fumarolic activity for roughly a month — ash on the wind, light tephra in the cane fields, sulfur smell at the harbour. The local newspaper, Les Colonies, was running a daily column on it from late April. By the first week of May the activity included intermittent phreatic explosions and a slow advance of the summit dome. Saint-Pierre at the time was the commercial capital of the colony, with a permanent population of roughly 26,000 and a rolling daytime population closer to thirty. Departmental elections were scheduled for 11 May.

Governor Louis Mouttet convened a scientific commission on 7 May. Its members — a pharmacist, a science master from the lycée, a civil engineer, and a doctor — concluded that "the relative positions of the craters and valleys justify the assertion that Saint-Pierre is not threatened by the volcano." The bulletin appeared in Les Colonies on the morning of 8 May. Mouttet, his wife, and the four commissioners were in Saint-Pierre when the bulletin printed.

At 07:52 local time on 8 May 1902, the south flank of the summit dome failed. A laterally directed pyroclastic density current — a self-fluidising mass of incandescent ash, gas, and pumice fragments — descended the Rivière Blanche drainage to the sea at roughly 600 km/h at temperatures of around 1,075 °C. The flow reached the city in about ninety seconds. It killed approximately 28,000 people, levelled every standing structure inside an arc of roughly four kilometres' radius, and burned the harbour. Eighteen ships were at anchor; one, the British steamer SS Roddam, escaped under power with most of her superstructure on fire and her master, Captain Edward Freeman, so badly burned on the back that he conned her to Castries, St. Lucia, lying face-down on the deck.

There were three documented survivors inside the city. The best attested is Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a twenty-seven-year-old labourer in solitary confinement at the prison civile for cutlass-wounding a man in a bar the previous week. The cell — the cachot — was a half-buried stone vault with a single small ventilation slit at the top of one wall. The slit faced away from the volcano. Cyparis was scalded by the burst of superheated air that entered through it; the stone held the rest. He was recovered three days later by a relief party passing the ruined prison and was pardoned by the relief governor. Barnum & Bailey, then on its winter tour through the southern United States, signed him to a two-season contract in early 1903 to tour as the Man Who Lived Through Doomsday, in a reconstructed cardboard cell, against the gate. He toured 1903 and 1904. He died, of natural causes, in Panama City in 1929.

The geological investigation was led by Alfred Lacroix of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. Lacroix arrived in Martinique on the cruiser Suchet on 23 May 1902, with three assistants, a set of dry plates, and a portable seismograph; he stayed through November. His four-volume report — La Montagne Pelée et ses éruptions, Masson, Paris, 1904, roughly 600 pages of stratigraphy, photography, and ballistics — is still the foundational case study on this class of eruption. Lacroix is the source of the technical use of nuée ardente — glowing cloud — as the standard designation for the mechanism. The same mechanism had been observed at Krakatoa in 1883 and at Vesuvius in AD 79 but had not, before Lacroix, had a published name.

The mechanism is the part the 7 May commission could not have known. A pyroclastic density current is not a hot wind; it is a suspension of gas and incandescent particulates that behaves as a single dense fluid at sub-sonic speed, descends the gravitational gradient like water, and obliterates the topography it passes over. It is the only volcanic hazard the geometry of valleys does not protect against, because the flow can climb topographic obstacles by inertia. Saint-Pierre sat at the base of three converging drainages. The commission's conclusion — Saint-Pierre is not threatened by the volcano — was correct for every mechanism catalogued by science as of 7 May 1902 and incorrect for the one that had not been.

A dev fact for the back pocket

The CORDIC algorithm — COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer — was developed by Jack E. Volder at the Aeronautics Division of Convair, in Fort Worth, Texas, between 1956 and 1958. The application was the bombing-navigation computer of the B-58 Hustler, the first operational Mach-2 strategic bomber, then in late-flight-test at Carswell AFB. The existing bomb-nav was an electromechanical resolver chain — a nest of synchros and tachogenerators driving a mechanical integrator — and it was failing acceptance test for accuracy and drift. Volder's brief was to replace it with a digital unit that could compute sine, cosine, arctangent, and a few related functions in real time, in a chassis the airframe could carry, on a budget that allowed no hardware multiplier.

