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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?

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

lchic - 07:12am Jul 3, 2002 EST (#2851 of 2856)

GU on plane crash http://www.guardian.co.uk/airlines/story/0,1371,748318,00.html

lchic - 07:15am Jul 3, 2002 EST (#2852 of 2856)

So what has happened to the FBI and CIA .. seems there's no big 'L' Leadership, as in, top cocky-s having a sense of what's right, needed and best for America's future.

Leadership failures have been responsible for the extenuation of war situations, especially in Africa where peoples of 'The Congo' and 'Angola' have gone through unnecessary suffering.

rshow55 - 10:25am Jul 3, 2002 EST (#2853 of 2856)

MD2833 lchic 7/2/02 12:55pm . . . MD2834 lchic 7/2/02 1:01pm

Lchic's links provide VERY important context to a number of questions about how a society, free on the surface, with a powerful command structure below the surface, can hide things, and do things.

My computer seems to be under more than usual attack.

rshow55 - 10:28am Jul 3, 2002 EST (#2854 of 2856)

I saw A Beautiful Mind again, and it was, indeed, a beautiful movie. I stand by the things I've said about it before - - but it was good for me to see it a second time - to see the excellence of the production - - and think about what may have happened to Nash.

I may owe Ron Howard, and others who worked on that movie, an apology about the movie. They may have done absolutely everything they could to depict accurately what Nash was doing before he was committed. If so, it throws a new light on one of the most interesting, surely the most emotional, briefing I ever got from government people. That briefing was very gently done, intensely done. I thought at the time, and I'm thinking again now, sincerely, properly done. It was an assignment they were hoping I'd take, but only when I felt ready. The were terribly concerned.

To break some key codes in language and in "animal dynamics" (of the kind needed for a breakthrough on air-air missiles and some other things) they felt they needed to go outside the class of the serial numbers. Every known code that anybody could make work, or even think about, was in the class of the serial numbers, as was every computer program. They had proofs, that they felt were in some sense correct, that showed that human and animal performance was impossible, by many orders of magnitude, within the constraints of the class of the serial numbers. Someway, somehow, animals were "jumping in and out" of patterns in the class of the serial numbers -- doing some jobs billions or trillions of times faster than seemed possible. I was given a sense that the notion of "the class of the serial numbers" was itself classified, as were all the results about it. If I had a whiff of a pattern that would lead me to this way to transcend the class of the serial numbers in working code, would I please investigate it, and follow it up?

I was told, gently, that if I was unlucky, or somehow wrong - it could kill me, and that that had happened to another guy. I asked no questions about that guy - - this is one of the few times in my briefings where classification usages WERE being carefully respected. I was told everything they felt I needed to know, and I listened hard, cooperated, and deferred to their judgement.

rshow55 - 10:36am Jul 3, 2002 EST (#2855 of 2856)

Could John Nash have been busting his head, wearing his heart out, straining to find patterns in natural language and repetitive patterns of human behavior - because it was the most important thing anyone could think of for him to do - and because they were desperate to go beyond the class of the serial numbers - feeling that if the Russians did so first, we'd be lost? It seems reasonable - - and would fit my briefing. I was told not to try to find patterns where there weren't any. But I was to look for the "Rosetta stone" for this process - if I could find it.

We'd try a simpler problem, also hidden, but almost certainly in the class of the serial numbers, because it looked easier. They needed it, too. That was the problem of simultaneous action of physical laws at the same place at the same time - in interaction -- the three body and N body problem, and a bunch of related stuff, including patterns that had stumped Clerk Maxwell. With help from some other people, I learned to do the series method definition-solution pattern for differential equations - and started looking for patterns.

Did Nash blow his head, straining on an impossible pattern recognition job? Did the agency do the best they knew to do (maybe not very well) under very difficult circumstances? Did they feel forced to mess up Nash's mind, because he knew too much, and it was dangerous? Was it a nightmare for all concerned?

Was it a tragedy - but also a human drama with an enormous amount of love, helping and good faith, well set out in Howard's movie, as well?

Maybe. Seems possible, though of course I'm guessing.

Here's the Rosetta Stone -- http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/regandat - - if Nash had seen it (the data wasn't taken till 1989) he might have done everything I've done, and much more, in the 1950's - - comfortably. You can't look at this data, know radar practice and some other things, be looking for a way to jump in and out of the class of the serial numbers, and not think "resonance code."

Brains jump in and out of subprograms in the class of the serial numbers with a resonance code - and brain is highly evolved with resonant elements adapted to that.

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