"But with these new technological solutions come also new technological problems. We are all familiar with the threat of the YM problem last year, when the abaci that recorded the Year CMXCVIIIJ were to roll over and show the year...well, something other than the Year M. [The lack of a zero can cause problems sometimes.] Luckily, few people were using the abacus, since it had only been introduced to Europe a few decades earlier by Gerbert of Aurillac, now Pope Sylvester II. [This is part of how you got to be Pope in those days. Want to make friends and influence people? Learn the abacus.]

"Our technologies may expand human potential, but they can be used for both good or ill. Now that we can plow deeper and faster than ever before, will we have the wisdom to know if we have plowed too far? We think that we control our watermills--but will our watermills one day begin controlling us?

"Yet we can look back in history to see that that humanity has survived its many travails over the past millennium. Furthermore, the predictions of the French priest Raoul Glaber that Satan would be unleashed upon us and that the great Apocalypse would arrive last January have not come true. We can also take comfort in what one of our forebears thought of the passage of the last millennium, one thousand years ago:

"'As everyone knows, the first century--and with it, the first millennium--will not really start until January 1, A.D 1. This past year, the Year...wait a minute...[Damn that lack of a zero!]'"

Stephen E. Sachs '02 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.