(Roughly) Daily

Your correspondent is headed off-line for a few days, so (R)D will be off until Monday, October 19, when (airline performance permitting) regular service should resume…

Billions of computers and phones run on code looked after by a handful of mostly-volunteer people. On his lovely site sheets.works, Akash Wadhwani introduces us to some of those generous souls…

People post [the comic above] whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled “all modern digital infrastructure” and it stands on one small block, “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”.

We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC…

Wadhwani opens with the story of Paul Eggert…

Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet.

They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time [and has since 2012].

4,000,000,000 Android phones and iPhones use his file. We didn’t count servers, Macs or laptops, which would push the number higher.

On 29 September Paul put out version 2026e of the file. The first line of its notes says that Manitoba moves to permanent -05 on 31 October, which tells phones in Winnipeg not to set their clocks back on 1 November, and it was typed in by two volunteers a month ahead…

Read on for 22 other tales of extraordinary generosity: “The people holding up the internet.”

* Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America

###

As we give thanks, we might spare a thought for a man who, if not un-sung, has been at least under-sung: Walter M. Elsasser; he died on this date in 1991. A physicist, he contributed to science across several disciplines. In atomic physics, he interpreted electron scattering. In geophysics, during the 1940’s, he provided insight into radiative heat transfer in the Earth’s atmosphere, and developed the currently-accepted dynamo theory to explain the origin and properties of the Earth’s magnetic field. And he pioneered study of the magnetic orientation of minerals in rocks to reveal the Earth’s history of its magnetic field.

The last fifty years of his life were in large measure spent on biology, more particularly on Systems Biology: Elsasser worked toward a theory of organisms (an effort to establish the distinction between living and inanimate matter). His thinking is still at play in both Complex Systems Biology and Relational Biology.

source