2038: here we come

A lot of those calculators are about as accurate as a roll of the dice. Except they usually go above 66.

By 2038 I’m not even sure if where I’m living will be habitable any more. Will people still be using computers as much then or is it just a “phase”?

Future proofing an RTC is a good idea though, no matter what. One thing can be said is that computers are at a point where the use of an extra word here and there won’t clog up our current storage capabilities.

5-byte centisecond counts from 1-Jan-1900 carry us well beyond the dreaded Unix problem expected at 2038.01.19 03:14:07 UTC?

This is a problem for Unix but not for RISC OS which uses unsigned integer, so we have until the year 2176 (approximately). I presume it is an advantage for Unix in that it can handle dates from 1762 rather than from 1900.

we have until the year 2176

Must put an event in Organiser to remind me to be on the lookout at the appropriate time / day. I wonder what version of Pi that would be by then…

This is a problem for Unix but not for RISC OS

Wrong.

The end of time for RISC OS’ native time facilities is 06:57:57 03-Jun-2248.

However RISC OS also has CLib within, and CLib does things differently:

// simple time test
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int main(void)
{
   time_t mytime = 0xFFFFFFFE; // it's unsigned int
   struct tm *time;

   time = gmtime( &mytime );
   printf("End of the world time is %s\n", asctime(time) );

   return 0;
}

It can’t be &FFFFFFFF as that reports 1970. Using &FFFFFFFE works (and note that I’m forcing it to GMT).

Result:

End of the world time is Sun Feb 6 06:28:14 2106

Chances are I’ll be dead long before then (I’d be 133!), but it is 142 years before RISC OS’ time runs out.

It is later than the 2038 deadline because RISC OS uses unsigned for time_t, however this does mean that CLib is incapable of coping with representations of time prior to 1970. In a program I’m writing, it all worked for me, but a friend (born in ’67) complained that his entering that date kept getting rejected. I found out why, told him he was “proper ancient” (as he predates UnixTime) and then threw all that away and wrote my own custom date handling functions (which does not support seconds but supports dates from 1900 to 2932 (!) and uses a single word to hold the date value).

which uses unsigned integer,

Also sort of wrong – RISC OS’ native time is indeed unsigned, but it is a five-byte value no doubt inherited from the BBC MOS…

Only up to 2932? Oh dear, that won’t cover the timeline of either my last novel, or the one that’s with the publisher now 8~(

no doubt inherited from the BBC MOS…

Nope, the Master 128 provided 7 byte BCD values. Looks like the 5-byte first made its appearance in Arthur.

Since we’re talking time rollovers, the original Econet time (byte for day, byte for year since 1981 (4 bits) and month (4 bits) has already rolled over (end of 1996); so the day was limited to 5 bits and the upper three bits were added to the year (as high order bits). This means Econet time will roll over at the end of 2108.

Oh dear, that won’t cover the timeline of either my last novel

You’re a smart guy. I hope and trust that the language people are speaking in 2932 (or later) bears little resemblence to how people speak now, especially as given the monumental changes in English since circa 1000AD [everybody who performs Shakespeare with RP is doing it wrong, and that’s English that looks like English!]

Or, going back two thousand years – we know Romans spoke Latin, but Latin only exists nowadays to annoy botanists and med students. Greek, ancient Greek? How about Aramaic, vestiges of which can be found in Hebrew (and Arabic if you look really hard because it went via Syriac to turn into the hideously complicated script it is nowadays).
Add some more time, people around these parts spoke Pict, things written in runes, and things that had no written form at all.

