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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 - 11:41am Aug 18, 2003 EST (# 13326 of 17697)
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.

Batteries Not Included By MAUREEN DOWD http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/opinion/17DOWD.html

"Klaatu barada nikto. I couldn't help but flash on the 50's sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still," watching New York and other cities plunged into sweaty darkness when the 50's equipment on the power grid gave out.

"That's the movie where Michael Rennie, as the superior alien , and his silver robot, Gort, land their spaceship on the Washington Mall. Mr. Rennie ends up shutting down electricity on earth — suspending elevators midskyscraper, turning off TV midshow — to get skeptical earthlings to listen to his message. (Stop fighting among yourselves or we'll destroy your puny little planet.)

If that happened - and people tried to stop fighting - they couldn't always do it for technical reasons - and with better understanding - they could do better than they could do now.

Here are words that are related to the notions Dowd expresses, to me, to Dowd, or interesting otherwise:

superior, alien

clown, joke

trust, experiment

experimental animal

abnormal, aberrant, anomalous, divergent, freakish

contradictory, unfrieldly

better, exceptional

These words can be thought of as nodes in classificatory spaces - and can be thought to have dimensions.

You can look up a description of such nodes in classificatory space in http://www.hyperdictionary.com/

For instance, the word "alien." http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=alien&search.x=17&search.y=7

Every other word is described in such a "node"

Looking at the definitions, and the thesaurus entries - thinking about synonyms, antonyms, and other complexities (like grammar) here's a simple thought - what does the notion of "perpendicular" or "orthoganal" mean?

That notion is central in n dimensional vector spaces.

That notion is much less clear about the dimensions of physical quantities ( density or voltage, for instance. )

Does the notion of "orthogonality" apply to "classificatory spaces" at all?

What about the notion of switching?

Steve Kline worried about questions like that, and simple applications - including a very simple one in differential equations of modelling connected to a 350 year old mistake.

Turns out - to do "game theory" at the level you need to to sort out things like blackouts ( or possibly the end of the world) such questions turn out to be important.

This thread is a great place to "debrief" for some purposes - but it could be improved in others, maybe.

Pardon me for moving slowly.

rshow55 - 12:27pm Aug 18, 2003 EST (# 13327 of 17697)
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.

Statement:

People's objections to me, and things I say and propose, mostly involve the dimension of status - - where my background, and problems, really are unusual.

To get the notion of Disciplined Beauty http://www.mrshowalter.net/DBeauty.html to work better, more usefully - statements like the one above have to be subject to more explicit clarification - at the level of mechanics.

I don't feel like apologizing too much for the awkward aspects (from a status viewpoint ) of some of the suggestions and requests I make.

I had some special "swimming lessons." http://www.mrshowalter.net/SP_51_n_Swim.htm

I was complicit in those "unusual circumstances" - but I didn't have much more discretion in the matter than Mimi Beardsley did - - and I'm doing the best I can.

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