Rick thats a REALLY interesting question.

I'd like to see the pattern, results as well

hook it up shawn

thanks for the suggestions, Rick. I should have that small font problem fixed soon. I know what I have to do, and so it's just a question of finding the time.

About the stats of active members and whether there are any trends, I agree with anonymust that it's a very interesting question. I'd have to think about how exactly to implement that sort of thing, though..... Let me think about it a bit.

I suppose the suggestions come in faster than they can be implemented, but here's another one:

Mind-Brain really needs a members-only chat feature. That would unload the forum from some of the chat-like posting and make it more useful for longer cycle dialog. Making it members only would prevent some potentially annoying flame-like phenomena.

I know that chat is a major implementation and might take quite a bit of doing, but I'm just trying to help.

I was envisioning that there would be a single chat page that a user could switch to, similar to the way he now switches to the "send a message" page, and it would have near-realtime updating. A manual refresh of the page would be OK and easy to implement. Perhaps the last thirty lines of chat would be shown, and older chat would just scroll off the bottom. I think members only is important to avoid nuisances and congestion. Perhaps you could re-connect the old chat feature. There are, of course, other Web chat pages that users can go to, but I thought a members-only chat here would be a real convenience so that members can take their flaming digressions from the fora into a more appropriate format.

Hello Shawn,

Whites, shades of blue, black - I feel like I'm living Picasso's blue period while on this site.

Maybe it's just the artist in me and my inherrent bend in favour of colour as enlivening entities, but I feel that the site could use some more colour.

Colour does stimulate thought and contributes as a silent partner in the evolution of creative insight.

Just a thought,

Trip like I do.

In a computer user interface, color without meaning is confusing. Please don't use color just to brighten things up.

Ah yes,

· The subjugation of colour.
· Throughout the ages, people in authority have considered it prudent to regulate colour. The need to control colour is evident in all so-called rational endeavours.
· Governmental grey, army olive, corporate blue, lab coat white.
· Colours served to repress the impact on awareness, removing temptation and distraction.
· Colour can be used as a silent language to evoke a visceral reaction.
· Explosive emancipation of colour.

ATHENIAL GRACE

ONE forum
NOT choice
ALL name
ALL Voice

Existentialism be
become to be to be,
not be, not see,
not Democracy

NO DISGRACE

Socrates et:al Japser ©2004

Love Jasper

How did the poetry board get inserted into the active topics board and why and can it be restored as was before the move?

Is there anybody out there?

Just questions and no answers.

Hi Trip,

I don't understand your question; can you give more details?

I had a look when your original post appeared but found active topics to be working as normal.

Active topics is not a board; rather it is the result of a search configured by Shawn.
As such any posts on any board [recently] will show up [with a reference to the board on which they appear].

Did the poetry board always have it's posts displayed in active topics?

I don't remember having to filter through poetry posts before under active topics.

Sounds like an invigorating idea.

I see that you have ammended the active topics... I like it muchly, it allows for less 'noise' in the system.

Now, how about ne subjects eg history, ancient history, theology, architectural design, the english language, culture (multi-culturalism), the global village, etc. etc.

It would allow and open other avenues of thought.

Trip, I must have missed this post when you made it. Did you make it this year or last? It's a good idea. Is it something you'd still like to see?

It sure would be nice to have the year displayed as well as the month and day.

Only, it's now on my todo list. It should be fairly easy to do.

Long todo list, eh?

I have another suggestion. I wish we had a "health" forum here where we could talk about nutrition and exercise. Physical fitness is important for keeping the brain healthy, so it might be a good discussion topic at BrainMeta.

Nutrition normally gets fitted in with Biology and Medicine section or else they have it in cognition, depending on what your trying to achieve from the nutrients. A health section is a good idea, considering the amount of bulls**t products on the market, maybe we can give out information that is actually useful?

So how come Stephen Hawking is so clever? His ALS/MND have kept him wheelchair-bound for years, yet his physics and his writing are still prominent. I don't go along with this fitness-healthy brain idea. I think that diet/drugs can affect mental performance and a complete lack of fitness could deplete brain performance, but some of the brightest people I know are the most unfit and vice versa.

