According to Dr. James Anderson of the University of Reading computer science department, the airplanes are just going to start falling out of the skies at any moment.
"Imagine you're landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot's working," he suggests. "If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you're in big trouble. If your heart pacemaker divides by zero, you're dead."
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Yes, certainly: no one who ever programmed an airplane's onboard computer ever thought to work around a null divide. Thankfully, Anderson has a solution: 'nullity', a new mathematical concept that supposedly will allow computers to divide by zero. And the concept is so easy that — despite the fact that it's a mathematical concept that has eluded people for 1,200 years — even Britain's most gullible schoolchildren can understand it!
In reality, what Dr. Anderson has done is merely formalize dividing by zero, a problem which has already been solved by other mathematicians. Instead of a 0/0 = N/A, he's substituted his own mathematical symbol (a capital I overlaid on a lower case o). But the BBC? They think he's a fargin' genius.
