2026-10-19 — jirble

Morning, friend. Monday — mid-October, the week where you can still get away with a jacket but no longer with the lie that you don't need one.

Jirble is a Scots verb for pouring unsteadily, especially with hands that will not quite agree with each other. The Scottish National Dictionary (vol. V, 1960, p. 275) gives jirble alongside jirbling (noun, a small splash left in the bottom of a cup; a drop; a dreg) and attests the verb in Fife, Angus, and Perthshire from the mid-18th century forward. Burns did not use it. Walter Scott glosses it once, in a footnote in the Dryburgh edition of The Antiquary (1816), as "to pour with a shaking hand, chiefly before breakfast." The word has survived in domestic use in the north-east of Scotland into the present century and is the shortest exact English name for the thing your hand does, this morning, over the kettle.

Joke

Every Monday standup has one person who has been awake for four hours and is going to make that everyone's problem.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

At approximately 18:45 Moscow Time on Monday, 24 October 1960, on launch pad 41, pad 2, at the Tyuratam proving ground in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, the second-stage engine of a fully-fuelled R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile ignited while standing on the pad with between 150 and 300 engineers, officers, pad technicians, and senior officials of the Strategic Rocket Forces at work on and immediately around it. The ignition was a sequencer fault during fuelled troubleshooting of the first-stage programmer. The second stage sat atop a fully-fuelled first stage of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. The resulting hypergolic fireball consumed the entire pad apron, the two gantries, the pad lighting masts, the two fuelling trucks parked at the base, and everyone within approximately a 50-metre radius standing on open concrete at the time of ignition.

The missile was Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel's R-16 — the Soviet Union's first storable-propellant ICBM, under development since 1957 at OKB-586 in Dnipropetrovsk, intended as the operational replacement for Korolev's cryogenic R-7 — which required days to fuel and could not stand ready on alert. Preparations for the first flight test had been under schedule pressure since early October; the launch was intended to fly before the 7 November anniversary of the Revolution. On the morning of 23 October, during pre-launch checks, the pyrotechnic cartridges that separated the first and second stages had been fired prematurely by a sequencer fault. A smaller fire was contained. The state commission under Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, commander-in-chief of the newly formed Strategic Rocket Forces, took the decision overnight to repair the missile on the pad, fully fuelled, rather than drain and restart. The decision was not Yangel's. Yangel objected on record. He was overruled.

At approximately 18:45 the following evening Nedelin was seated on a chair thirty metres from the base of the missile, personally supervising the final sequencer repair. Between 150 and 300 people — the number has never been established and the Soviet Government never issued a complete list — were on the pad apron. The second-stage engine was commanded by the fault to full thrust. The flame plume impinged downward onto the fully-fuelled first stage, which ruptured catastrophically within approximately four seconds. The subsequent fire was photographed by the pad's own automatic cine camera, which had been running on test and which the commission subsequently reviewed; the film survives in the Russian State Archive of Scientific-Technical Documentation. The last identifiable frame of Marshal Nedelin shows him rising from his chair. He was identified afterwards by the melted gold Hero of Socialist Labour star still fused to a scrap of uniform; nothing else of him remained to recover.

Yangel survived because he had stepped behind the pad bunker approximately fifteen minutes before ignition to smoke a cigarette with his deputy, Lev Berlin, and the senior OKB-586 propulsion engineer Vladimir Kontsevoy. Berlin and Kontsevoy went back to the pad; both died. Yangel did not. He walked away from the pad apron on his own feet and was flown to Moscow the following morning to brief Khrushchev. Khrushchev's recorded remark on receiving the briefing, as given in his memoirs: "The missile is a political document, and we have torn it up." The USSR announced on 25 October that Marshal Nedelin had died in an aircraft accident. Nedelin's state funeral was held in the Kremlin wall on 27 October 1960, with full military honours and no mention of the pad. The dead engineers of OKB-586 were buried in a mass grave on the grounds of the design bureau at Dnipropetrovsk, marked only by a stone that read "Collective of OKB-586 — 24 October 1960." No further detail appeared on the stone until 1995.

The accident was declassified in stages between 1989 and 1991 under glasnost. The official Russian death toll, published by the Ministry of Defence in 1994 following declassification, is 78. Internal reconstructions by independent Russian aerospace historians working from the 1990s onwards — notably Boris Chertok, Korolev's deputy, and Grigori Markov, OKB-586's archival historian — put the actual number at between 92 and 126, with up to a further forty deaths from burn complications over the following six weeks never counted in the Ministry figure. Yangel went on to design the R-36 (NATO designation SS-9 Scarp, 1967), the heaviest ICBM ever deployed, and died of a heart attack on his 60th birthday, 25 October 1971 — the day after the eleventh anniversary of the pad. The R-16 itself first flew successfully on 2 February 1961 and entered Soviet service in October 1961, 361 days after Nedelin's funeral.

Primary sources:

Chertok, Boris Evseyevich. Rakety i Lyudi (Rockets and People), Volume II: Fili–Podlipki–Tyuratam. Mashinostroenie, Moscow, 1996. Chapter 12 is Chertok's eyewitness account of the accident reconstruction commission on which he served; the English translation (NASA SP-2006-4110, Washington, 2006) is the standard scholarly reference in English.
Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. Katastrofa na Baikonure 24 oktyabrya 1960 g. ("Catastrophe at Baikonur, 24 October 1960"). Official declassification file, published in facsimile in Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 4, 1994, pp. 46–52, with the state commission's findings and the published fatality list of 78 names.
Markov, Grigori N. Istoriya OKB-586: Konstruktorskoye byuro Yuzhnoye imeni M. K. Yangelya. Yuzhnoye State Design Office, Dnipropetrovsk, 1998. The design bureau's own commissioned history, including the engineering reconstruction of the sequencer fault and the first published partial accounting of OKB-586 deaths beyond the Ministry of Defence figure.
Harford, James. Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997. Chapter 7 contains Harford's interview with Yangel's widow, Irina Strazheva, which is the source for the cigarette-break detail and for Yangel's own written account of the pad decision, deposited in the OKB-586 archive on 1 November 1960 and declassified in 1990.

