Huh?
Why is it positioned smack dab it the middle instead of in alphabetical order? It seems out of place there anyway as GQ and GD seem to be serious questions and IMHO and MPSIMS are for not serious questions.
I was hoping for a physics lab forumn where we can post questions like what would happen if you are traveling 0.9c and turn on your headlights while orbiting a black hole 2.45 parsecs from the event horizon?
I posited that my crazy theory from a while back was right all along, but nobody would confirm or deny this.
I smell a conspiracy.
No, wait, that’s my socks.
The prior alphabetic order was fortuitous. The idea was, rather, a descending order based on relevance to Cecil’s columns and the concepts behind them. Thus, we start with the technical forum (just to make life easier), then go to Cecil’s columns, then Staff Report, then General Questions. Those sort of form a coherent trio, if you will; the same sorts of questions (largely fact-based) IMHO and MPSIMS and Pit all share similar characteristsics (largely opinion-based). A forum on the Arts, it was felt, belongs between the two categories. QED
Do you know, I never noticed the alphabetical order. I always saw it as ‘relevance to Cecil’ but with About This Message Board at the top.
I have to ask, C K Dexter Haven, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Just how close to right was my aforementioned crazy theory, given your well-described heirarchy?
I thought we already had such a forum. Why do you think I agreed to moderate way back when? 
Just on the off chance that the question was serious, 2.45 parsecs is far, far larger than any known black hole in the Universe (except possibly for the Universe itself, but that’s irrelevant and unlikely), so you wouldn’t get any weird General Relativity effects or tidal effects from it. You’d orbit it in exactly the same manner that you would any other body with that mass. In this case, at that distance and speed, it’d be a hyperbolic orbit, which would (eventually) swing around the black hole once, and leave the vicinity forever. Travelling at .9 c wouldn’t change anything of what you see, because you’re at rest relative to yourself. To anyone at rest with respect to the rest of the galaxy, you would look rather squooshed, and for someone in front of you looking at your headlights, they’d be strongly blueshifted (probably completely out of the visible range). Oh, yeah, any stars you saw from inside would be blueshifted by the same amount, if they’re in front of you, and redshifted, if they’re behind you, because relative to you, they’re travelling at .9 c .
Shouldn’t the new forum’s title be Café Society?
LOL Chronos - I was just a little miffed that a forumn that i really have no interst in got created while topics I am intersted are squished into the old forumns. But now I see it is better this way - less posts to go through.
I though a parsec was about 3 A.U. where a AU was the distance the earth is to the sun. And just a rough estimate it would put the orbit somewhere out by Saturn-Neptune area if the event horizon was by the sun.
All right you two, if you can’t behave yourselves in ATMB we’ll have to ask you to take it to GQ.
Dissed by an Admin and a Mod in fairly hasty succession. Maybe that wasn’t my socks I was smelling.
Slight slip of the units, dave. A parsec is 3.26 lightyears.
I’m glad I didn’t launch to aplha centuri this week
Sorry Arnold I’ll behave now
Back to the OP, I though that the alphabetical order was somewhat of an fortuitous alignment but assumed maybe some catagories were changed from then original name to fit. I would think at least the catagory’s name would be fit into the order.
Hell yes. I just knew Cecil loves me more than 'Gene and Corrado. Here’s your proof.
What I want to know is: where the bloody hell did it come from?
I look away for a day or two while moving all my stuff, and there’s this…this…thing right in the middle (that I managed to not notice for a full hour, too).
That was my 1st thought too. Don’t you think they should have given us notice? Are we that unimportant to the mod’s and admin’s?
If I even get elected to be a mod I won’t forget the little people
I’d always assumed the order was due to relevance to the questions, or in order from most formal (administrative topics in ATMB) to least formal (BBQ Pit).
And you have to have the extra forum to make a nice round nine – as in circles of Hell/Purgatory/Heaven.