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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 08:33pm Mar 24, 2003 EST (# 10441 of 10465)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

9835 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.8Ywtab9A5Cn.0@.f28e622/11377 includes this:

. . . I'm taking the rest of the night off. I can't hope to measure up to the exalted standards of Henry Kissinger, for example as set out in The Secret Life of Henry Kissinger By NEAL POLLACK http://nytimes.com/2002/12/03/opinion/03POLL.html , which includes these paragraphs:

• Henry Kissinger is a mathematician gone mad with his own genius. He sits babbling incoherently about shadowy figures who want to read his e-mail messages and track his credit-card purchases. But only he is able to decipher Osama bin Laden's secret code. His wife, Nancy, who fell in love with his brilliance years ago, tries to persuade him, through tenderness, to save the world for democracy. "When will they all stop staring at me?" he shouts through his sobs.

Links to CIA and my security problems: 3774-3779 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.8Ywtab9A5Cn.0@.f28e622/4753 Pollack's piece goes on:

" Henry Kissinger can kill vampires. He is a slayer, once a generation born. He fights them with karate chops and plunges stakes into their hearts. One time, I was with him when he killed a demon in the cellar of a Los Angeles-area high school. "I perform this role reluctantly," he said. "But my destiny was foretold in the great book." Then we went out for beers.

I can't kill vampires. But though I can't share Kissinger's accomplishments and high status, I do share his leisure vices.

After my last posting, I relaxed and had a beer. Then another.

rshow55 - 08:40pm Mar 24, 2003 EST (# 10442 of 10465)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Way back when, I was assigned to go after what seemed to me to be one of the "big vampires" in AI - especially visual processing.

If you look at image processing done today, such as that worked out for Toy Story http://www.pixar.com/featurefilms/index.html using fancy image processing such as that packaged in Pixar's RenderMan https://renderman.pixar.com/ (something only dreamed of when I got my assignment) you find "images" in a totally undigestible form - in "the class of the serial numbers" where it is essentially impossible - for clear mathematical reasons - to process even a billionth as fast as people do (counting time for steps) when they do wrenchingly difficult processing jobs (such as watching television.)

I cracked that problem, and think I made that pretty widely known - the work is set out - at the level of encoding Casey instructed, in PROPOSED SYSTEMS OF NEURAL NETWORKS FOR POLYNOMIAL PROCESSING http://www.mrshowalter.net/pap2/ - - and demo programs, that don't work on my web site but that Commondata noticed on my distribution disk (in Polynomial Processes and Demo) show how human processing can handle visual images (quickly, and at different scales, translations, and rotations) as fast as people actually do. I had been promised that once that was done, I'd be taken care of.

Did some basic work at the interface between mathematics and physics, too, set out in a "user-friendly" form in Intuitive Problems with Calculus - forum discussion http://www.mrshowalter.net/bhmath/ The problem I found, after much digging, is simple - and only difficult because there was an oversight, now 350 years old, that has propagated through some systems - and that matters, in spots. 1566 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.8Ywtab9A5Cn.0@.f28e622/1970

Couger, the problems of context can be handled - in very large degree - conceptually - and also by machine - once people go to the trouble to use some quite straightforward polynomial processing that I've had working for years.

A lot of AI people got stumped, and stayed stumped - a long time ago - because there are some problems where you can't work - unless you have BIG search capacities - or another way (such as a resonance code) to go outside the class of the serial numbers. Nash saw that one - and I got fingered to work on it. Made some headway.

Other issues of context are related to "Plato's problem" - (you can see a lot about it by searching Plato - this thread) but I share Kissinger's weakness for beer - after I've worked a while, and I'll deal more with these issues tomorrow.

Mostly, for jobs like image processing, AI folks are stumped on problems that, given a solution to my security problems and related credentialling problems (carefully set up by the government) I could solve.

Enough is at hand that we can go a long way toward

" . . . a workable understanding of the world or of enabling them to "make reasonable arrangements" in it.

I can't do much more than I'm doing, placed where I am. Sometimes, though, looking at diffusion of ideas, it seems that lchic may be doing a fair amount.

For tonight, I'm worn out. Think I'll have another beer, and dinner.

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