New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 04:15pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (# 14905 of 14912)
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.

as I was saying . . . People are very much alike because of processes that naturally converge - that usually work very well, and sometimes misfire.

The lead story in SCIENCE TIMES on Dec 14, 1999 was FURS FOR EVENING, BUT CLOTH WAS THE STONE AGE STANDBY by Natalie Angier - which was included in The Best American Science Writing 2000 edited by James Gleick.

FURS FOR EVENING begins with this:

" Ah, the poor Stone Age woman of our kitschy imagination. When she isn't getting bonked over the head with a club and dragged across the cave floor by her matted hair, she's hunched over a fire, poking at a roasting mammoth thigh while her husband retreats to his cave studio to immortalize the mammoth hunt in fresco. Or, she's Raquel Welch, saber-toothed sex kitten, or Wilma Flintstone, the original Roccer Mom. But whatever her form, her garb is the same: some sort of animal pelt, cut nasty, brutish, and short.

Angier invokes our "kitschy imagination" - and she knows a lot about that collective imagination. She lines the reader up, with things she expects the reader to recognize comfortably. Multiple things - which she interconnects - and sets into a tension. So that readers find a multiply interconnected set of patterns in their heads - all fairly closely connected to the rough stories and images they've been exposed to. A lot of common ground - that she rightly assumes works for her readers. The last sentence goes beyond connected common ground

Angier is speaking of neolithic clothes, and writes

"But whatever her form, her garb is the same: some sort of animal pelt, cut nasty, brutish, and short."

POW !

Off she goes, somewhere in her head, starting from the neolithic age, and she jumps to a new use of Thomas Hobbes old one-liner. And thereby adds connections to an entire literature that fits and embellishes her story.

Just as the jump must have occurred in her head - and must have pleased her - the same jump happened in my head - and pleased me !

And, I'd guess, pleased a great many people in the same way. Including some journalistic judges.

How can we be so much alike?

rshow55 - 04:20pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (# 14906 of 14912)
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.

And yet so violently angry when we happen to find differences between ourselves -and between our groups.

This is both a logical and a biological and an emotional question - a very old one - and one that we're a lot closer to sorting out than we used to be.

Sometimes - very often - our communication patterns work astonishingly, mysteriously well. Other times - things are so screwed up it seems surprising.

People kill each other - and fail to come to agreements - because our communication patterns are misfiring. And if the NYT Science staff isn't a good group to discuss this with - who would be?

Especially with government folks looking on ( and, unless I miss my guess - some NYT management looking on ).

rshow55 - 04:31pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (# 14907 of 14912)
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.

I'm going to take a little time off to get sweaty - and if things go as they have been - this will be covered up with 10-20 more postings - a lot of posting has been happening lately. 14706 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.1aPdbRpYNqA.2333575@.f28e622/16417

Nobody wants news stories that "go round and round" - but the language we use is as sharp as it is because of processes that do "go round and round" - in many coupled ways - and produce - homogeneous logic and patterns in thousands and millions of different people.

In ways that make us human - and can sometimes make us fight.

klsanford0 - 04:38pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (# 14908 of 14912)

On the Guardian, Showalter complains:

"It seems to me that the highly professional efforts shown in http://www.mrshowalter.net/Cantabb_Srch_to10_4.htm and later postings by cantabb and co-workers - taken as an assembly effort - destroy all hope of a reliable and coherent "connecting of the dots" in a number of the senses set out above by fragmenting and frustrating any orderly "collection of the dots" and ordering of them."

(4 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense