For all those of you with slightly older PC's Here's a reason to
rejoice!!!
New Integer Discovered, Millenium Bug Delayed
Those computer scientists trying to find a fix for the so-called
"millenium bug" have just gotten a break thanks to the discovery of a new
integer by an unnamed mathematics professor at a well known university.
The number, which comes between 1999 and 2000 is 199f. The f is a symbol
for the digit foof which is normally an imaginary number but occasionally
pops into the realm of real numbers -- by the way, that's the word
"Foof", not hexadecimal eff-zero-zero-eff.
The reason for this is that although 10 is an exact integer, the base of
our decimal number system is approximately 9.995002 which we usually
round up to 10. The number that we call "one" actually has a value of
about .9995002.
This means that due to the rounding errors inherent in our decimal number
system, it takes 2001 times .9995002 to make the year 2000, so this means
that the millenium bug won't actually strike until what we have been
thinking of as 2001.
When asked why we hadn't discovered this before, the professor replied
"We've always been in a rush, doing simple integer arithmetic and
ignoring the fractions. Now that we're counting years at the actual rate
of only one per year, we can see the situation clearly for a change."
Whether or not 199f is a leap year has yet to be answered. The usual
procedure of dividing by 4 doesn't apply because 4 is also an
approximation. Researchers hope to answer this question before 199f so
that calendars can be printed.
When asked if there are any more years between 1999 and 2000, we were
told that "while theoretically possible, our current research shows it's
extremely unlikely -- the numbers indicate that we might be able to
squeeze another day or two out of the seventh decimal place, but beyond
that we're only looking at a minute here and there."
George Trudeau, Town of Falmouth
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