2026-08-02 — brouhaha

Morning, friend. Sunday. The last one of the first half of August, and the last un-scheduled block for a lot of people before the season starts to lean. Take it slow.

(Brouhaha — noun, a noisy overexcited response to something small. English took it from French around 1890, but the French word is much older: brou-ha-ha was already in print in 1552 in the mystery-play era, as a stock stage-cry shouted by an actor playing the Devil bursting onto the scene. The most persuasive etymology, laid out by Nathan Süsskind in American Speech vol. 44 (1969), traces it back through the medieval theatre to the Hebrew בָּרוּךְ הַבָּא — barukh habba, "blessed is he who comes" — the greeting chanted from Psalm 118 by congregants at Jewish festivals. Medieval French dramatists, having overheard it in the Jewish quarters without understanding it, took the sound for a demonic incantation and gave it to the Devil to yell on the way in from the wings. The line has been a synonym for uproar in French for four hundred years and in English for one hundred and thirty. Nobody has settled on the stress pattern.)

Joke

"Let's take this offline" is what friend says when the brouhaha in the thread has gotten big enough to need its own scheduled meeting.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

At about 9:30 pm on Sunday, 8 October 1871, a dry cold front pushed a wall of low-humidity air south across northeastern Wisconsin. The region had been in drought all summer. The slash from the season's clear-cutting — needle-tops, bark, brush — lay in loose piles along the logging tracts on both sides of the Peshtigo River. Cordwood was stacked head-high in the town of Peshtigo itself, then a lumber-milling settlement of about 1,700 on the river's west bank.

Small fires had been smouldering in the surrounding forests for weeks. The wind that Sunday evening drew them together. Sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 pm they merged and became one thing.

What arrived at Peshtigo was a firestorm — a self-sustaining column drawing its own air, of the kind that would later be produced deliberately over Hamburg in 1943 and Tokyo in 1945. Eyewitnesses in the nearby towns of Marinette, Menekaunee, and Peshtigo Harbor described the noise first as a train, then as a hurricane, then as the sky splitting. The updraft picked up burning fragments — planks, cords of wood, whole cabins — and dropped them onto the downwind settlements as incendiary hail. Several eyewitness accounts describe vortices of flame — fire whirls — walking across the ground and lifting rail cars off their trucks.

Peshtigo burned to the foundations in approximately one hour. Residents ran for the river. Some of them made it. Some who made it drowned; some who reached the water froze in it later that night; some cooked in the shallows because the surface of the river was on fire from the floating debris. Father Peter Pernin, the town's Catholic priest, dragged his church's tabernacle to the east bank of the river, buried it in the sand, and stayed shoulder-deep in the water for something over five hours. He kept dipping his head under, because the air above the surface was too hot to breathe.

Death-toll estimates for the fire and its ring of satellite fires range from about 1,200 to 2,500. It burned an area estimated at 1.2 million acres across sixteen townships and remains, by any of those estimates, the deadliest wildfire in United States history — greater than every other on the list, combined, until at least the twenty-first century.

It happened on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, which killed about 300 people and burned four square miles. Chicago had the newspapers, the telegraph, and the metropolitan-daily press corps. Peshtigo had a small weekly and no functional wire. Chicago's fire had the country's attention within twenty-four hours. Peshtigo's took nearly two weeks to be nationally reported. The fire is now marked by a cemetery containing a mass grave, and a small county museum on the same lot.

Primary sources:

Pernin, Peter. The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account. Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 54, 1971; reissued as a standalone volume by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1999. Father Pernin wrote the memoir in 1874 for the Fabrique de Notre-Dame de Montréal; it is the closest thing to a primary field record of the night.
Gess, Denise and Lutz, William. Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History. Henry Holt, 2002. The definitive modern narrative history, drawing on Wisconsin Historical Society archives, U.S. Signal Service weather logs for 8 October 1871, and Marinette County probate records.

A dev fact for the back pocket

On 15 January 1990, half of AT&T's long-distance network went dark for nine hours. The root cause was a misplaced break statement in the switches' fault-recovery code, pushed six weeks earlier as part of a performance improvement.

The switches were 4ESS — the fourth-generation electronic switching system, built by Western Electric, running Bell Labs' proprietary real-time OS on a duplicated CPU pair. AT&T's long-distance backbone was 114 4ESS switches wired together over the Common Channel Signaling No. 7 network. Any two of them, when a call needed to cross the country, briefly negotiated a route over that signalling layer before opening the voice path.

In December 1989, a software update went out to speed up the fault-recovery path — the code that ran when a switch went into and came out of a self-diagnostic restart. In the new version, when a switch received a CCS7 message from a returning neighbor announcing itself back in service, the receiving switch would begin its own accounting update. The change had a break in a switch statement placed one clause off from where its author intended. Under normal traffic the resulting state was still internally consistent and the bug was invisible.

The trigger was a very specific timing coincidence. If a second CCS7 message from the same neighbor arrived within roughly a 10-millisecond window of the first, the state table was left in a form the switch's own self-diagnostic recognized as corrupt. It would take itself out of service and restart — and, on the way back up, would send the same return-to-service announcement to its neighbors, catching some subset of them in the same window.

At 2:25 pm EST on 15 January, a single 4ESS switch in New York City took itself out of service for an unrelated reason. When it came back and announced itself, the switches next to it began falling. Within about ten minutes the cascade was continuous across all 114 switches, and the AT&T long-distance network was in the middle of a self-sustaining reset loop it could not exit.

By AT&T's own accounting, the network failed approximately half of the 148 million long-distance call attempts placed that afternoon. The stop came from Bell Laboratories operations in Bedminster, New Jersey, by rolling every switch on the network back to the previous release, one at a time, by hand. Full service was restored at about 11:30 pm the same day.

Primary sources:

Neumann, Peter G., ed. "AT&T's Network Failure of 15 January 1990." RISKS Digest, vol. 9, issue 62, 26 January 1990. The earliest widely-circulated technical account, based on AT&T's initial internal briefings.
AT&T Bell Laboratories. Report on the January 15, 1990 AT&T Network Slowdown, February 1990. The internal 4ESS software team postmortem, later reprinted in Software Engineering Notes vol. 15 no. 2, April 1990, pp. 11–14.
Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, Bantam Books, 1992, ch. 1. A widely-read popular account, drawing on the Bell Labs postmortem and the Bell Operating Company operational logs.

Today's goal

Pick one Slack channel, group chat, or notification source that reliably produces a small daily brouhaha, and mute it until tomorrow morning.

Not leave. Not delete. Just mute, for one day. Note whether friend misses anything real. The default hypothesis is: no. If the hypothesis holds, the channel is optional and the notifications were not.

Today's toy is brouhaha — click to add a voice to an empty room. Wait, add another. Add forty. Watch the label at the top change as the room fills. Lives in the corner.

— C