Sayonara

Really? Because my comment referred to posts plural, and I have corrected one term in one post so far. Let's not make a mountain out of a molehill; that one phrase is a common error and it just happens to be one of my bug bears. If you don't like being corrected then I apologise for any discomfort. Yes. I was referring to the reasons behind the use of mutually accepted, conventional terminologies. The specific details of the subject matter are utterly irrelevant. I am glad to hear you are studious (goodness knows we like having members with such inclinations!) but you have to admit that this on its own does not necessarily mean that you have reached any useful conclusions. Or conclusions that will assist in this discussion, to be more precise. Interesting. Are you not of the opinion that structure and function go hand-in-hand? I do not advocate a "science lesson", but I maintain that you need to be careful about the precise details of what you say. In the section of my post you replied to, I warned that a strawman accusation could result from certain means of approaching a topic - having read my post you then went on to make a comment that could have been called as a strawman (the "And “DUH”, you are telling me I might have misinterpreted something!" part). Yes, it has got a bit convoluted this thread. But recall that I entered a dialogue with you specifically in relation to the abstract thought comment, and that the points of discussion which are pertinent to that are all that matter to it. Perhaps it would have been better if we had just started a new thread, "What is Abstract Thought?" or similar. [EDIT: Lucaspa has now started a new thread here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=30956] Reason and logic are useful to abstract thought but can operate outside it (for example, when dealing with concrete entities), and verbalisation is not any indicator of abstract thought. I think we are in danger of muddying the waters somewhat. Are you saying you want Lucaspa to revisit those two points and present more comprehensive evidence? I would be interested also, although not so much as an opponent. Also, top marks for using "phooey" and "piffle" in the same post.

But keep in mind that this alone is not a very good argument against using Firefox (or Linux, for that matter), because "obscurity" is not its only line of defence.

This thread has an interesting discussion about why biodiversity ought to be valued in the first place. It might help: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21635

Unless you quantify "super" and cite a feasible technical means of reassembling 90 tactical nukes into a device that can initiate a series of such "supers", this is a fairly spurious comment. Asserting that 90 tactical nukes could "end the world" was factually incorrect and could be shown as such with relative ease. But vague possibilities that aren't defined and don't use conventional terms are not exactly going to help this thread to stay on track.

I think we only need one Lasik sparf thread.

Ha, not intending to mark your posts for spelling and grammar at all I think maybe you misinterpret slightly. We may not fully understand the brain mechanisms behind abstract thought (and I use "may not" there because I honestly don't know how well it is understood; not my field), but as long as we all subscribe to the same definition then we can discuss it in a consistent manner. It's the same for any technical term in any given field. If someone comes along and uses a different definition in the discussion, then they are referring to a different mechanism and/or effects. Which essentially means a different discussion. This can be particularly problematic in an academic discussion because if the variance in definitions is not immediately noticeable, one runs the risk of attracting fallacy accusations.

I am not advocating the use of the K-scale though, am I? I am advocating reading the threads in which it is mentioned, because they are likely to contain discussions which are relevant to this thread. Like this one: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=22260

We have had many discussions on space colonisation and the problems faced by Kardashev-scale civilisations before, some of which make for very interesting reading. I suggest using the search function to find those!

It still matters, because if we use different definitions in the same discussion, then we are talking about different things. Quite possibly. Probably there are some who have the facility but fail to consciously engage it. It is of course not limited to that area. But when you responded to Lucaspa you were replying to the words "by noting that the required intelligence requires a large and complex brain in order to contemplate abstract thought. Dogs don't have the required brain", which clearly do reflect consideration of that (or similar) topic. It's per se, Latin for "by itself". Not a criticism, just so you know what you are saying Whether or not psychologists understand how they themselves think is no basis for discarding or misusing the descriptive framework which they and others use in their area of expertise. It's a feature of the forums. Since a few months ago, any consecutive posts made in a thread by the same user are automatically merged, and the "new post" marker updated. It helps with spam control and makes things generally more tidy.

Extensive mathematical modelling is provided, which your case lacks. You are extrapolating a law of force exchange to cover all events.

So your approach is to pick a word and then glue it to the meaning you want it to have. Good work! See, what I did there was say "good", but contrary to any reasonable expectations you might have had, I have arbitrarily redefined it to mean "crap". If you are talking about abstract thought in terms of behavioural or cognitive psychology you need to use the definitions that are considered to be conventional in that field. Otherwise you cannot have a meaningful exchange.

Why would it be any more likely in 5 or 10 years than it is now? Or for that matter, than it was at the height of the Cold War? Isn't that basically just a remarkably trivial criticism?

We have a particularly dense kind of grave here, from which no soul can escape no matter how light. That is exactly where this thread is destined to go if it can't serve a purpose.

That's not abstract thought - coherence and logical structure may well be employed, but they do not characterise it. The defining characteristic of abstraction is the distancing of concepts from objects. Be aware that a thesaurus or dictionary is not a technical reference for [insert topic here].

And indeed, there are still people living in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Some stayed, some moved in.

Hawking. Not that I think it matters in this particular case.

K. Margiani, please specify which part of your post/s you want us to question, critique, or otherwise discuss. Otherwise you are simply making a proclamation, and there are more appropriate places for that kind of thing.

The thing is about tactical nukes, they won't take out any of the cities on that list. They don't have the right yield or deployability options. If you were really clever, you could possibly "fake" an attack on one nuclear power and make it look like one or more other powers had launched it, but with modern tracking systems and intelligence (both on the ground and comms intercepts) the chances of fooling a nation into a misguided retaliation are pretty slim. Panic launches shouldn't happen due to the way that launch protocols are organised (I put "shouldn't" rather than "can't" because of the simple fact that sometimes everyone loses their head at the same time). Don't get me wrong POM, I am sure 90 tactical detonations alone would cause untold misery and devastation, and any kind of subsequent interchange definitely would (even a limited one). But I sincerely doubt it would be anything on the scale or even on the order of the end of the world as we know it. Although I do concede of course it somewhat depends on who one includes in that "we"

I think you gravely overestimate the damage, especially taking the scenario given in the OP into consideration. The scale of the planet is far beyond the destructive power of a trifling 90 nuclear weapons; for example there are 61 cities in England and Scotland alone.

I know it was the way you posted it, that was my point. I don't really think I need to research anything. It was actually meant to be humorous. I imagined you baking parallel trays of chocolate and TNT cookies, then testing them in the bath.

I don't really understand why 90 missing tactical nuclear weapons are anything to do with the end of the world. On a global scale (either geologically/meteorologically or in terms of human populations) 90 tacticals would barely scratch the surface. Although to be fair I am sure the second bit is true. Putinnnnn!

Shouldn't that be "Chocolate chip cookies have 8 times the energy of TNT cookies"?

Actually the primordial energy is called Geoff Puddlebucket, and it lives in a bungalow in Croydon.

Are you talking about writing 3rd party code within the application framework, or information for general users who want to customise their facebook experience?

Don't leave just because theCPE is condescending.