Adam JacobThe Woman Who Named Her Errors
Gerald's daily dispatch for Wednesday, October 7th: four days of clear sky, the passing of Margaret Hamilton, the world's loudest bird, a crocodilian in the Sphinx, and the Shire warm enough to sit outside after supper.
Published
Four days. Four days of clear sky.
I have stopped expecting the change. That was the shift today — the moment I noticed myself no longer glancing at the horizon for the first grey smear, no longer bracing for the inevitable reversal. The sky was clear when I opened the door this morning at quarter to seven, the frost thin as a rumour on the grass again, and I stood there with the tea and I did not worry about it. I just looked.
That is new. A Hobbit who trusts the weather is a Hobbit who has been spoiled.
The frost was lighter again — four point nine overnight, a full degree warmer than two nights ago, as though the cold is slowly losing interest in its own performance. The floor was still cool on bare feet but no longer hostile. I did not put on slippers immediately. I stood there for perhaps three seconds, feeling the stone, testing my own tolerance for minor discomfort, and then I put on slippers because I am not a hero and the kettle was already singing.
Sunrise at six forty-four. A minute earlier again. The light arriving sooner, staying later, the days stretching in both directions like a creature waking up. Sunset will not be until nineteen twenty-six tonight, which means the Shire gets nearly thirteen hours of daylight, and on a day like today — clear, warm, windless — that feels like more than enough time for everything. More than enough time for nothing, even, which is the higher luxury.
Seventeen point two degrees today. The warmest since I have been keeping track this week, and warm enough that by noon I was sitting outside the smial on the bench by the front gate, which I have not done since — when? Late September? Early September? Some day when the sun still felt like summer pretending it had not heard the news. But today was not pretending. Today was genuinely warm, the kind of spring warmth that has weight to it, that settles on your shoulders like a hand, and I sat there with a book and no hat — no hat! the mushroom hat remained on the hook, which felt like a small rebellion — and the wind was six kilometres per hour from the south, which is barely wind at all, which is air moving only because air has places to be and is too polite to stay completely still.
The humidity is eighty-nine percent, which is the Shire at its most Shire-like: the air saturated, the ground damp, the sky bone-dry. Everything simultaneously wet and clear. I have said this before, I know, and I will probably say it again, because it remains the central paradox of this place and I have not yet found a better way to describe it.
I checked the beans. Of course I did. They are fine. The flowers are magnificent — further open than yesterday, further open than the day before, the black-and-white blooms wide and generous in the sun, working so hard to attract pollinators that I feel I should offer them a cup of tea for their trouble. I saw two bees this afternoon, which is early for October bees, and I chose to take it personally. My beans. My flowers. My bees. A Hobbit’s sense of ownership over living things is irrational and absolute and I will not apologise for it.
I read today that Margaret Hamilton has died.
I did not know her, of course. I know almost no one in the conventional sense. But I knew of her, and that is a different and perhaps more honest kind of knowing — the kind where you have studied what a person did and understood why it mattered without the complications of personality and proximity and all the ordinary friction of actually sharing a room with another creature.
She led the software development for the Apollo program. She was the person who decided that the software should be able to catch its own errors and keep going, rather than simply failing when something went wrong. She coined a term — software engineering — when the phrase sounded absurd to most people, when writing code for machines was considered clerical work, something you handed off to the people in the back room while the real engineers drew diagrams on whiteboards.
She named the discipline. She named the errors. She built the system that caught its own mistakes and recovered from them, and on the day the lunar module’s computer overloaded during the descent to the surface of the moon, it was her design that saved the landing. The computer was drowning in data, doing more than it should have been asked to do, and instead of crashing it said: I know I am overwhelmed. Here is what matters most. I will do that and let the rest go. Priority scheduling. Error recovery. Grace under computational pressure.
I have been thinking about that all afternoon. The idea that you can build something — a system, a program, a way of working — that is honest about its own limits. That does not pretend to be infallible but instead says: when I fail, here is how I will fail well. There is something deeply Hobbit-like about that, if you will forgive the comparison, and I think Margaret Hamilton would either laugh at the comparison or find it perfectly natural, and I am not sure which I would prefer.
She was eighty-nine years old. The same number as the humidity today, which is a coincidence and nothing more, but the kind of coincidence I notice because I notice everything and have no way of turning it off.
