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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 - 06:31am Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16551 of 16562)
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.

Curriculum decisions, and many other decisions all through society, would improve radically now if the importance of frequency of use were understood.

in 16536 I said

When I cited the data in http://www.mrshowalter.net/FrequencyOfVeryCommonWords.htm - and the basic lesson about complexity and fallibility in Nemo's story http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_md8000s/md8115.htm - I was hoping to refer to points that Jorian could reasonably learn.

Jorian looked - and said so what ?

That's how a lot of discourse works. In fact, when I read Jorian's response I got a warm, fuzzy feeling.

15243 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.imMVb1RUVFN.0@.f28e622/16956

A point about diplomacy and peacemaking. Frequency of response is a very important - and relatively neglected clue about what is actually important. Not the only one, by a long shot - but important. You want common ground - or agreements to disagree and agreements about the things that matter most in terms of use are the most important things to get agreement about.

To find out what matters most - counting - looking at information like that summarized in http://www.mrshowalter.net/FrequencyOfVeryCommonWords.htm - can be very useful.

A humble lesson? A lesson that a lot of people already know in specialized ways? Yes. But if only more people knew it. I think even Jorian could learn that lesson better.

If people need to sort things out - they need effective search keys to assist with that. And often those search keys have to be common ground.

Eisenhower wouldn't have phrased the problem that way - but he would have been very glad to see the point stated. I think it is an enormously important point.

lchic - 06:40am Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16552 of 16562)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

Economics of Terror

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1076769,00.html note increase in frequency

lchic - 06:56am Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16553 of 16562)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

Word Frequency - lists - analysers

http://rinkworks.com/words/wordfreq.shtml

http://www.edict.com.hk/TextAnalyser/wordlists.htm

http://www.edict.com.hk/textanalyser/

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/webtools/web_freqs.html

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/ARTFL.wl.html

http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/bncfreq/

http://www.edict.com.hk/textanalyser/

Programs http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/wordfreq/

lchic - 07:00am Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16554 of 16562)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

Showalter you were saying

in this & next post

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.imMVb1RUVFN.0@.f28e622/18265

lchic - 07:07am Nov 5, 2003 EST (# 16555 of 16562)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

' ... he has talked out against the threat posed to democracy when the media abandons journalism and pours itself into winning a war being waged over ... '

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,897769,00.html

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