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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 - 07:39am Oct 2, 2003 EST (# 14217 of 14217)
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.

13900 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.tmgbbvWoKQE.3023825@.f28e622/15603

This passage is from Fundamental Neuroanatomy by Walle J. H. Nauta and Michael Feirtag . . . W.H. Freeman, 1986 ( Nauta wrote as a MIT professor - Feirtag from the Board of Editors of Scientific American ).

The passage is the last paragraph of Nauta and Feirtag's Chapter 2 - b The Neuron; Some Numbers

"One last conclusion remains to be drawn from the numbers we have cited. With the exception of a mere few million motor neurons, the entire human brain and spinal chord are a great intermediate net. And when the great intermediate net comes to include 99.9997 percent of all the neurons in the nervous system, the term loses much of its meaning: it comes to represent the very complexity one must face when one tries to comprehend the nervous system.

To understand workable human logic at all - to "connect the dots" - and do so well - and form workable judgements - we must face the need to "go around in loops" with a lot of different kinds of crosschecking. To say "no fair doing self reference" is like saying "no fair for a neuron to connect to anything but and input or an output neuron." It doesn't work that way, and can't.

Journalists, including journalists at the NYT, have fully mastered the art of "hiding things in plain sight" - and the prohibition on loops, and crosschecking - is a way to do that. The crossreferencing on this thread isn't accidental - and it shows something basic. With the crossreferencing shown - a lot can be knit together - both in terms of internal logic - and reference to external facts. It becomes clear enough to TEST . Not necessarily true - though, after a time "the odds of that" improve. Good enough to test.

Without the cycling - clarity is strictly impossible dealing with complicated subject matter.

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