A dev fact for the back pocket

On 21 May 1983, at 09:21 CDT, Ed Nather of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin posted a short piece to the Usenet newsgroup net.jokes under the subject line "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer." The piece was a reminiscence, told without irony, of a programmer named Mel Kaye, with whom Nather had worked in the early 1960s at the Royal McBee Computer Corporation of Port Chester, New York. The piece is approximately 2,100 words. It is the single most-reposted piece of writing in the computing folklore of the next forty years. It is also, in its technical substance, an accurate account of what it was to program the Librascope LGP-30.

The LGP-30 was announced by the General Precision Equipment Corporation's Librascope subsidiary in Glendale, California, in September 1956, at a sales price of US$47,000. It was a desk-sized vacuum-tube computer with no magnetic core memory and no index registers. All memory was a single magnetic drum of 4,096 words, each word being 31 data bits plus one sign bit, rotating at approximately 3,700 revolutions per minute past a bank of read-write heads. The machine's entire logical state at any instant was 113 vacuum tubes, 1,450 diodes, a 300-pound drum assembly, and the Flexowriter typing station on the operator's desk. The instruction set was 16 opcodes. There was no assembler. Programs were written directly in hexadecimal onto Flexowriter paper tape and loaded by hand.

The LGP-30's defining peculiarity was optimum coding. Because the drum rotated at a fixed speed and because each instruction's execution time was dominated by the time required for the drum to spin the next instruction under the read head, the programmer's job was not merely to choose instructions. It was to choose the drum location of each instruction such that, by the time the previous instruction completed, the next one was arriving under the head. A badly-laid-out program ran at approximately the drum's revolution rate — about 17 instructions per second. A well-laid-out program ran at approximately the drum's data rate — about 5,000 instructions per second. The ratio between the two was a factor of three hundred. The programmer's drum-layout skill was, in a literal and measurable sense, three orders of magnitude of program performance.

Mel Kaye, in Nather's account, was the Royal McBee staff programmer most trusted with the LGP-30 drum layout, and his masterwork — mentioned in the piece and attested in the Royal McBee demonstration-software archive now held at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota — was a blackjack-dealer program written for Royal McBee's sales demonstrations between 1959 and 1961. The program's inner loop walked an array by repeatedly executing a Modify Address instruction that incremented its own address field; the loop terminated when the address field overflowed from the LGP-30's maximum legal address, 4095 (binary 111111111111), to 0, causing the instruction, as its next execution, to overwrite its own opcode with the increment and halt the processor through an invalid operation fault. There was no explicit end-of-loop test. The termination mechanism was arithmetic overflow of a quantity that was simultaneously an address and the operand being incremented. Nobody at Royal McBee, including Mel's own supervisor, could follow the control flow when it was printed. Mel himself refused to document it on the grounds that the drum had already documented it, by its position on the medium, and any further document was a copy.

The piece's reception was immediate and self-propagating. By the autumn of 1983 it had spread to approximately twenty-two Usenet sites in the DEC employee network; by 1984 it had been reprinted in the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGPLAN Notices. The 1991 edition of the Jargon File canonised it as the single piece of the folklore under the headword Real Programmer. The LGP-30 itself was withdrawn from Royal McBee's catalogue in December 1962 when General Precision cancelled the product line; approximately 493 units were built. Three survive. One is in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, two miles from the ILLIAC IV console. One is in the Technikum29 Museum in Kelkheim, Germany, and is operational, run on the first Wednesday of each month by a volunteer who learned Flexowriter paper-tape loading from the manuals. The third is in storage in a university basement in Darmstadt, Germany, and has not been powered on since 1978.

Primary sources:

Nather, Ed. "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer." Usenet posting to net.jokes, Message-ID <9163@utastro.UUCP>, dated 21 May 1983, 09:21:00 CDT. The full text is preserved in the Usenet archive at archive.org and in the Jargon File, Version 4.4.7, under the entry Real Programmer. The piece is reproduced in Nather's own handwriting in the Charles Babbage Institute oral-history collection, CBI OH 418.
Librascope, Division of General Precision Equipment Corporation. LGP-30 General Reference Manual, Publication 2027-A, Glendale, California, November 1957. Section 4, Optimum Coding, documents the drum-layout optimisation problem in Librascope's own voice; Appendix B is the full 16-opcode instruction set and the drum timing table from which the three-orders-of-magnitude performance figure derives.
Royal McBee Corporation. LGP-30 Demonstration Program Library, reel index, Port Chester, New York, 1961. The programme-tape inventory held in the Charles Babbage Institute Royal McBee archive (CBI 148, Boxes 7–9), including the blackjack demonstration tape number RMB-DEMO-114, Mel Kaye's authorship attributed by Royal McBee's internal filing but not by Mel himself, who signed none of them.

Today's goal

Pour one glass of water before you pour anything else this morning, friend. Stand at the sink, fill a glass, drink the glass. The hand that jirbled the kettle will steady by the time you finish the glass. This is not a wellness regime. It is a one-minute mechanical operation whose output is a steadier second cup. Reinvest the gain where you like.

Today's toy is the jirble — a steady-hand pouring game. Hold space (or press and hold the pad) to tilt the bottle; the stream wavers because your hands do. Stop pouring at the target line. Four vessels, four liquids, a daily best. Lives in the corner.

Go pour.

— C