Permalinks were installed with recent board software changes, first mentioned in this About BAUT thread: Permalink? where their rationale is explained (more search engine friendly links). Some problems seem to have cropped up (see View First Unread) that aren't yet clearly understood, but I just discoverd another issue in this thread: Arrogance in scientific disciplines (sorry Paracelsus I know you'd just as soon see that thread go away)

As near as I can tell, there are now two posts links in the upper right hand corner of each post, with the "permalink" in parentheses. The format of the other one (Thread Post Count) seems to be PPPPPPP-postCCC.html, and the permalink one is TTTTT-aaaaaaaaa-MM.html#postPPPPPPP

I'm assuming that
PPPPPPP is the post number
CCC is the count of the post within the thread
TTTTT is the topic number
aaaaaaaaa is the name of the thread (with spaces changed to dashes, and puncuation and short words removed)
MM is the page number

An incredibly bizarre kludge, if I have that right. The Thread Post Count combines post number (which the software uses to find the thread) with count within the thread. The Permalink combines the topic number with its version of the topic name, followed by the the page number, and a named entry index using the post number.

The bouncing back and forth between various pointers doesn't seem to be the worst of it--the page number, as near as I can tell, depends upon each individual user's settings. My page 7 will not be the same as your page 7, if I've set up different page lengths in my profile. My permalink would seem to be different than your permalink, and if I gave you my permalink, it might not even point to the post, for you, if that post happened to be on a different page for you. I think.