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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 - 12:57pm Jan 18, 2003 EST (# 7788 of 7799)
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.

Not for six-seven hours anyway, after this posting. I haven't advocated torture very much - or very often - and any time it is used in, or by, the United States of America a lot of primary values are being set aside - and there has to be some very good reasons for the exceptions. Not unthinkable reasons. But likely to be very, very, very, very rare - and maybe questionable then.

I'm not resting as much as some have suggested, but I'm resting some. Orders is orders. My wife, who watches me like a hawk, thinks I'm doing very well, but working too hard - she's decided my sleep cycle has gotten too unstable for her tastes - and we're going to museums, and doing other restful things today. I want to talk about contradiction, and repression - and be careful doing it. There are problems - some going on now - that can't be sorted out without getting clearer on what repression is and isn't, and what it excuses, and doesn't. And how it can be checked, as well.

rshow55 - 12:58pm Jan 18, 2003 EST (# 7789 of 7799)
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 things ought to be clearer.

One is that language - well written, internally consistent language, can "convicingly" say anything - can "justify" anything -- can praise or blame anything . Anything at all. The language code, which is very good for description (though deficient where quantitative notions are concerned) is very treacherous for proving anything. Finding how well a set of ideas fits reality - you have to check for consistency with external things that can be known - or believed as a matter of probability.

Another thing is that, for workable results - standards of orderliness, symmettry, and harmoniousness are important again and again and again from many points of view. When there are contradictions or tensions, connected to real circumstances - there is work to do - and some prices to pay.

Again and again and again, aesthetic standards - the feelings of the people involved - are important - and when things seem dissonant and ugly - that's very good reason for checking. For finding aesthetically better solutions. Checking against reality. (Not just construction of language to justify one position or another.)

rshow55 - 01:00pm Jan 18, 2003 EST (# 7790 of 7799)
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.

It seems to me that a lot could work out very well - and I appreciated Gisterme's joke about the talking dog - an interesting multilevel contradiction.

Here's one of my favorite passages, quoted "in fun" - at the beginning of Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming

" Here is your book, the one your thousands of letters have asked us to publish. It has taken us years to do, checking and rechecking countless recipes to bring you only the best, only the interesting, only the perfect. Now, we can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that every single one of them, if you follow the directions to the letter, will work for you exactly as well as it did for us, even if you have never cooked before. . . . McCall's Cookbook (1963).

A computer can model anything - if you take your time. Or mislead you. Some programs are very much better than others, when you check, for clear reasons - including reasons of orderliness, symmetry, harmoniousness - and total cost. All a mathematician, working as a mathematician, or a computer programmer, working as a computer programmer, can possibly do is show patterns that can work based on assumptions. That's an improvement - when new patterns can do things that need to be done and haven't been possible before.

I'm trying to explain something vital for peace and prosperity - something that has screwed up much too often. How to costruct and trim stable oscillatory solutions - where nothing else can possibly work - and where these solutions can do well - if people take their time and fit them carefully.

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