That’s my big grudge with future sci-fi. Everybody speaks with a SoCal accent using contemporary phrasings. Okay, people in the future don’t tend to say “totally radical” and the like, but if you think not so long ago English had formal and familiar forms so one might say “what thou dost troubleth?” (I’ll let somebody that actually bothered to study writing of that era fill in the correct words) instead of “what’s wrong?” or “what’s up?” (“up”? the sky is up, heaven is up, spaceships are up – when did “up” come to be asking how a person is feeling?) – it is extremely clear that while things set in the farish future need to be readable to an audience today, it should also make references to the fact that the dialogue is a translation as the actual words spoken would be utterly incomprehensible.
[and today we have meanings to words like “text” (verb), “facebook”, “media”, “disc”, “processor”, “memory”, and “jet” which would be alien and bizarre a hundred years ago never mind thousands]

And that’s assuming we’re even speaking English by then and not a distant derivation of Mandarin…

everybody who performs Shakespeare with RP is doing it wrong

Apparently (according to the people who study these things) the speech patterns / dialectal inflections etc are similar to Black Contry and Yorkshire – “thee” and “thou” are certainly common usage in Sheffield¹ and various other parts of Yorkshire (and even over on the soggy side of the pennines).

On the subject of pronunciation I’m pretty convinced the RP version of Latin is way wrong too.

¹ The slightly corrupted pronunciation is the reason friends from Barnsley refer to me as a “Dee-da”.
“Nah den dee, aa da comin aat t’neet?” is a perfectly normal question from one youth to another on a Friday afternoon.

I hope and trust that the language people are speaking in 2932 (or later) bears little resemblence to how people speak now

Indeed it does. Here’s a paragraph from the Foreword:

This is a translation of a translation of Birgom’s diary. The original is written in what Birgom would call English (although he’d write it Inglis), but it’s not an English you’d understand easily. You’d probably manage to work out quite a lot of it, with some difficulty, but some of it would be next to impossible. A bit like trying to read Chaucer, or more like Chaucer trying to read a 21st century diary.

Oh, have a few more paras:

Mostly I haven’t tried to copy the original English directly, because not only has the language evolved almost beyond recognition, but Birgom’s handwriting is hard to read in many parts. It’s mainly Owen’s excellent Laana translation that I’ve translated into 21st century English.

A word of caution about dates: 662 is not 662 AD, and I don’t know how much to add to convert it to AD.

Where I can match place names to 21st century places, I’ve used our names for them; otherwise I’ve copied Birgom’s.

Most of the characters in the books don’t know English at all; there are numerous languages, none of them identifiably related to any 21st century language – apart from English, which exists in at least four versions, mutually intelligible only with some difficulty. But it’s entirely on Earth; there’s no space travel or the slightest dreaming of it. [This isn’t from the Foreword, I just wrote it for your benefit.]

the speech patterns / dialectal inflections etc are similar to Black Contry and Yorkshire

There’s an OU video on YouTube about a father/son who try to perform it “authentically”. Sounds like a sort of “Zomerzet” accent to me.

or more like Chaucer trying to read a 21st century diary.

I’m trying to imagine what a teenage girl might write in a diary (basing it off Cher in Clueless!) and how that might seem to somebody like Chaucer.

And what is it the new Doctor said? Let’s get our shift on? Something like that?

there’s no space travel or the slightest dreaming of it.

No space travel in 29xx? If we haven’t nuked ourselves back into an agricultural based non-technical populace, I would be EXTREMELY disappointed if humanity couldn’t build a functioning spaceship in nine hundred odd years. I mean, where’s this great future all the books in the late ’70s promised me? Everything all shiny and chrome (WITNESS ME!) and personal jetpacks to take us to work easily.

Sheesh. 29-something and no spaceships. I’m proper disappointed, I am…

From the cover of Exile – “According to legend, some sort of controlled flight had been commonplace in ancient times. I suspected there was more truth in the legends than most people believed.”

Here ya go – the cover & a bit of blurb: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction.html

Not even any aeroplanes in 662 L.C.

Given that my website has dozens of pages and thousands of words of facts backing it up, I don’t think I’ve got anything to add.

You certainly wrote a lot on your website, but it completely lacks any scientifically valid references to even begin to back up what you describe as “fact”. I don’t blame you for not providing those references, after all you probably wrote it for fun and not to win the nobel price or to get published in a scientific paper. But what you wrote is opinion, not fact. Just saying that your words are fact does not make them facts.

