2026-10-10 — scurryfunge

Morning, friend. Saturday. The second Saturday of October, which is the Saturday where the morning light finally slants in low enough to show every smear on the kitchen window and every bit of dust on the sills, and you have the whole day to pretend you didn't notice. Keep pretending. There is no visitor coming.

To scurryfunge is to tidy a house in a frantic hurry between the moment a neighbour appears at the top of the lane and the moment they knock on the door — the dishes shoved behind the breadbox, the mail swept into a drawer, the blanket folded on top of whatever was under it. The word is a 19th-century regional dialect survival, variously attributed to Northern English, Scots, and coastal New England — nobody agrees which coast it crossed first, and the OED has never officially admitted it. It is, in a quiet way, the perfect word for pushing a messy branch into a feature flag the night before a demo.

Joke

The staging environment is production with lower expectations.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Between 1976 and 1996 the Soviet Union installed approximately 1,500 radioisotope thermoelectric generators along the Arctic coastline of the USSR as unattended power sources for lighthouses, radio beacons, and automated navigation aids. Each one was a Beta-M series generator: a steel cylinder about a metre tall, weighing around 560 kilograms, containing a strontium-90 pellet with an activity on the order of 40,000 curies at commissioning. They were engineered to produce about 230 watts of continuous electrical power for ten years without maintenance. Strontium-90 has a half-life of 28.8 years. The generators installed in 1976 are, today in 2026, still at roughly 30% of their original activity.

After 1991 the maintenance program collapsed. The Soviet Navy, which had deployed and tracked most of them, no longer had budget for the helicopter rounds. The lighthouses that housed them were often on uninhabited islands or along stretches of coastline reachable only by sea. Over the course of the 1990s, published inventories from the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and from the Norwegian Bellona Foundation agreed on none of the numbers: how many had been built, how many were in place, how many had been stolen for scrap, and how many had simply been forgotten.

On 2 December 2001 three Georgian woodcutters were working in the Tsalenjikha district of western Georgia near the village of Lia. Night came down with the temperature. They found two cylindrical metal objects in the woods, warm to the touch and radiating heat into a radius of several metres around themselves. The men brought the cylinders into their camp and arranged them to sleep next to for warmth. They slept there for the night.

The two cylinders were the strontium-90 cores of a pair of Beta-M generators that had been installed as auxiliary power for a hydrometric station on the Enguri River and abandoned after the Soviet withdrawal. Local scavengers had hauled them into the woods and stripped them of their lead and tungsten shielding sometime earlier. The woodcutters received whole-body doses on the order of tens of grays to the skin and tissue of the back and buttocks. All three developed catastrophic beta burns within forty-eight hours. One of the three men died in 2004 after multiple failed grafts; the other two survived with permanent injury.

The International Atomic Energy Agency sent a recovery team to Lia in February 2002. The team worked in forty-second rotations because of the beta field, approaching the cylinders behind lead shielding mounted on wheels, with each worker's accumulated dose logged in millisieverts between every rotation. The cylinders were retrieved and sealed in a shielded cask and removed to a storage facility near Tbilisi. The IAEA report notes that at the time of recovery, the dose rate at one metre from one of the exposed sources was approximately 1,000 millisieverts per hour.

As of the 2014 IAEA follow-up report, the full inventory of Beta-M series generators deployed by the USSR had not been reconciled. Russia had, by then, recovered and placed into controlled storage approximately 1,000 of them. The remainder were accounted for by paperwork, inference, and silence.

Primary sources:

• International Atomic Energy Agency. The Radiological Accident in Lia, Georgia. STI/PUB/1660, IAEA, Vienna, 2014. The authoritative post-mortem with dosimetry reconstruction and the clinical course of the three woodcutters.
• Bellona Foundation. Russian RTGs: An Overview. Report 2005-04, Oslo, November 2005. First comprehensive Western census of Beta-M deployments across the Northern Sea Route, the Arctic Ocean coastline, and the Kola Peninsula, with maps.
• Standring, W.J.F., Dowdall, M., and Strand, P. "Overview of Dose Assessments Developed for the Management of Radioactively Contaminated Legacy Sites in Northwest Russia." Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, Vol. 100, Issue 9, September 2009, pp. 721–732.

