Re: Electronic Potholes!

[RAJ6582@ACS.TAMU.EDU (Robert A. Jones)]

>                                        - 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.  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)