I'm interested to know what methods lemming and ar0n (and the others who guessed) used to extrapolate the 100K date. Personally, I wrote a little script that retrieved every Nth node using XML::Parser::Lite and LWP::UserAgent from the Node query XML Generator

for example: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=37150&nodes=$nodeid

I grabbed the node ID and the time. I then converted the times into something I could easily manipulate mathematically and did a linear regression analysis. The real data is not actually a straight line of course since there is significant diurnal variation according to when people are awake, etc. There's also a weekly variation since weekend traffic drops off a bit. Although it didn't jump out at me, I'm sure there's also a bit of exponential growth to the curve since monastary traffic probably increses proportionally to the number of monks. I had hoped to make a model that accounted for these variations but ran out of time. At any rate, my linear regression came pretty close.

Update: Fixed a spelling error