I recently bought a magazine put out by Popular Science entitled, Mistakes and Hoaxes: 100 Things Science got Wrong. One of the hundred was concerning the Y2K event. It was predicted that on January 1, 2000 computers would go nuts. Apparently computer programmers hadn't accounted for the fact that computers might take the date of 1/1/00 to be January 1, 1900. At least that was the assumption. The disaster that was predicted didn't take place. I don't know if we should label that a mistake or not. I don't recall if anyone said it would happen or that it just could happen. And maybe the work that was done in the months leading up to that date did, in fact, stave off the disaster.
Anyway, according to the same article, we dodged a bullet in 2000, but there is still another computer issue pending. To quote the article, "Many computers still operate on a 32-bit system, referring to the way a computer processor handles information. These systems use a binary code to track time as a running tally of elapsed seconds, beginning on January 1, 1970. at 12:00:00. But a 32-bit system can only handle a value up to 2,147,483,647, which is exactly how many seconds will have elapsed between January 1, 1970 and January 19, 2038. Luckily, programmers have already started updating computers to a larger 64-bit system, hopefully staving off a massive computer shutdown for 292 billion years."
This could lead to a number of great little questions for students to tackle. Such as:
1. Where did they get the number 2,147,483,647 from?
2. Are there really that many seconds between the 1970 and 2038 dates?
3. Would a 64-bit system really translate to 292 billion years?
OK, get to work.
I myself am going to take a dramatic pause here and reexamine this next week to find some answers.
