commentary and ageing brains

I'm starting to think that the architecture of this blogspace is not actually ideal.

Why? The fact that comments remain to some extend hidden (i.e. just appearing as hyperlinks below a post rather than actually displayed) seems to work against the formation of dialogues that develop in depth.

Simple solution:

Any substantial responses to a posted post should probably be posted as a new post. The 'comments' functionality should be reserved for short, well, comments that the poster doesn't necessarily expect to in turn provoke a response.

Unless, of course, there is a way to make the comments always visible (blogministrator? can you check this out?).

Unfortunately this would mean that conversations would be read backwards from the top of the page, but I think we're all sharp enough to deal with that.

My second comment for today is this:

In addition to longer posts that analyse or argue for this or that, I would like to encourage shorter, more spontaneous posts containing interesting facts that have popped up, quotes, images, or well, whatever.

For example:

In an interesting lecture the other day, it was pointed out that the number of neurons in a human brain peaks at about 18 months of age. We then proceed to lose about 200,000 neurons per day ("neuronal death") for the rest of our lives.

So, if we start off with about 10^12 neurons (apparrently this is a good estimate), and we lose about a million neurons every five days (5*200,000 = 10^6), then we have about 5 million days to live before our last brain cell flickers out! (10^12/10^6 = 1 0^6, times 5 days gives 5*10^6) Luckily that's about 13 and a half thousand years...

The conclusion: old dogs really do have a bloody hard time learning new tricks - enjoy your neural plasticity to the full while you still have it!

C