Sayonara

You must deal only with the arguments made, not the person who is making them. You can leave that to the staff. You agreed to conduct yourself in line with our rules when you joined the site, the very first of which prohibits attacks on other members. I have no intention of chasing around after you like a fool, and neither will any of the other staff. It would be much simpler to bar you from the physics sub-forum, but rest assured that if you harass other members you will rack up those infraction points very quickly.

So you don't think that cherishing the right of an individual to make their own choices is a good feature of American democracy then? It is ironic that your own words - "for who they are and what they believe in" - do not concern you at all.

You might say, in fact, that denial is functionally the same as loss. If this thread was a Star Trek episode, we would have figured out that it was a temporal anomaly all along about 60 posts ago.

You are right; it is for the OP to decide. So please refrain from making disparaging remarks about other members.

...and I think that you are stonewalling anything that disagrees with what you think, and cherry-picking examples. I cannot possibly be "quibbling" about definitions, since I have been making the valid and REAL point that the ecological definition of habitat loss is a somewhat subjective term. You need to start taking notice of what is being said, or this thread will just be locked as a waste of time.

"Money talks!" lol, yes it says "you idiot".

But this doesn't mean that the people who report (sometimes severe) withdrawal symptoms are making it up. Most smokers have withdrawal angst between cigarettes, for goodness sake. People who successfully quit cold turkey are certainly a group to be envied, but they are hardly representative. For most, the experience of "just stopping" is entirely unpleasant. Yes, you could successfully get every smoker to stop this way, but you would have to enforce it well because I guarantee the effects would send most of them running straight back to lovely fags. And, in fact, frequently do. If we have the medical technology to alleviate such suffering, why not use it? To not do so is just stupid.

I can assure you that nicotine withdrawal symptoms are quite unpleasant. They simply would not exist without a chemical dependency. Not that there is no habitual aspect to quitting smoking; it's a game of two halves.

roflcopter

Let's play "guess the thread's destination".

I have already proposed a solution: we accept that denial is functionally the same as loss, which is what the ecology mainstream appears to be doing anyway. The alternatives are to support a definition of habitat loss in which either special pleading plays a role, or tautology results. Neither of these particularly appeal.

Semantics is crucial when you have someone who is presenting a popularist, media-hijacked version of an ecological state as if it were a universally agreed biological term. By which I mean him, not you. No. What you see is network disruption. What you are told is that it is habitat loss. Newsreaders rarely use scientific terminology correctly at the best of times; they have no chance when scientists disagree on the scope of definitions. Re-reading this thread in its entirety should - at the very least - give you some pause for thought over that. Remember: habitat denial is functionally indistinguishable from any literal definition of habitat 'loss'. In certain cases, yes. In other cases, no. That doesn't really demonstrate anything. An invasive species can occupy the same niche as the harmed species (which is more likely than not where extinctions are the end result). The red and grey squirrels mentioned earlier are a seminal example. You also cause a new problem here that by tightening the definition of habitat loss still further, to include only one "type" of habitat, without even specifying how we should differentiate between "types" of habitat, you further beg the question by effectively disqualifying the extinctions of all species which occupy an ecologically variable niche, or which have any kind of potential ecological refuges (i.e. the vaaaaaast majority of all life on Earth). It wasn't when I presented it to you as an example. I would agree. However it is also loss of network. Which one killed off populations? Animals and birds don't just drop down dead because their favourite perch is missing, but they do tend to starve when there is no system to support them. Do you see what a quagmire we step in to here? It's not that ecologists can't distinguish (as in "at all"), it's that Lomborg apparently provides no definition other than one which produces a tautology. Look, I realise this isn't what you expected to hear when you created this thread, but we are honestly providing the only ecologically rational response. Sorry.

Shame My point earlier today was that deforestation is not just "loss of habitat", it is the removal of the majority of the ecosystem. I do not want to seem harsh or anything, but to claim this fits Lomborg's definition while rejecting the definitions required for counter-examples given in this thread is disingenuous at best, and outright intellectual dishonesty at worst. Why can't you see that?

The thing is though, in the case of fat-soluble chemicals like phthalates you need to take into account their cumulative effect over time. Nobody expects to get a fatal dose from one bottle.

Actually, there is quite a subtle point in there which I want to make entirely clear so as not to encourage further misunderstanding: Lomborg's examples of "habitat loss" in forest systems suffer from exactly the same problems of definition as each and every example you have discarded in this thread. Hence, no special case for ownership of the correct definition.

As should be clear to you by now, because it came up posts and posts and posts ago, and has been discussed throughout the thread, it is Lomborg who is scaling back the definition of "habitat loss", to mean a removal or occlusion of physical features within a spatial domain. The problem is, the "physical features" he is describing - especially in the case of forest habitats - are not simply inert background material. You are talking about trees and the plants, lichens, insects, birds etc that live on and in them. They are part of the system, not just "a thing which happens to be in the same space as one species we happen to be interested in". Thus Lomborg cannot credibly consider his definition of "habitat loss" to be more satisfactory than any other definition ecologists use. What he is doing is substituting the meaning of habitat denial (which I pointed out with big flashing lights and honking klaxons on the first page of this thread) into a demonstration of massive network disruption, which grossly misrepresents the cause and effect within his examples. There is a mildly disinterested but clear consensus in this thread that the only way Lomborg's point can be valid is if he is using his own tautological definitions. I don't understand why you would get shirty about this. It's not like you are defending your own hypothesis, unless you are, in fact, Lomborg?

Surely you mean "only Apple gets to decide who can SELL software for them"? Or has the developer area on Apple.com completely mislead me?

If we are not being solipsists ITT then surely you want to know about mistakes people perceive Sorry could not resist

Pangloss, is it actually specifically illegal to rip a DVD to your hard drive in the US? If not there is no basis for closing this thread. In the UK we have "fair use"-style legislation, although the companies that control media interests have very noticeably started to pretend to the public that this is not true. The law disagrees.

God did it.

We have been telling you about this exact problem since the very first page of the thread. It is our proposition that Lomborg is arguing from the point of view of a special definition of "habitat loss" which is not used or even recognised by other ecologists. He has chosen a definition which only produces the results he wants to see, which makes his arguments tautological.

This is nothing to do with time travel or wormholes - it is due to good old special relativity. Latest thread on the repeatedly debated "Twins Paradox" (basically same scenario as at the start of your question) http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=25400 Thread on time dilation due to relativity: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=26728

Let me put it another way: Luminal is not proposing a new model that is an alternative to "reality", nor does he appear to favour any particular extant model. I think you misinterpreted the function of this thread.

Luminal is not proposing a matrix conspiracy.

What is a "moonnut"?