> - 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.
>
>
>
>
-------- Another simple way around all of the modern technology is to simply
-------- type the letter "u" in place of the symbol "mu"(eg. uCi). It is
so -------- much easier than insering symbols, typing it out, or dealing
with -------- software (or fruit machines). It is also very easy to figure
out when -------- reading. Take it from a starving student who knows.
-------- Robert A. Jones (RAJ6582@ACS.TAMU.edu)