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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 - 12:27pm Aug 18, 2003 EST (# 13325 of 13326)
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 human patterns in Casablanca are primordial.

And some are more predictable than people seem to know.

The space of the physical set of the movie has physical dimensions - x - y - z - and people, parts of people and objects in the movie and in the world can be described in terms of "dimensional quantities" - - the dimensional quantities of science and engineering.

Are those "dimensions" dimensional in the sense of x - y - z - up, down, back?

( You need some other dimensions, too, to make sense of f = ma . )

What of the words - the actions - the patterns - do they have dimensions, too? People talk about such "dimensions."

At the level of taxonomy, mechanics, and bookeeping, we don't have answers to these questions - and for stable solutions to technical and human problems - better solutions - we need to find them.

You can't sort out the kinds of problems that go explosively wrong - such as the blackout - and a possible end of the world - and a lot of other stuff - without doing so.

Doing so would not in any way reduce the beauty, art, or wonder of the world. But we'd be safer, and more able to live well in it.

Steve Kline and I got some ways toward a solution to these technical problems, and with Lchic's help I've gone farther. For a few minutes of DOD budget - and some staff - we could solve them in ways that would greatly increase the security of the United States and the world. But I'd have to be able to "leave Casablanca" in a way that would permit me to work.

One thing is clear. In the sense of game theory - Casablanca is a game - and about games. It has subgames. But it "isn't a game" - it is serious. And it is "multidimensional" in a lot of senses. As a matter of culture and mechanics - some of those senses need to be clearer than they are.

To get the clearer - people have to be clear about what they mean - even when they disagree about a great deal.

We can do that - if people simply submit to checking - and "keep at it" - without people getting any smarter than they are. A lot of good would come from that.

rshow55 - 12:41pm Aug 18, 2003 EST (# 13326 of 13326)
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.

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