Just one example – you state that Climate Change is the biggest problem mankind faces. Since we don’t have the slightest idea what tomorrow’s climate will be, it seems to be a strange to know that it is truly a problem, let alone the biggest problem ever.

And it is very strange – or should I say shizophrenic – for someone so sure that it is the single biggest problem for mankind to also damn the only known solution to drastically reduce our CO2 footprint in a cost-effective manner (or even in a costly manner – because, after all, it couldn’t possibly be more expensive than the biggest problem for mankind?) that is known as “nuclear fission”. And even if nuclear fission is as dangerous as you state (and I can assure you that it is not), surely it is not more dangerous than the biggest problem for mankind, that “the welfare of billions of people is going to be drastically affected by it, in many cases in a life-and-death way. Economic woes are completely trivial in comparison.”

You also seem to completely ignore what the French did in the 80s – they quickly ramped up the amount of energy produced from nucelar power without any significant problems – they did not go bankrupt, their power plants are reliable, and they build all of them in less than 20 years. The French nearly halved their CO2 emissions per capita from 1980 to 1995 (thanks to nuclear power), while German emissions per capita more or less stagnated the last 15 years despite spending around 20000 Million Euros year by year for “renewable energy” like solar and wind.

You also seem to be stuck firmly in the 70s wrt nuclear power plant technology. You seem to have never heard about the Russians successfully operating their various fast breeder reactors (which is a quite easy solution for the waste “problem” if it really is a serious problem). And how do you explain the cost reductions the Koreans and the Chinese achieved by not following our way of complete over-regulation of the whole nuclear industry as well as not stopping building just one new reactor and being surprised that “first-of-a-kind” is always expensive.

Newer proven technology for reprocessing, demonstrated in the IFR concept the US developed (I recommend reading “Plentiful Energy” to everyone really interested in the possibilities of modern nuclear power), is also completely ignored by you.

Unlike ignorant writers on both sides of this debate, I’m able to back up my measured criticism of the nuclear industry with information and careful argument, all presented on my website.

Most of what you wrote about nuclear power is opinion, not fact. You might start to back up your idea that nuclear waste is “indestructible”. Or “most dangerous”.

Then, to make it more interesting, you could come up with a complete cost comparison of your favoured energy system (as you wrote on your website, mainly powered by wind and solar) – to make it easier, use fossil fuels for backup – and then we’ll do a cost comparision with nuclear.

You mean it was stronger than those Category 4 hurricanes hitting Florida in 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1950?

Yes.

Show me the measurements of wind speed.

How do you know?

By reading.
Michael, with sustained winds of 155mph (135 knots), is the first category 4 hurricane to make landfall on Florida’s Panhandle and the fourth strongest storm ever to strike the United States. Only three category 5 storms have made a US landfall: the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 (160 kts), Hurricane Camille (1969: 152 kts) and Hurricane Andrew (1992: 145 kts).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/11/hurricane-michael-explained-biggest-florida-storm-all-you-need-to-know-extreme-weather

Apart from the obvious problem that you rely on a newspaper writing about something they likely have no idea about, the biggest problem is the fact that hurricane wind speed data is just not available for most of the time. When did serious measurements of wind speeds start? I mean with reliable instruments with sufficient points of measurement? How about the hurricanes hitting Florida in 3000 b.c.? The NHC was founded when exactly?

It is a big problem with many things in Climate Science. Data is sparse. Extracting data via proxies to form an idea about historic climate is problematic if you want more than a rough idea, in which case you could also just rely on historians reconstructing the climate from historiography. I witnessed the whole field of paleoclimate losing its credibility after the Mann “Hockey Stick” disaster. I got to know that thing named the “divergence problem” that really questions the validity of nearly all of the research in this field. It is still not resolved.

You seem to have never heard about the Russians successfully operating their various fast breeder reactors (which is a quite easy solution for the waste “problem” if it really is a serious problem).

