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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 - 02:36pm Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12554 of 12558)
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.

Here's a K.I.S.S. level point I haven't gotten across well enough:

. Most solutions that actually work in exactly understood circumstances (such as many engineering circumstances that are effectively modelled) can only be modelled effectively using solutions that are successive approximations - taken to more than enough terms - taken to the point where further refinement of the approximations makes no difference. Except in special circumstances - this is a fact for basic and inescapable reasons. People do not understand how often they have to keep at it - and how often answers that have been arrived at do not need to be abandoned - but need to be refined. And compared to alternative systems of explanation.

It is logically proper to "talk things to death" - talk them to stability - and THEN summarize - with matching to internal logic and circumstances carefully done BEFORE the summary is undertaken.

That's how human discourse that actually works in practice usually happens - if you go back and check.

. Be sure you're right. . . . . THEN go ahead.

The long and the short of it is you need both long and short. The long has to be right - and has to come first. Leadership by "intuition" or "doctrine" - without much more - is dangerous - essentially certain to go wrong.

Our culture seems to believe in discussion - diversity - but not to the point of convergence to clear answers. Ever. The very idea of truth has been rejected - even by The New York Times - and the rejection is doctrinaire and general.

In the 50's, very few "ordinary readers of The New York Times" could have believed that such a thing could happen in the United States.

I'll try to make that point about focus more completely - comparing points made in The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz By BILL KELLER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/14/opinion/14KELL.html and some points C.P. Snow made about the strengths and weaknesses of Winston Churchill.

The connection to original work lchic and I have done together - and partly written on this thread - is close. It has to do with "connecting the dots" - and answers to both the positive and the negative parts of Plato's problem as General Eisenhower expressed it in condensed form to me:

How exactly can people be so smart?

and equally

How exactly can people be so stupid?

In workable, teachable detail.

rshow55 - 02:44pm Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12555 of 12558)
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.

Technical point:

Most solutions that actually work in exactly understood circumstances (such as many engineering circumstances that are effectively modelled) can only be modelled effectively using solutions that are successive approximations.

That's true in general, but the fact is hidden because people change frames of reference to hide it in teaching - and because many packages of successive approximation ( for example, the functions defined by "infinite" series ) are packaged and given names - so that details are hidden (and often encoded in tables.)

People have a lot of beautiful, gem like "perfect examples" where a single explanation "just fits" - but when you start looking and counting - these are rare. That doesn't mean you can't get perfectly satisfactory and "perfectly" valid answers. It does mean that, quite often, a lot of work is inescapable - especially before things focus.

After focusing, you sometimes can get perfect answers - especially on things that are simple. Some of our biggest technical problems are also simple.

lchic - 04:23pm Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12556 of 12558)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

When Stepford wimmin

meet Stetson men

How mechanical

is life then?

dR3

lchic - 06:17am Jun 16, 2003 EST (# 12557 of 12558)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

The mechanical harvester & The Olive Tree

Tony Hawke's invention sprang from manually beating olive trees with a fishing rod. He believes it will harvest other crops such as macadamia, pistachio nuts, almonds, even citrus.

"Well we pinched the motor and the hydrostatics out a cotton harvester and transplanted them into a chassis which is this machine, then it all went from there, but in the future we'd be putting new motors and new transmissions in the machine," Tony Hawke said.

Hawke jokes that he sold a farm and now has a machine, which owes him three quarters of a million dollars. This may be a prototype and the improved version already on the drawing board, but an inventor's lot is not easy.

"The rewards potentially are absolutely huge not just for us, obviously for us but not just for us, but for the whole industry," Adam Booker said.

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/stories/s878043.htm

Ye Oldie 'OLIVE' - the harvesting of, and best auto-designs, are still problematic .... yet all assist in keeping the price asked of the common-man, affordable.

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