I just realized that though I don’t imagine each forum as a literal room or anything, I have sort of a sitemap in my head of how the boards are laid out, and it’s something that’s present me brain whenever I move from one forum into another. Anyone else, on puropse or by happenstance, have a mental image of the boards?
For me, I enter through Cecil’s latest column. From there, the central room us General Questions. The rest of the forums are arrayed around it-- Great Debates directly above (at 12 o’clock), MPSIMS to the right, the BBQ Pit to the left (but about 8 o’clock), and IMHO below. I often forget about ATMB, but it’s up and to the right of GQ (GD at 12:00 and MPSIMS at 3:00). Comments on the columns doesn’t even exist.
Hmm…Since I have a pretty good idea of how I’d design the underlying database, I tend to picture it that way. I know, I know, subsets of R[sup]n[/sup] don’t exactly count as spatial, but that is how I visualize it.
It’s not very original, but I suppose I picture the SDMB is a bunch of nested lists; i.e. the list of posts for a thread within the list of threads for all the forums within the main list of forums.
P.S. ultrafilter, what’s R*[sup]n[/sup]* and why does it have subsets?
R*[sup]n[/sup]* is the set of all lists of n real numbers. A subset of R*[sup]n[/sup]* is just a restricted set. The reason I mentioned that is because every database can be viewed as a subset of R*[sup]n[/sup]*, if you’re geeky enough. I am.