I’ve heard of the Russians operating fast breeder reactors, of course. But “succesfully” is an interesting opinion in that regard. As for it being any sort of solution to the waste problem, I’ve dealt with that pretty thoroughly. For the “waste problem,” see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Energy.php?NuclearWaste which you seem not to have read. In principle, you could (as I wrote) burn the actinides from the waste in a fast breeder, thereby getting rid of most of the stuff that would last for tens of millennia; but they do nothing whatsoever to deal with the fission products, with “only” 2,000 years or so that you have to keep them out of the environment – that’s as long as from the Roman empire to now.

As for “most dangerous” you could try looking up LD50 values for radioactive materials (things with half-lives of decades to millennia – fission products – not things like natural uranium) and compare them with LD50 values for things like methyl isocyanate (the stuff that killed so many people at Bhopal). I didn’t think there was anyone left ignorant enough not to know that medium (or even worse, short) halflife radioactive materials were the “most dangerous stuff ever produced.” (They’re not very dangerous unless you ingest or inhale them – but then chemical poisons aren’t dangerous at all unless you ingest or inhale them.)

Things like Ricin or Botulinum Toxin are comparable with some of the less radioactive isotopes amongst fission products – but they’re only ever produced in gram quantities, not tonnes.

it completely lacks any scientifically valid references

You don’t like the Los Alamos site? Or the (South) Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute? Both of which I refer to for my (1) Fission product ratios; (2) Fission product half-life and emissions data. Or any of my other references, all apparently “scientifically invalid.”

you could come up with a complete cost comparison

I could, but you could try reading the piece about why I don’t, and why I don’t trust anyone else’s either: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Economics.html
- there was a link to it you could have followed. However, for LOLs, economists do seem to be catching up with my GUESSES about relative costs, guesses the basis of which is explained – without references, of course, since I don’t regard references to long-range economic forecasts as any better than references to astrologers (as I’ve explained often enough, I think).

I seem to think that the ‘Weather change’ is a bit like the tale of ‘King Canute’ being told by his advisiors that he could control the Tides!

Some on the Web – researching way back – wx by way of ice core samples Millions of years – seem to think a return to ice more likely.

(As far as I can see – no one knows why about 20thou years ago – the Ice expanded down to about Bristol UK – and about 12 thou years ago started to go back to where it is now)

Some […] seem to think a return to ice more likely.

Fun fact: The ‘normal’ state of the Earth’s climate for some millions of years has been glacial. We are living in one of the inter-glacial periods that punctuate the normal state. Other inter-glacial periods have rarely exceeded 10,000 years. Ours is about 12,000 years so far. Make of that what you will. It is not really relevant, but in the 70s climatologists were warning of the impending ice-doom. ;-)

Fission product half-life and emissions data

Fun fact: The longer the half-life the lower the emission rate. Highly radioactive materials decay quickly. ;-)

methyl isocyanide (the stuff that killed so many people at Bhopal).

Methyl isocyanate. Mistakes such as that degrade your argument.

As for our future energy supply, nothing beats the late, lamented David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”, which you can read online .

For the “waste problem,”

Fun fact: Nearly all ‘nuclear waste’ is not radioactive. True, but not very helpful. ;-)

Fun fact: The ‘normal’ state of the Earth’s climate

For a (well-informed…) discussion of that, see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Climate.php?ClimatePatterns

nothing beats the late, lamented David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”

For a critique of that, see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Energy.php?SusHotAir

(“There’s a lot of very good stuff in it, but there’s a few big holes, too.”)

Methyl isocyanate. Mistakes such as that degrade your argument.

True. That will teach me to write more carefully on here and not to rely so much on memory. Needless to say, my website is more carefully produced – and subject to corrections when errors are reported. I’ve corrected my post on here, thanks.

Nearly all ‘nuclear waste’ is not radioactive.

Also true, of course. But as you say, not very helpful. Well – I say true. It depends how long after it’s removed from the reactor (or after the chain reaction is shut down), but it becomes true within hours, so close enough. But the witches’ brew that is radioactive in the longer term…

One of the links on one of my nuclear pages is to this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/

Probably not as easy to understand as my more teacherly exposition, but more academic, much more thorough in its provision of references for its facts. Broadly the same conclusions.