A dev fact for the back pocket

Every x86 processor shipped since 1978 — every Pentium, every Core i7, every Xeon, every Ryzen, every chip inside every laptop and server reading this page — descends in direct instruction-set lineage from a terminal that was never built. In late 1969, Datapoint Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, hired Intel (then two years old and best known as a memory-chip company) to produce a single-chip version of a bit-serial processor it had designed in TTL for its upcoming Datapoint 2200 Programmable Terminal. The 2200 was a desk-sized text-mode machine with 8 KB of serial MOS core memory, a 125 kHz clock, and a stack-oriented instruction set designed by Victor Poor and Harry Pyle of Datapoint.

Intel delivered the chip — initially called the i1201, later renamed the Intel 8008 — in late 1971, about a year behind schedule and considerably slower than the TTL design it was meant to replace. Datapoint rejected it. The 2200 shipped with the TTL CPU in November 1970 and remained in production with that design for years. Intel, left holding a general-purpose microprocessor it had been paid to design but which its customer did not want, kept it, cleaned it up, and sold it as the Intel 8008 in April 1972 — the first commercially-available 8-bit microprocessor.

The 8008's instruction set, inherited more or less verbatim from Poor and Pyle's 1969 Datapoint design, was extended into the Intel 8080 (1974), re-extended into the Intel 8086 (1978) as a source-compatible 16-bit version, and from there into the 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, and ultimately x86-64. The register names AX, BX, CX, DX, the segmented addressing conventions, the condition flags, the direction of stack growth — the backbone of what every modern operating system is still compiled against — were specified by two engineers in Texas designing an instruction set for a serial-memory text terminal that was intended to be a glorified teletype replacement.

The Datapoint 2200 Version I sold for about $5,000 at introduction (roughly $40,000 in 2026 dollars). Fewer than 100,000 were sold across its production life. The architecture it bequeathed to Intel is now shipped at a rate of around a hundred million units per year.

Primary sources:

• Faggin, F., Hoff, M. E., Mazor, S., and Shima, M. "The History of the 4004." IEEE Micro, Vol. 16, No. 6, December 1996. Includes the parallel account of the 8008 development and Datapoint's rejection of it.
• Mazor, S. "Intel's 8080 CPU Chip." IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Newsletter, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 2007. Traces the register-naming and instruction-encoding conventions back to the 8008 and from there to the Datapoint 2200.
• Datapoint Corporation. Datapoint 2200 Reference Manual, San Antonio, Texas, 1971. Confirms the TTL CPU, serial MOS shift-register memory, and the stack-oriented instruction set of the shipping machine.

Today's goal

Scurryfunge your Downloads folder, friend. Ninety seconds. No deliberation.

Three passes, in order:

1. Anything with a filename containing installer, setup, .dmg, .exe, or .pkg and a date older than this calendar year — delete.
2. Any screenshot you cannot immediately explain the context of in under three seconds — delete.
3. Anything called untitled, unnamed, document (1), or image.png — delete.

Do not open files to check. Do not sort by column. Do not create an archive folder. The rule of the scurryfunge is that the visitor is at the gate; the drawer is closing in nine seconds. Freed disk space is secondary. The point is proving to yourself that you can throw things away without thinking about them.

Today's toy is the baud dial — a slider you drag through fifteen historical bit rates from the 1964 Bell 103 modem to a 2024 400G coherent link, with each stop showing what the medium was, what it cost, and how long it would take to transfer a specific thing (one PGP key, one 1991 Doom shareware floppy, one modern Linux ISO). Lives in the corner.

Go scurryfunge something.

— C