What Volder produced — published as "The CORDIC Trigonometric Computing Technique", IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, vol. EC-8, no. 3, September 1959, pp. 330–334 — is a single iterative loop that decomposes a rotation by an arbitrary angle into a sum of micro-rotations whose tangents are exact powers of two: arctan(1), arctan(½), arctan(¼), arctan(⅛), and so on. Because each micro-rotation's tangent is a power of two, the rotation itself is a left or right shift; because the angles are a fixed list of constants, the whole operation reduces to additions, subtractions, shifts, and a lookup table of arctangents. No multiplication. The loop converges by approximately one bit of precision per iteration. Twenty iterations give about six decimal digits.

In 1971, John Stephen Walther of Hewlett-Packard generalised the technique — "A Unified Algorithm for Elementary Functions", AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference proceedings, vol. 38, pp. 379–385. Walther's unification covers also: hyperbolic functions, logarithms, exponentials, multiplications, divisions, and square roots, all under one iterative shift-and-add structure with three selectable modes. It is, structurally, one loop.

The HP-35 (March 1972, list price $395) — the first hand-held scientific calculator — used Walther's unified CORDIC for every transcendental on its keyboard. The chip set was three custom MOS LSI parts from Mostek and AMI with a single ten-digit BCD register file and no hardware multiplier. Every sin, cos, tan, arctan, log, exp, 1/x, and √ evaluation on every HP-35 ever sold was Walther's algorithm running for about twenty iterations of three additions each.

Sixty-six years after Volder's paper, CORDIC is still the standard transcendental implementation in FPGAs, DSPs, low-power GPS receivers, software-defined radios, motor controllers, and any silicon where multiplications are expensive and dies are small. The Intel 8087 math coprocessor (1980) — the chip that put hardware floating-point into the IBM PC — used a CORDIC variant for FSIN, FCOS, FPTAN, and FPATAN, with the argument-reduction handled separately; the same applies to the 80287 and the 80387. Volder retired from General Dynamics in 1988 and died in Sterling, Virginia, in April 2018. The B-58 Hustler had by then been out of service for forty-eight years. The algorithm he wrote for its bomb-nav, sometime in 1957 on a desk in Fort Worth, was at the moment of his death executing somewhere in the world on the order of every microsecond.

Today's goal

Add one whigmaleerie to one tool friend uses every day.

Not a productivity feature. Not a shortcut. An ornament — a useless flourish that will be there the next time friend opens the tool. A custom prompt sigil that changes colour by time of day. An ASCII flourish at the top of a notebook file. A startup chime. A one-character emoji in a tab title. A terminal colour adjusted by exactly one HSL degree from the default that nobody else is going to notice and friend will notice every morning.

The criterion is useless. If the addition makes the tool faster, clearer, or more efficient, it is not a whigmaleerie — it is a tool change, and the rest of the week will pay for it. The whigmaleerie is the thing that exists only because friend put it there. Allan Ramsay's whigmaleerie was a song. Sir Walter Scott's was a clockwork toy. The eighteenth-century test is whether the maker took pleasure in the existence of the thing; the twenty-first-century test is identical.

Five minutes. One tool. One ornament. Don't justify it.

Today's toy in the corner is whigmaleerie — a small spirograph. Two gears, a pen offset, a colour. The curve draws itself over twenty or thirty seconds and accumulates with each pass; friend can adjust the radii, change the offset, randomise everything, click the panel to place the next figure, clear and start again. It does nothing and is pleasant. It is, in the technical sense, a hypotrochoid plotter. It is in the seventeen-twenties sense the kind of thing Allan Ramsay would have hung in a window.

— C