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SALT LAKE CITY -
A Y2K bug may disrupt worship services in many of the LDS meeting houses throughout the United
States and Canada, according to a spokeman for the church's information systems department.
The problem was discovered as part of ongoing tests to verify that church
computers would function properly well in to the next millenium.
Mike Smith, Director of Y2K Preparedness, explains, "We decided to hold a
'Y2K day' at one of the area chapels. We moved all of the clocks forward
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to January 1, 2000.
We really weren't expecting problems, but within a few minutes of resetting the clocks, fires spontaneously
erupted in the chapel pews and we had to call in the fire department."
According to Smith, the cause of the fires has been tracked to the special "micro-dot" ink
used to print the green "paisley-like" inside covers on green LDS hymnbooks.
Each dot printed with "micro-dot" ink contains a microscopic computer chip which calculates
the correct amount of adhesion for the dot of ink. A bug
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in the software for the embedded
microchips causes the ink dot to improperly recognize the year 2000 as the year 1900. Since no adhesion
data for the year 1900 is stored in the ink dot, the ink dot improperly determines it should have zero adhesion.
The simultaneous adhesion loss of tens of thousands of ink dots on a single page can create enough heat to
cause the hymnnal to spontaneously combust.
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