I was looking through the old Lab6 archives recently, and noticed the Lynz page, with its horribly broken Excel spreadsheet. That was then. Now I have GNU bc, an arbitrary precision calculator, and for what it’s worth, the number of lynz is now ten to the power a 548 digit number: somewhat larger than the number of different ways all the particles in the known universe could be randomly shuffled at each moment in time since the universe’s creation.

And if he doesn’t do them by tomorrow, there’ll be more.

Via the extropians list comes this psychology paper [google cache > rtf], neatly summarised by Anders Sandberg of aleph.se fame:

The basic idea is the cognitive science of sacred values. Something is sacred when it is absolute and involable, and the mere thought of trading it off for some secular value is abhorrent. Different societies have different sacredness, but all societies have it. In practice we always have to do trade-offs between values. As an example, how much do we want to pay for road safety? If human lives were infinitely valuable to us, we would gladly pay all money we could for safer roads. But we actually chose (or have someone chose for us) a finite amount. But actually being tempted or forced to make these compromises makes us uncomfortable, and various escape and coping mechanisms (such as ‘moral cleansing’ where people do something they consider moral to balance the trade - we feel contaminated by trading in the sacred). These taboo tradeoffs cause strong moral outrage, especially among observers. It is seen as unacceptable to trade something sacred for secular, or even to consider it.

Read the paper for actual data!

What’s going on here?:

Melting?

The white thing is a shoe shaped hunk of something that’s meant to make rooms smell nice. It’s on top of a plastic pen box. The melty-looking streaks running down the side are not running freely; they’re solid. They’ve assumed this position after months of being slowly melted. But what is going on? Is there some horrid lime mixture in the soap that can melt plastic? Does it make the room smell nice by pumping caustic gas into your lungs? Answers on a postcard to Childrens’ BBC, PO BOX 8999, London, W12 6WR.

This story [via Ars Technica] talks about Internet addiction:

The only way we as psychiatrists will figure out whether Internet addiction exists as a separate entity from other psychiatric illnesses is if we have consistent criteria to evaluate it.

They’ve even got a cute contrived acronym: MOUSE, the E in which stands for “Excessive thoughts or anxiety when not online.”

Is internet addiction at all shocking? Being online turns you into a superhuman (”Man plus”). You can know anything and talk to anyone, immediately. Being online, absolutely literally makes you a lot smarter than when you’re offline. Is it so surprising that people don’t want to give this up? When you’ve tasted godhood, the only thing you want is more.

Mainstream users don’t understand how internet addiction happens. I suspect this is because their interfaces are bad. If you have to wade through Hotmail every time you want to send an email, you’ll never really get involved in the computer. Compare the Hotmail ordeal to mutt<enter>m Name<tab><enter>Subject<enter>i Body<Esc>:wq<enter>y. That’s mostly incomprehensible to your average Citizen, but those who persist will find the immense increase in efficiency tightly integrates them with the software. Compare also a google search: users of IE will by default have to go to google.com, and type their query. Toolbar users are better off. Other browsers are even better: with Mozilla Firebird, to do a google search, type CTRL-K query<enter>. I’m sure there are plenty more shortcuts and optimisations that I don’t know. When I do know them, I’ll be deeper online than before.

(I suppose the lesson here is that the keyboard is still the best interface hardware we have for navigating the web.)