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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
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rshow55
- 12:58pm Jan 18, 2003 EST (#
7788 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.
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 (#
7789 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.
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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