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 - 01:17pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7610 of 7614)
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've been making a transition between digital and analog at some levels where I have to work - and have recently enjoyed listening to the BMG edition of the Beethoven Symphonies by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini . I've been listening to a lot of CD disks - something I've barely done before. Just bought my first CD player - except for the one on my computer. I thought the engineers made some beautiful, tempered decisions about the Toscanini CD - including one to preserve some autocorrellated rumble that others might have excised - to preserve nuances that would otherwise have been lost. If sampling frequency were much higher - it would be possible to learn to filter these out much better. My guess is that I could give others some tips so that they could do it quickly. I noticed that there was so much autocorreallation of pitch in the NBC Orchestra that the digital sampling produces a low frequency rumble on some of the very most beautiful passages. I'd love to talk to some audio engineers who are near the forefront of their craft. Among them, the people who are Emmylou Harris' favorites. Sometimes incompatible formats can be beautifully compatable in ways that matter - but often, to do it - people have to try harder than it seems they'd have to at first. When they do - solutions can be very, very good. The solutions that work very well take a lot of work to come up with.

I think we can learn to make peace - stably - with good results from the points of view that anybody decent can decently explain in public - if we take our time. Draconian solutions won't make it - except in a few tailored cases.

rshow55 - 01:20pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7611 of 7614)
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.

We are very different. That's unchangable.

The question "what happens to the children" needs to be asked - carefully - answered carefully - and then reasked, reanswered, and readjusted - again and again and again and again and again and again until answers evolve that are workably canonical where they have to be - workably flexible - and not too draconian or strenuous for the people involved - as they are - and as they adapt to the problems they have, step by step.

This is true, I believe, whether you believe in God, or evolution, or both. I don't see how you can believe in evolution and not believe in God in a lot of senses - or believe in evolution and not believe in God in a lot of senses. There are only oscillatory solutions to the "problem" of chance versus causality. Some of these oscillatory solutions are better than others in specific contexts. The more cannoical you can get a system and its components - in compatable ways - the better the chances of finding good solutions - on this sort of problem - and other sorts of problems, as well.

"What happens to the children" is a primal question.

We can come up with better answers than we have. Mercy and severity both play a part in spots - and sometimes they have to alternate. If key decisions are made in opposite orders - as they have been at Harvard and Stanford, for example - some patterns are opposite for long chains of corresponding cases.

Pardon me for moving slowly. I'm trying - but other people know a lot of things I cannot know - and handle a lot of things well that I can't handle well at all.

rshow55 - 01:23pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7612 of 7614)
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.

Some of the interfaces between math and the larger culture - and the sciences and the humanities - need to be fussed with, too. Some good things could happen, it seems to me.

The canonicity of negotiations conducted in language - where issues of balance and quantity are unavoidable - need to be improved - and that can happen pretty gracefully, from where we are, I believe. If it were done, math phobia and math worship, as they exist now, would fade away.

People would feel better, and be able to do some things more safely.

lchic - 02:15pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7613 of 7614)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Read to date

^{1.15 last paragraph looks 'interesting'}
and far too 'narrow' a viewpoint
DNA may prove to be a curse on social continuation

|>

(1 following message)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense