The story of the lynz is long and complicated (and you'll probably get to know it after a while), but it basically involves Adam having to do a WHOLE LOAD of lines for Jimmé. Adam still hasn't done them.
James notes that using GNU bc, an arbitrary precision calculator, the Excel spreadsheet lives on. Its 2003, so the note is inhis Blog, naturally.
The actual number of lynz is absolutely incalcuLable (in the layman's sense), but you can have a go if you've got a particularly mathematical bent (or are completely twisted) by downloading the Lynz Workbook in Excel 97 format (This is now utterly broken, by the way - the lynz are so big they break Excel! Try changing your time to sometime in 2000 or something.)
In February (on the 26th, to be precise, since it's a good day to celebrate, num' sein?) of 1998, a chemistry teacher gave a set of lines to one of his students, Adam Clarkson. The lines read, "I must always tuck my shirt in whilst participating in a Chemistry Lesson". He had to do a hundred of them. However, the clever part was that if he didn't do them by the next day, they would double, and if they weren't done by the day after that, they would double again. We pointed out that the lines would become too great to do pretty soon, but this didn't stop the teacher giving them. In September 1998, 7 months late, due to a confused and old man apparently mishearing us (we tried to inform him of the vastness of the Lynz, but he didn't want to hear, and so he said "If they're not on my desk by tomorrow, they'll square!"), the lines were squared every day they weren't done. To this day, they still haven't been done.
On September 17th when they started to square, they were 10^63. We chose an arbitrary time in the morning so that the lynz would be exactly 10^63 (to make calculations easier), although this may be a few digits out because of the inaccuracy of Excel. The next day, they were (10^63)^2, and so on. At the time of writing, the lynz (as they are commonly known) are 10^298084483796761000000000000000000. A second set of lynz were given on July 13th (I believe they said "I must do my lines"), but they never started squaring, so they remain considerably smaller than the 1st set of lynz. The 2nd set of lynz was, at the time of writing, 1.41 x 10^53. Whenever we refer to The Lynz, we refer to the 1st set plus the 2nd set.
On August 9th, 1999 (at 6:34:15am), the 1st set of lynz became bigger than a googolplex (10^100), which was thought to be a pretty hefty number in the first place.
He will never be able to do the lynz, as it would require more time than the universe is long. This number is extremely unweildy, and because of it's dynamic nature, is expressed as K, or Kappa (we spent ages finding a scainin' Greek letter that hadn't been used too often).
As you can imagine, K is big, and by the time you've read the w in the next word, it will already by unimaginably bigger. As a matter of fact, by tomorrow, it will have squared, and squaring is a very powerful function. I'm going to carry on writing right now just to give you an idea of how huge and vast it really is, but I don't think I can describe it. Try looking at it for a few minutes and understanding what all those 0's mean. They don't just mean 'nothing'. Am I getting this across? This number is big, Big, BIG. It's bigger than the number of elementary particles in the universe. It's bigger than a googolplex. It's bigger than the odds of rolling a bucket of dice and them all landing on 6, then picking a million aces from packs of cards, and then flipping every single coin in the world, and them all landing on heads.
It's big, OK?
And if you liked that, you'll love the Clarkkkkson
1.0 x 10473,465,543,875,367,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
This number was taken at exactly 10:04:52 in the morning, the exact moment when he received the lynz a year ago. This is the first set of lynz - the second set is nowhere near as big with only 695,132,982,441,777,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lynz, and the second set only started on July 10th.
1.0 x 101,095,536,669,160,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Less than a month later, the lynz are some 2,313,868 orders of magnitude larger. Which is large.