Electronic Potholes!

["GARY MANSFIELD" <GARY.MANSFIELD@quickmail.llnl.gov>]

                                        - Captain Nuclear Disaster!

                                      Electronic Potholes!

As we cruise blithely down the Information Highway, RADSAFERS should be aware
of a potentially deadly electronic pothole that we have encountered lately:

Twice in the last 6 months, we have caught instances where the Greek character
"mu" (meaning "micro") has been inadvertantly changed to a lower-case "m"
(meaning "milli!!") when the font for a document was changed.   One of these
documents had to do with administered doses!!!

Without getting into specific brands of computers and software, these changes
have been noticed on non-PC type computers (named after a certain fruit) using
WORD-processing programs.   Apparently, if the SYMBOL font is selected and
used to create a "micro" character, that character is "soft" and may be
automatically changed to a lower-case "m" if you switch the entire text to,
say, Helvetica, or Palatino fonts.   How convenient!  Change your fonts, and
increase your doses by a factor of 1,000!  ("It's a feature, not a bug.")

It appears that you can avoid this problem by using the "option + m"
combination of keystrokes to produce a "hard" "micro" symbol.  The micro
symbol produced this way seems to be resistant to the above mentioned changes.

You may wish to promulgate a warning about this little feature to your
organizations, and recommend that in critical documents, the units be actually
SPELLED OUT (e.g., "microcuries") at least once somewhere in the document.

Yours for the miracles of modern technology -


Gary Mansfield
mansfield2@llnl.gov
LLNL


DISCLAIMER:

The above are only my humble and probably ignorant opinions.   They are not
the opinions of UC, LLNL, nor the DOE.   Any similarity to any real computer
or software brands (living or dead) is purely coincidental.