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 - 09:43am Jun 9, 2003 EST (# 12426 of 12430)
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.

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.vkdkbnYVeai.56649@.f28e622/14071 says I knew of Oscar Rothaus' work - and that's true - and J.W.Marchand did help me with Markov chain work - mostly applied to linguistic and classificatory problems - suggesting that I slog through Kemeny and Snell's Finite Markov Chains - and read some of Markov's original papers - Jim Marchand was a strong believer in looking at primary sources. And then he "put me through my paces" in applications - including many in computational linguistics, and psychology related to human linguistic function.

I don't know whether Jim himself had any conscious involvement with the military-classified side of Rothaus's work http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/obituaries/08ROTH.html - but I do know that Jim Marchand once took a number of mathematicians "to the cleaners" in a high stakes poker game - and Rothaus may have been one of them. Jim talked to math folks all the time - over poker, and under more formal circumstances, too. Sometimes those conversations answered my questions, or provided direction.

Markov chains offer a nice example of an "obvious" but key thing - because they connect to logic that a human can relate to, and because they are routinely formalized with matrices, and similarly ordered logical structures. If you happen to look at a text on Markov chains (I have Kemeny and Snell) - you see structures that are plainly, explicitly involved with arithmetic according to a pattern.

Magnitudes, weights determine answers - in logical structures that depend on, and assume patterns of arithmetic.

The issues of "logical structure" and "weights" are coupled, but distinct.

Unless two people or groups agree on both logical structure and weights - they don't agree on "right answers."

"Disciplined Beauty" - a pattern for aesthetic and intellectual common ground http://www.mrshowalter.net/DBeauty.html - that clarifies some key ideas about what people can agree on - and how they can be clear about disagreements that they have.

SUGGESTED DEFINITION: Good theory is an attempt to produce beauty in Heisenberg's sense in a SPECIFIC context of assumption and data.

We can be clear than we are about distinguishing differences we have about logical structure --- differences we have about objective facts --- and unavoidle differences about magnitudes or weights.

Some "agreements to disagree" are better and clearer than others. The really clear ones are good enough so that people can work together pretty well.

For example - with respect to fredmoore's recent objection that I'm "all wrong" - to get to closure (something academics and journalists may bend over backward to avoid) we have to distinguish between disagreements about logical structure - about facts - and about weights.

For now, I stand by everything I wrote in Psychwar, Casablanca and terror - on Sept 26027 - 2000 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0 - - in terms of the context then. And things I stated as facts I believe to be facts - because I think I understood what Eisenhower told me about US military arrangements. And of course, those military arrangements aren't "the whole story" - and I never said they were. I was also expressing the view that it was very sad that the US maintained the pressures and fictions it did after 1991 - instead of effectively helping the states of the former USSR.

almarst2002 - 12:23pm Jun 9, 2003 EST (# 12427 of 12430)

Britain's foreign policy and intelligence decisions have been politicised - http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,972943,00.html

almarst2002 - 12:37pm Jun 9, 2003 EST (# 12428 of 12430)

The AP is reporting that the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency "reported last September that it had n no reliable evidence that Iraq had chemical agents in weaponized form." At the very same time that the DIA was saying it had no credible evidence about Iraqi chemical weapons Secdef Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Project for a New American Century Chairman William Kristol and many others in and out of the Bush Administration were accusing Iraq of possessing vast quantities of chemical weapons. - http://www.warblogging.com/

almarst2002 - 12:48pm Jun 9, 2003 EST (# 12429 of 12430)

Karzai Says Taliban Is Gone, but Terror Remains - http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-afghan-president.html

HAHAOHOHOH...

(1 following message)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense