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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 - 06:03pm Aug 23, 2002 EST (# 3934 of 3948)

.... down the steps ... the third door on the right ... no worries mate!

rshow55 - 06:10pm Aug 23, 2002 EST (# 3935 of 3948)
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.

References that are merely cited don't show much, beyond the existence of a somehow "related corpus of material." Not unless they are also examined. References do serve to tell people where to look to find material thought to be connected with an argument or result. They say " you may, look for yourself, judge for yourself -- and I've looked HERE." Of course, people rarely have the time to do that looking. But sometimes they may need to - so it is good to set out

I've read all these references - most more than two years ago - and many more. I’ve thought about them all today, and if I had to, could write a short essay on how I think they each connect to useful, simple things about “connecting the dots”.

This is much less material than is out there - only a small sampling of the "sea" of published writing about learning from an education, learning, brain, and information processing point of view.

But when I say that I think lchic and I are doing important work on "connecting the dots" - I mean "important, in my opinion, judging from what I know based on these references, some others like them, some thought and some experience."

Hilary Putnam said this:

" We think because Newton somehow reduced the physical world to order, something similar must be possible in psychology. . . . . as we say in the United States . . . "I'm from Missouri -- show me! "

We're trying to take some steps in that direction. Order, when it comes, is often simple. Simple enough to learn and teach. You don't get much more condensed than f = m a , a relation which (with Einstein's small correction) is perfect for what it does.

As of now, psychology is not, in Hilary Putnam's sense, "reduced to order."

In reading instruction, and in areas where questions like "missile defense" need to be taken to closure, there's room for improvement. Some of my sense that there's room for improvement comes from reading the following references.

Also doing some math work I was assigned to do. When you think about how well people do a lot of other things (watch television, or talk, for instance) and think about how flexible human beings are --- it seems likely that there is a lot of room for improvement. Reason for hope. And some things to fight shy of, as well.

rshow55 - 06:11pm Aug 23, 2002 EST (# 3936 of 3948)
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.

When I say that I think lchic and I are doing important work on "connecting the dots" - I mean "important, in my opinion, judging from what I know based on these references, some others like them, some thought and some experience."

Adams, Marilyn Jager BEGINNING TO READ: Thinking and Learning about Print MIT Press 1991 .

Barinaga, Marcia “Listening in On the Brain” Research News, SCIENCE , v. 280, 17 April 1998

SPEAKING MINDS: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists Edited by Peter Baumgartner and Sabine Payr Princeton University Press, 1995

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Doubleday, New York, 1966.

Bernays, Paul Axiomatic Set Theory North Holland Publishing Co. 1968.

Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. The Social Life of Information Harvard Business School Press, Boston Mass 2000

Carpenter, Malcolm B. Core Text in Neuroanatomy 4th ed. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, Md.

G.J. Chaitin http://www.cs.aukland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/ has an extensive bibliography and many papers.

Chaitin, G.J. “Randomness in Arithmetic” SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 259, No. 1 (July 1988).

Chaitin, G.J. “Randomness and mathematical proof” SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 232, No. 5 (May 1975)

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