Y2K or just Armageddon?

"So what should the world's greatest defense department in the world's greatest superpower be doing? In an ideal world, it should scan every chip and every line of computer code it owns for dates that, although often hidden, are nonetheless critical to all sorts of functions - sorting data, processing records, performing mathematical calculations and so on. But it is not an ideal world."

Michael Kraig, research fellow of the British American Security Information Council. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Out there, forever?

"Like a hall of mirrors, the apparently endless universe might be deluding us. The cosmos could, in fact, be finite. The illusion of infinity would come about as light wrapped all the way around space, perhaps more than once - creating multiple images of each galaxy . . . bizarrely, the skies might even contain facsimiles of the Earth at some earlier era."

Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn Starkman and Jeffrey Week. Scientific American