The microzen: a unit of enlightenment
<p>Earlier today one of my commenters <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4679&#038;cpage=1#comment-390113">caused me to realize</a>  that it would be entertaining to try to define a unit for the intensity of &#8220;aha!&#8221; experiences &#8211; moments of sudden insight.</p>
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<p>In honor of said commenter (who, synchronistically enough, signs himself &#8220;Foo&#8221;) I define the &#8220;microzen&#8221; (&mu;z) as follows: the amount of enlightement achieved when one realizes that &#8220;spinward&#8221; and &#8220;antispinward&#8221; are useful terms on planets as well as ringworlds.  Because, well, global atmospheric circulation patterns &#8211; the context was a discussion of the incidence of cyclonic storms.</p>
<p>(I&#8217;d have preferred &#8220;microsatori&#8221;, but &mu;s is taken.)</p>
<p>Of course, there&#8217;s a scaling problem here. Even if you have a good way to estimate relative magnitudes, you need <em>two</em> fixpoints to define a linear scale.  (You in the back there just shut up about logarithmic already, I&#8217;m having to wave my hands hard enough as it is.)  I therefore arbitrarily set 100 &mu;z as the amount of aha required for somebody to write <cite>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</cite>. </p>
<p>Now, I hear you out there saying &#8220;You fool!  That&#8217;s entirely too ill-defined!&#8221; But here&#8217;s my clever plan:  if people have broadly similar intuitions about relative degrees of aha, <em>we can crowdsource the problem!</em>  That is, we ask a bunchaton of people to consider some specific enlightenment experience &#8211; like, say, grokking how anonymous lambdas work in a functional-programming language &#8211; and rate that relative to our 1&mu;z and 100&mu;z scale pegs.</p>
<p>There you have it.  Comments are open; let the crowdsourcing begin.</p>
