Grave Concern? Or Is Chicken Little Alive And Well?

One thing Americans seem pretty deficient at is history.  We produce our share of world-class scientists but our institutions of higher learning (in my view at least) allow far too high a degree of specialization in graduating our masters and PhD graduates.

A number of Internet sites have picked up on the “latest hot GPS” news regarding at best an educated guess about dire consequences for the GPS during the next predicted solar maximum (solarmax) which will probably happen around the year 2013.  Here’s a sample: http://tinyurl.com/rk9bc

A grad student “discovered” an inconsistency in his GPS receiver readings and has possibly correlated this with a solar flare tat occurred at the time.  Well, ummm, hello, solar flares have been disrupting radio communication since the days of Marconi.  A GPS receiver is just a radio reception device.  The solar maximum phenomena occurs approximately every 11 years (next one is due ore in 1023 than 2011, but that’s like betting on a horse race, anyway).  GPS was in wide use during the last solar maximum (April 2001) and no airliners fell out the sky and no oil tankers ran aground.  In the last but one solar max (1989) a very disruptive power grid outage in the US/Canadian Northeast was blamed by some on solar flares … but of course we’ve had bigger disruptions in years since that couldn’t be blamed on a rouge sun.

I’m not for a moment suggesting we ignore such research but I think we ought to learn:

1. A little bit of history, remembering perhaps

1. The Y2K non-event that was going to destroy the power grid, bankrupt the world of electronic commerce, etc., etc.
2. The “potentially earth-shaking” great GPS clock rollover affair of 21-22 August 1999 (careful, the clocks will all roll over again in 2018)

A little bit of science outside what narrow realm we may be an expert in.  Doctor Kinter may indeed be an expert in Electrical engineering but it smacks of sensationalism to be issuing warnings telling the world how commercial airliners will fare in 2011.  Does he even hold a private pilot’s license?  Does he think that even though GPS is already an important aviation tool that any sensible airline operates solely upon GPS (or any other aid to navigation?)

This whole report reminds me of the sick jokes about spiraling Bonanzas and medical doctors.  Having expertise in one area does not translate to expertise in another area.  And I wish our news media would figure this fact out for themselves.

By the way, has anyone considered that on December 31st 9999, even though the US will still be losing in Iraq and the TSA will still be trying to decide if tubes of lipstick are weapons of mass destruction, the world of computers will suffer an event of truly unprecedented proportions?  Every single program written around the model of the four digit year will probably blow up as the date changes to either 1 January 10,000 or 1 January 0000, (depending upon where you earned your PhD).  I’m thinking of starting a Y10K consultancy, it’s never too early to get a head start on disaster.  Any unmarked cash investors?