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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 - 12:44pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3692 of 3700)

Goods from Asia are competitively priced because

http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,773473,00.html

rshow55 - 01:02pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3693 of 3700)

lchic 8/13/02 11:40am

How does 'the reader' know if that put forth is true or skew?

One only knows if one has checked (and usually there's neither time nor opportunity for that) or if one can trust that others worthy of trust have checked.

For more trust to be justified in the world -- there needs to be more checking.

Because things that are both true and fundamental and simple are precious.

Ideas that a reader or listener can't distinguish from these precious things can be false but involved with fundamental things and simple. Such ideas are very dangerous - and we have too many of them.

Some days, lately, I've been waking up early, feeling very, very hopeful.

I'm frustrated other times. But it seems to me, a lot of the time, that I'm doing, and this thread is doing, just the sort of things that Bill Casey was hoping could happen.

Note - Casey was no wild-eyed liberal - he headed CIA under Ronald Reagan. But he was revolted at much of the danger and mess of the Cold War, and hoped that we might be able to do much better. In ways almost all Americans could be proud of. Sometimes, these days, it looks possible.

If it is, new results have to be useful and simple.

It seems to me that some results like that are coming into focus.

Is the idea of "connecting the dots" a "new" idea, in the sense of newly, more sharply focused?

I think perhaps it is. And I think the process of focusing - of stripping down to simplicity and new sharpness - is vitally important.

Are these ideas "new" in the sense that they are newly, more sharply focused?

" People say and do things.

" What people say and do have consequences, for themselves and for other people.

" People need to deal with and understand these consequences, for all sorts of practical, down to earth reasons.

"Every individual, and every group, has a stake in right answers on questions of fact that they have to use as assumptions for what they say and do.

How sharply, quickly, universally are these things known? How early are they known? Does focusing at this level matter?

I think it matters a lot.

I think this Missile Defense thread has been, and can be, very useful in illustrating how human discourse and logic works, how focusing works and what closure takes. If we knew these things better - a lot of problems that now seem like nightmares would sort themselves out.

One nightmare - very connected to these issues, is reading instruction - something where, as far as objectives go, almost everyone is on the same side -- even those willing to work hard to defend nuclear weapons. Some things are very basic.

lchic - 01:33pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3694 of 3700)

Watching a growing baby this a-way it's interesting to see how integral language and interactive communication are to human development.

Looking at picture and story books for children of late - I haven't noticed any stories about Nuclear Missiles or the Cold War!

rshow55 - 02:16pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3695 of 3700)

But you've noticed a lot else - and so has your child. And there's so much to learning to talk.

It is a statistically and logically fascinating process. It seems almost miraculous.

The average American kid has a comprehension vocabulary of about 14,000 words by age six. In early childhood, right on to early adulthood, people seem to learn at a rate of about 9 words per day -- in a way that is almost entirely unconscious - connecting the dots - and a lot of dots.

Folks in the language development business think a person is sorting out the meaning of something like 1600 words at any one time.

Kids hear a lot of words, as well.

The average American 2 year old hears 10,000-20,000 words per day -- and the average adult in society listens to about 40,000 words a day. By age 4 kids have listened to 20-40 million word in context.

So their learning is hardly instantaneous acquisition.

The amount of logical processing that seems to go on is prodigious .

But somehow, people "connect the dots" -- we all do it in very much the same way. We do it so well, and so similarly that anybody reading this thread is likely to share something like 100,000 rather precisely understood definitions. Picked up from a common culture in which we all "swim."

Learning to read is tougher - and less natural than learning to talk. We are built to listen and talk. Reading is an "unnatural act" - something we could not have evolved to do. And learning to read is the hardest thing anybody has to learn in school. Still, a lot of people learn to do it b very well. America has a big problem with people who can't read well enough to function comfortably.

How does it happen? How does it go wrong? How can it be made to go better? A lot of this deals with the connection of statisitics and symbolic logic.

It helps a lot that some words are MUCH more frequent than others - and so, much more important. If you can read the most common words - not so many -- you have a much better chance of learning the others.

When you are trying to get a statisitical correllation - it matters a lot how noisy and well selected your data is. If the data is too noisy, or ill selected - you may not be able to sort things out at all. This may sound abstract - but if you've ever known a nonreading adult - you're talking about human agony - and terrible loss.

(Numbers taken from different pages of Processes in Language Acquisition and Disorders Robin S. Chapman Mosby Yearbook 1992)

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