2025.01.10

Greetings Large Number Enthusiasts,

Happy New Years everyone! It's the beginning of a new year and it seems like a good time to have a little retrospective, on the developments that have begun to take shape in 2024 and which I plan to expand on further in 2025.

It's no secret that my website has gone into something of a deep hibernation over the last few years. It's most active years were during the 2008-2016 classical googology era. Starting in early 2017 the website went completely silent for 3 years, the longest hiatus period in it's history. There were some small changes through 2020-2022, the most significant being the move to New Google Sites on the LNS's (Large Number Site's) 13th Anniversary in 2021. Things then went quiet for much of 2022 and all of 2023, an approximately 2 year silence.

Starting up in the middle of 2024 however I got interested in going back and reviving my website. The first order of business was to fix the broken ULNL which had been somewhat damaged in the transfer to New Google Sites, mainly in the fact that all the color had been removed from the text.

The concern was that the ULNL was out of date and missing key things, like a complete list of all current Bowerisms, and so a project began in May of 2024 to start renovating the ULNL. A decision was finally made to split off the complex numbers into their own list called the CGNL. The ULNL was then changed to encompass everything from Negative Absolute Infinity to Absolute Infinity (though with a significant bias towards positive numbers). Epochs were now separated by colored Title cards with nice little descriptions of the content of each epoch, with the text color corresponding to the Epoch's title card color. Some minor changes were made to the epochs themselves, such as the addition of the Stratospheric Epoch. Towards the end of the year, after much renovation and additions to the ULNL, with it reaching over 2000 entries for the first time, I began work on renovating the site as a whole.

Although precise figures aren't available, 2024 was a significant leap from previous years from 2017 to the present. I was putting in regularly weekly work into improving the site and had even begun keeping work logs again, which I hadn't done officially since 2017. Unlike some of the other false starts in 2020-2022 this one was a significantly more sustained and organized effort. I think it is safe to say, the LNS may be on the verge of a renaissance! I was very encouraged by progress over the last year.

To top it all off, we got our first new article in 4 years at the end of the year with the New Rudolph Spoof article. It's probably the most writing I've done for the site in a very long time.

So what are the plans for 2025?

Well I'd like to continue with the momentum that 2024 brought obviously, and if anything crank it into high gear. I actually only began work on the LNS in the middle of 2024, but now we have a whole year to work with.

First things first, I'll set a goal to complete Renovation of The New Large Number Site before the end of 2025. 

The ULNL has also not reached it's final state and I intend to expand it even further this year. Firstly I want to finish adding all current Bowerism's, as well as many many useful intermediate BEAF expressions for comparison with ExE. I may also try to add all the Cedric Fausey BEAF numbers if I can track them down. Also the main goal with the ULNL is to get it up to date with the current state of Extensible-E Numbers, as it doesn't include the numbers past the Cascading-E Update. That was actually what got me interested in getting back to developing the ULNL in the first place.

Those are the main two development goals. However I'd also like to publish some new non-spoof articles for the first time since "Scales of the Microcosm" in 2025. It might be on some random missing topics.

I have also been considering revision of the Section 1 material to improve the quality of the book.

 The most important development though I'd say moving forward in 2025 is the introduction, in one form or another, of my 2007 work on Hierarchal-Structor Notation, an early attempt to formalize Array Notation. Lastly I'd like to release some new Extensible-E googolisms for 2025.

That's about it for now. I will probably stick with my plan to have quarterly updates, so I'll probably give another update in about 3 months.

Stay tuned, and keep counting,

Sincerely,

Sbiis