Good health is influenced also by attitute and an all-around sense of well being. A healthy body is better for the mind than the opposite. Leading a healthy life-style also means that the person's priorities in life fall at unison with Maslow's hierarchy of needs which tops at self-actualization.

Life is a flux of energy, and a perfect health is a perfect balance of energy.
Plato wrote about the importance of a balanced development of a human being, nurturing body, senses, mind and spirit.
If a person does a lot of physical exercise, most of her/his energy is consumed by the body, and little is left for the higher dimensions of being.
The opposite situation happens when most of energy goes into the senses or the brain -- the case of great artists and scientists.
It is up to us to decide which dimension of our being we want to empower, or if we´d like to keep all of them in perfect balance.

If Hawking is so smart, how come his computer voice has an American accent? Everyone knows that British speakers automatically sound more intelligent than us yankees.

I'm thinking you're using an ill-advised debating technique, but I don't know what it's called. (It goes something like this: "I know of an example or two that defy given general argument. Therefore, you're wrong.")

Extensive studies have been done regarding the connection between physical fitness and brain health. I've listed a few here, starting with one from BBC News.

Exercise now to cut dementia risk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4304822.stm

Dr Miia Kivipelto and colleagues said there were many reasons why exercise might be good for the brain as well as the rest of the body. For example, regular exercise could help keep the small blood vessels of the brain healthy as well as protecting against other conditions that might make dementia more likely, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Exercise might also reduce the amount of the protein amyloid that builds up in the brain in Alzheimer's disease. Physical activity also affects genes and compounds important for maintaining good cognition and memory.

Exercise Prevents Dementia
http://alzheimers.about.com/od/healthyliving/a/exercise.htm

...new evidence suggests that regular exercise of the body can protect against the development of Azheimer's.

Study Links Obesity, Dementia
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/health/8515762/detail.html

Researchers from Kaiser Permanente followed more than 9,000 people for up to 30 years...They found people in their 40s with the largest skin-folds were nearly three times as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than other study participants.

Belly fat has beastly consequences (more on the Kaiser study)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...1.13510877.html

...people with the most abdominal fat were 145 percent more likely to develop dementia compared with people with the least amount of abdominal fat.

Principles of Energy Medicine -- http://www.energymed.org/hbank/handouts/pr...es_ener_med.htm

Muchas Gracias for the links, ON. And welcome back.

Prof. Hawking said that when his disease began to restrict his physical activity, he focused on the mental as a compensation. His is an exceptional case. As a counterexample, when the American Bobby Fischer won the world chess championship, breaking the Soviet chess dominance, he swam and lifted weights daily as part of his training.

hmm it seems like its got more to do with the individual rather than the general, I think that physical exercise can be used in co-ordination with the mind if its done the right way. After all what drives your body to do exercise if not the will of your mind? I dont think the argument could be made that you need to be physically fit to be smart or improve intelligence cause I think we have all met many idiots who could bench 200 pounds but couldnt talk physics if their life depended on it.

that is.. if you can define intelligence?

Intelligence is deciding on appropriate goals and then formulating and executing viable plans for achieving those goals.

Back to new features Shawn - Is it possible to have the Old feature of new posts first?

Unfortunately my abdomen has been expanding steadily over the past few years. Not much hope for me then....derrrrr


Seems to me that living is the problem and being dead could be much healthier (and who knows, the mind might live on!!):

Being fired from work could be fatal
Employees who lose their jobs at risk for heart attack, stroke
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13439422/

Do not despair, Hey Hey, there is always another side to each story.
By the way, a flat belly is not considered healthy in the East. The belly is the seat of chi energy, so a healthy belly looks like a belly, not like a board.
Look at the sumo fighters -- they are the sex idols in Japan !

This, from the same people who torture their dogs in the most barbaric way possible because supposedly their meat tastes better this way; who have brought the siberian tiger to extinction for the medicinal properties in their bones (same thing with the rhinoes for their horns). And who collect shark fins by the thousands of tons per year by severing them off the living animal and then throwing it overboard while still alive. Thanks, but, no thanks!

You're missing the point. Leading a healthy lifestyle has nothing to do with how much you bench-press. and you're right, a high percentage of 200 Lbs bench-pressers barely know how to read or write.

