Going back to geography, I kind of wonder how many people know:
Minnesota is the northernmost point in the lower 48
Hawaii is south of Florida
Alaska is bigger than Texas
Virginia extends farther west than West Virginia.
I wouldn’t be so quick on this one.
A quick google turns up definitions that match the “lack of knowledge” defintion, but I see comments from many people that were taught it meant a disregard for information, “A self selected state of ignoring information or knowledge”.
So, clearly some people have been taught that definition.
Because the single-most over-used image by journalists is of a hyperbolic cooling tower (since TMI used them) and this has inculcated into the public the “fact” that any hyperbolic cooling tower, used in any context and in any location, is a “nuclear reactor”. This leads to all sorts of darkly amusing situations, like the time I visited a site in Florida and found protestors out front - protesting the “nuclear reactor” on-site, because the coal power plant used hyperbolic cooling towers. :rolleyes:
I can’t imagine the thundering ignorance that gets someone out of their bed in the morning to drive out and march around in front of a “nuclear” power plant that isn’t, just because it had one of them thar’ hyperbolic cooling towers.
ETA: And I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen major news organizations (ABC/CBS/CNN/NBC/and yes even PBS) use a photo or video from a coal power plant which has hyperbolic cooling towers in an article about nuclear power. It’s either sloppiness or stupidity on a grand scale.
I will be very quick about this. Just because some people mis-use words does not mean they have no meaning. The most disturbing point is that the poster persisted in the error, instead of doing a little research. What is the point of the board, and its mission, if we accept mistakes just because they are wide spread?
[And, with that in mind, I will refer to cooling towers as cooling tower and power plants as power plants and reactors as reactors in the future, even though it is possible some of the people in Florida were knowingly protesting a coal plant.]
You seem to think that if a word doesn’t mean what you think it means, then it has no meaning. That’s a bizarre belief.
This should be posted permanently YouTube’s home page.
When I was in grad school my friend surveyed different groups of individuals on nuclear power and nuclear weapons issues. The groups surveyed were elementary school children, high school students, and our graduate student cohort. The results were abysmally bad for several of the questions.
One of the questions was, “Which is the only country that has used nuclear weapons against another country?”
It was a free-response, and if I remember correctly, the most common responses were North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Nearly none of the elementary or high school students knew that it was the US.
Grad students did a bit better, thankfully.
That’s because the self-selected part of the populace that votes in polls is largely the same self-selected part of the populace that votes in elections.
An optional poll only works when the pollsters take efforts to match the sample population demographically with the population that they are trying to evaluate. For political polls, those two populations can be fairly similar. You want to understand how people who will bother to vote are going to vote before they vote, so you find people interested in voting and ask what they think they will vote.
That’s quite different that phoning up people at random and hoping your autodialer finds and gets past phone screening on a representative sample of the population at large. Sure, they take demographics info in the poll, but the results of the poll are still dependent upon the construction of the poll, and how the demographics are accounted for.
No, my position is that words have meanings and we can’t get all Humpty Dumpty with them, not if we want to communicate with each other. I do not know how you could have interpreted my post as you did.
An additional point is that we are all about three clicks and a few keystrokes from researching just about anything - the definition of a word should not be that hard to find.
Words can have multiple meanings or different meanings in different locations (e.g. fanny and US vs UK).
Although I only found definitions that matched yours and my understanding of the word, I also found people with the same understanding as the other poster.
Given that there is some evidence of multiple meanings, without an exhaustive search, it seemed logical to withhold judgement until the root of those alternate meanings/teachings could be determined.
Doesn’t that make Minnesota the northernmost point in the lower 49?
I was gonna say “fusion reactions inside the sun.”
Silly me.
Where the hell is Malta?
I do not consider myself igoran’.
I know how to do inverted counterpoint. Do you?
When the going gets tough…
maybe the fact that we keep having Fat Man and Little Boy described to us as “atomic bombs” and not “nuclear weapons” has something to do with that. You’re talking about people whose only exposure to the term “nuclear weapons” is those things that we could have been lobbing back and forth with the Soviet Union, or the things we don’t want Iran or North Korea to have.
quite frankly, I think a depressing number of you in this thread are falling into the trap of believing that “if I know something, everyone else should know it too or else they’re idiots.”
With voter fraud, is it possible the polls are more accurate? And please, let’s not deny it happens.
I am sorry for not responding sooner. Right, the University of Malta is on the island of Malta. I have to admit before my son decided to go there, I only had a vague idea of somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Now that he is long back, that is the best I can do anymore. Many people had no clue at all.
The exceptions being nuclear and (deep-well) geothermal energy.
Atomic bombs are a subset of nuclear weapons (and the weapons Iran is allegedly trying to produce could be properly termed atomic bombs as well.)
IMHO, Malta is pretty much dead-center in the Med; I’d hesitate to say Eastern or Western.
Okay, change that to “fusion reactions inside the sun (or previous suns that went supernova).” 
[Supernovas produced all the heavier elements, including uranium and other radioactive elements, which are the sources of geothermal heat as well as fuel for nuclear plants.]
In general, I find there are some people who only seem prepared to deal in vague cliches and common bromides, and every single time the discussion turns to details, they don’t seem to know any details at all, even simple straightforward basic details, about whatever we’re talking about, even a subject they themselves brought up. This leads me to suspect that the rest of their conversation – the vague generalizations – is ALSO something they’re faking their way through.
Depends who you talk to. The geographers divide the Med into an an Eastern and Western basin on the basis of topography, and Malta is in the Eastern:
OTOH, cruise ship operators include Malta in cruises of “The Western Mediterranean”, which makes sense from their point of view.
Hey! Me too!