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] part of the experiment is to measure the difference between the amount ] of nanog mail lorenzo drew in 2005 by pre-announcing with the amount we ] get in 2009 while not pre-announcing. :)
This statement is an admission that he set out to annoy people, annoy them enough they would complain on a public mailing list. More over, I can't see how any researcher could use "the amount of nanog mail" as a valid indicator of anything. It has as much to do with how many engineers are bored on a given day as it does with the severity of the problem.
So the goal of this research seemed to be to see how many people the researchers could panic, and then see how 10,000 people reacted to the panic. Sounds a lot like yelling "fire" in a crowded movie house just to "research" what the results might be, and then measuring success by the number of words in the article on the front page of the paper, or perhaps the number of people trampled to death, or both.
maybe not so much annoy people, rather see how many people actually noticed the announcements and were aware that their AS was being used as an origin in the path