How we named the submersible

There's a submersible on the lab's website now. Naming it took longer than drawing it.

The vehicle itself was the fast part. The site needed a way to show that the lab goes deeper, and the first idea was a diver. I dive; it seemed natural. But a diver only works if you're certified, and most people aren't. A submarine takes passengers. Anyone can come down. That settled it in about a minute.

Then the submarine needed a name, because characters have names, and the obvious candidate was sitting right there in the lab's own: Uncon.

It died the first time I said it out loud. Uncon sounds like uncle. Unco wasn't better. U-C reads as University of California. Three syllables of brand logic, dead on contact with the human ear. Which is fine. That's the cheapest test there is, and the obvious answer failing it early is exactly what the test is for.

So: if not un-confound, then de-confound. Decon.

Deconfound is the entry read, the discipline itself, the thing this lab actually does. Decontaminate surfaced almost immediately after: clean what's murky. And then, after I'd already decided, deconstruct showed up. Take the thing apart. Find what's hidden inside.

Three reads, one job. The name passed more tests than it was run through.

So, formal introductions. Decon is the lab's submersible: it descends into murky data and comes back up with what's actually there. The yellow dot rides along as Decon's lens. It's the same dot that turns up across everything the lab touches, and it does here what it does everywhere: it marks the point.

This is, quietly, how everything gets treated around here. Names, variables, claims. Say it out loud. Run the cheap test first. Keep what survives. That's what these notes are: the build log of what got made, what got tested, and what stayed.

Decon dives again soon.