lots of mental summing

Or a little bit of conceptual detection. Each post has a number associated with it. It is the number at which you should stop when posting a link to that post and it is also the cardinal number of that post. Yours (http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=announcements&Number=49442) to which I am replying is 49442. To find how many posts have been posted so far, find the most recent post and go to it. The number is right up there in the url.