I typically rest my weary head upon the brilliant minds of many wonderful friends, professional and personal. Without the assistance of these people this paper would have been much the worse for wear:
Wietse Venema, my brilliant and astonishing friend and sometimes coauthor, helped me immeasurably by validating some of my results, as well as letting me bounce new ideas and tests off him, as well as keeping me on the more sane side of the fence.
Muffy Barkocy, who is also amazing, my ex, an extraordinary fuck, and loves adrogynous guys with long hair and slightly butch but pretty women (and is looking for the same, according to her), did lots of editing work and helped me with my html stuff, including the creation of the cool menu bars at the bottom.
Dalya Sachs, friend, neighbor, and graduate student of english put in a heroic effort to edit the thing before the deadline. Don't blame her for the mistakes I added after she did it, or for me not following her advice at times ;-)
Gene Spafford, professor at Purdue University, friend, and, I suppose, mentor. Spaf, as always, tried to reign in my enthusiasm for the subject with facts and pithy observations, as well as giving wonderful advice on how to interpret the data.
Andrew Gross, information security researcher, gave much needed hard core technical help with statd.
Del Armstrong was another one of my reviewers who gave me some very fine comments and ideas, especially with respect to the ethical concerns about my performing the survey in the first place. He also found me those great and oh-still-so-very-relevant Bloom County cartoons.
Of course, I stole the title "Shall we dust Moscow?" from Bloom County.
I stole the term "number numbness" from douglass hofstadter's insanely wonderful book Metamagical Themas. It was recently reprinted and I highly recommend it. He's a great thinker; you might love or curse at what he says, but he'll make you think, and that's a tall order.
I found that spinning disk somewhere on the net, and I really liked it. No special significance to me other than being really cool and orientalish. If someone can tell me who did it, I'd be happy to give them credit; I simply can't remember where it came from.
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