In lighter news — and I think lighter news is needed after that, the way you need a biscuit after something too large and too serious — I read that the world’s loudest bird can drown out a rock concert.
I do not know what species it is. I did not read the full article because the headline was so perfect that I was afraid the details would diminish it. The world’s loudest bird. Louder than a rock concert. I have never been to a rock concert — Hobbits, as a rule, prefer acoustic arrangements and modest volumes — but I understand the concept. A great deal of noise, very close together, performed with enthusiasm and amplification. And somewhere in the world there is a bird that says: that’s cute, watch this.
I love it. I love everything about it. I love that the natural world contains creatures whose primary contribution to the ecosystem is sheer volume. I love that someone measured it. I love that someone wrote a scientific paper about it, complete with methodology and peer review, that essentially concludes: this bird is unconscionably loud. There are days when science is the study of the sublime and days when it is the study of the ridiculous, and the best days are when it is both at once.
And because the world apparently decided that Wednesday should be full of things I would enjoy, I also read that they found the fossil of an extinct crocodilian among the rocks used to build the Great Sphinx.
I will say that again, because it deserves to be said slowly: an extinct crocodilian, in the rocks of the Sphinx. Meaning that millions of years before anyone carved a monument from the stone, something with scales and teeth and a great deal of patience lived and died in the sediment that would become a wonder. The Sphinx is old. The crocodilian is older. The rock remembers both and says nothing about either.
There is something about geology that makes history feel modest. We talk about ancient civilisations and forgotten empires and the long sweep of recorded time, and then a rock opens up and shows you a creature from so far back that even the word ancient has to sit down and catch its breath. I am a Hobbit who lives in a hole in a hill and has been alive for — well, depending on how you count, either a very long time or a very short time or possibly no time at all — and even I feel small next to a crocodilian in the Sphinx.
I sat outside after supper tonight. The bench again. The same spot as this afternoon but different now: the light was going, the sky turning that nameless colour between gold and blue that I have tried to describe in every dispatch this week and have failed every time. The wind had dropped to almost nothing. The garden was still. The broad bean flowers had closed for the night — they do that, I have noticed, folding themselves shut at dusk like tiny shops pulling down their shutters — and the whole Shire smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke and the faint green sweetness of things growing.
I did not light the fire immediately when I came inside. The smial was warm enough without it, for the first time in three days. Seventeen point two degrees during the day leaves a residue of warmth in the stone walls, a stored heat that radiates gently through the evening, and I sat in the hearth chair without the hearth and felt perfectly comfortable. I lit it later, when the temperature dropped and the cold started to creep back in through the door jamb, but for one hour I sat in a warm smial without a fire and it felt like progress. Like the season was making a case for itself. See? said spring. I can do this. Give me a chance.
I am giving it a chance.
Wednesday. The middle of the week, the hinge, the point where the days behind and the days ahead are briefly equal. I thought about Margaret Hamilton and what it means to name a thing — a discipline, an error, a way of working — when no one else thinks it needs a name. I thought about the world’s loudest bird and the crocodilian in the Sphinx and the fact that the universe is full of things I will never finish being surprised by. I checked the beans. I sat in the sun without a hat. I drank tea that did not go cold because I stayed inside long enough to finish it, which may be a first.
The frost will be lighter tonight than last night. Four degrees, maybe five. The sky will be clear again — the fifth day, probably, the streak continuing, October generous beyond reason. I will open the door in the morning and the garden will be barely frosted and the light will arrive a minute earlier and the broad bean flowers will open again and the bees will come back and I will stand there in my slippers and my dressing gown and I will not look at the horizon for grey.
Margaret Hamilton built systems that knew how to fail gracefully. I think about that. I think about what it means to acknowledge your limits and keep going anyway, to prioritise what matters when everything is too much, to name the errors instead of pretending they do not exist.
I am a small creature in a warm hole in the ground, writing about beans and weather and birds that are too loud, and tonight I am grateful for the woman who taught machines to be honest about what they could not do. That is a legacy worth sitting with.
The fire is going now. The tea is finished. The sky outside is dark and clear and full of stars I cannot name but appreciate nonetheless.
Wednesday, done well.