Hey, hang on Code, Guest says that I'm a sex symbol!

Hey, I just thought of something. If, when we catch crabs we broke off a claw and then threw the live crab back in, it would grow another claw and we could eat the first one. Conservation or conversation? Pity sharks can't do that.

What is the Old feature of new posts, Bill?

Btw, there's a chat room at http://brainmeta.com/index.php?p=chat if anyone's interested.

Chi Energy -- http://www.healing-systems.com/chi.html
http://www.braincourse.com/energia.html

When I choose a board to view, the last post is not shown at the top of the page.
Obviously, this means that one has to use the scroll bar or page down control on the keyboard to get to the most recent (last) post !

I was of the impression that we used to be able [in our control panel] to show such last posts at the top of the page, ie., in reverse order. I can't find such a feature now, and wondered if it could be made available.

Take care, Bill.

hi Bill,
there have been at least 4 different software versions of the BrainMeta forum and it's possible this feature was in a previous version. I don't remember offhand but will look into it. On a related note, when you click on "Last Post" for a given thread it should take you to the last post (unless you're using Opera; for some reason, it doesn't work in Opera).

That's the problem then Shawn - I use only Opera!

Thanks anyway.

Suggestion: Rid this forum of dattaswami.

And your specific reasons are............?

Brain Meta's forum exists for the purpose of exchange of ideas; not as a public rest-room wall; or a college dorm posting board.

Here is my humble suggestion:

LET US BE COURTEOUS ENOUGH TO LISTEN, ONCE
In the name of being courteous, and of even of accepting the points of view of others, could we not allow for a thread, or two--CLEARLY LABLED AS SUCH--for those who obviously want to "evangelize" us, to save us from our sins? Let us give others, who may differ from us, the opportuniity to at least tell us the "Truth", as they see it.

However, in return, such "evangelists" must agree to let those of us, interested, to debate their claim. It is my opinion that totally boring and unchallenging threads, threads without any kind of intelectual appeal, will die a natural; death. They will be ignored.

LET US INVOLVE A REFEREE
For example, if it can be arranged, with the help of a referee, I would love to have the opportunithy to have a real debate with a convinced fundamentalist Christian, Jew, RC, Protestant, Muslim, Mormon, Jehovah Witness, Christian Science, whatever.

What do you say?

Night-club and bar rest-room walls are usually cluttered with personal , unsolicited messages( ie: "Big Guns was here:, "for a good time call #..." ect"). Nobody knows who writes them because their authors' intentions are to express their opinion; period. They're not interested in dialogue, or exchange of ideas. Dattaswami's "posts" remind me of these rest-room messages. He comes in, clutters the board with posts, and then he dissapears; to not be heard from again untill the next time that he comes back and repeats the process; over and over and over again.. This is called SPAMMING. I am extremely cautious about deleting any posts, and I don't dare to untill it is called to my attention by REAL BrainMeta members. This was the case with Dattaswami's post. At least four serious board members requested that his posts be removed.

Yes, please. I don't want to jump the gun and take any action that may disrupt the harmony of the forum.

Lindsay, I agree that it is really nice to be courteous. But talk about discourtesy--I dropped in here today to find six threads in a row started by dattaswami, all filled with a bunch of...stuff that nobody here is interested in. Dattaswami is like a Hindu Chauncey Gardener. Two of the thread titles were parables about eating fish. Why would we need two such threads? (For that matter, why even one?) Another said that atheists had a value of -10 while believers were worth +10--or something like that. It went into some kind of nonsensical and highly presumptive numeric formula trying to show that nonbelievers are not worthy. I chuckled to see yet another of the dattaswami threads with "tsunami" in the title.

Nobody had commented on any of dattaswami's threads today, and rarely, if ever, do I see responses to anything he says. Any time I start a thread in which nobody comments, I take a hint and refrain from posting other threads like it. To do otherwise ad nauseum is the height of discourtesy.

ON, thanks for your well reasoned response. I agree that we are not here to impose our personal dogmas--victimizing, hit-and-run and/or soul-threatening "evangelism"--with no room for give-and-take dialogue.