Conference rusure::math

498.0. "SDI -- Strictly Decimal Initiative" by ERIS::CALLAS (Jon Callas) Tue Jun 03 1986 13:59

    
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 Edition : 1081              Tuesday  3-Jun-1986            Circulation :  2987


    Year after year, the U.S. will lose millions of dollars to
    useless arithmetic, converting yards into miles and vice versa.
    the problem is serious enough to threaten the leading role of the
    US economy.  In the computer business, the same mistake is being
    repeated by defining 1 K of memory as 1024 rather than precisely
    1000 words.  As usual, the egg-heads of computer science have
    pretty clever reasons, talking about powers of two and so on, but
    avoid finding a simple solution. Therefore, the president has
    decided to arithmetic fatalism and pessimism, and has launched a
    new movement, called the Strictly Decimal Initiative, aimed at
    introducing a revolutionary law in mathematics stating that 2**10
    = 1000. After it was possible to prove that 2**10 equals 1024,
    why should a great nation fail to go one step further?

    The idea is obviously very attractive, and has been enthusiastically
    welcomed by many columnists.  The idea makes sense, because every
    child can see that 2**10 does contain a ten already, so it's
    logical to have a power of ten as the result. The Numeric
    Algorithms Tuning Organization, a thoroughly democratic club whose
    president is by definition a leading US mathematician,
    immediately said that the success of the initiative is only a
    question of effort.  How else could free-world mathematics prove
    its superiority?

    But there are critics, too.  Some mathematicians do not even try
    to hide their sardonic laughter, and insist on the traditional
    solution.  Their usual comment is that while the initiative will
    not achieve anything, it will certainly absorb some of the best
    mathematicians for years.

    The Soviet Union has not yet reached a standard of computer
    science that would allow them to compete, but they have warned
    the US administration that the Strictly Decimal Initiative would
    certainly threaten the process of mutual formula recognition.

    European partners are not yet sure whether they should join the
    US or start their own project, for instance a European programming
    language that avoids most of the disadvantages of others because
    it is entirely in French.  A spokesman for the US Department of
    Decimalization has made clear that European cooperation will be
    appreciated; for safety's sake, however, numbers exceeding 99
    will not be passed to anybody outside the US.

    Though Congress has trimmed the budget proposed by the President,
    more than peanuts is left.  Most mathematicians who have won a
    contract now take a pragmatic view, trying to solve the problem
    by stepwise approximation.  Some results, obtained on special new
    hardware, indicate that it should not be beyond our abilities to
    prove 2**10 = 1023.  After that, everything else is only a matter
    of steady financial support.

    Jochen Ludewig
    ETH Z�rich
    {Computer June 1986}

    Sounds like a good additon to the collection of Sudden Disaster
    Idiocies. 
    
    An alternative suggestion is to do away with decimal points entirely,
    since nobody in the government knows the difference between a million
    and a billion anyway. That suggestion is known as the Suppressed
    Dot Irrelevancy.