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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 - 05:00am Oct 4, 2003 EST (# 14285 of 14288)
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.

"This begs the question - If Shakespeare were Commander-in-Chief today and acknowledged for his 'generousity of spirit towards humanity' - then:

"How would Tudor-Bill handle the 'Terrorist Question', Iraq, and Missile Defense?

Looking at the plays, you'd know he'd care a lot about order - multiple perspectives - and finding arrangements that could work. And he'd know how bad explosive fights could be. He'd know something about win-win solutions, too.

The connection to Shakespeare works well in another way. Shakespeare was a great human being - he produced a great corpus - that has been thought over, fought over, considered, reconsidered - and subjected to every kind of discourse analysis including statistics and logic and statistics in interaction - that any discourse has ever been subjected to.

Now, the corpus of this thread is not distinguished in the ways Shakespeare's is - but it does have a serious purpose - and its word count is now several times greater than Shakespeare's (the thread text is now somewhere over 8 million words - and links to billions of words pretty directly. ) Enough so that it could be subjected to every kind of text analysis (including statistics) that is used on Shakespeare's text.

For myself - I think that analysis would be worth it - and would remain worth it if every single one of my posts were excluded from the analysis - unless someone involved in the analysis wanted to make an exception. The NYT - if it wished to - could make a very few phone calls - and this funding would happen - from conventional foundation sources.

I think the analysis would be worth it because negotiation and peacemaking are major problems before us - and so is the process by which human being make sense of their world - and of each other - when they do make sense.

rshow55 - 05:02am Oct 4, 2003 EST (# 14286 of 14288)
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.

13900 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.we7Lbct9Lle.417401@.f28e622/15603

This passage is from Fundamental Neuroanatomy by Walle J. H. Nauta and Michael Feirtag . . . W.H. Freeman, 1986 ( Nauta wrote as a MIT professor - Feirtag from the Board of Editors of Scientific American ).

The passage is the last paragraph of Nauta and Feirtag's Chapter 2 - The Neuron; Some Numbers

"One last conclusion remains to be drawn from the numbers we have cited. With the exception of a mere few million motor neurons, the entire human brain and spinal chord are a great intermediate net. And when the great intermediate net comes to include 99.9997 percent of all the neurons in the nervous system, the term loses much of its meaning: it comes to represent the very complexity one must face when one tries to comprehend the nervous system.

To understand workable human logic at all - to "connect the dots" - and do so well - and form workable judgements - we must face the need to "go around in loops" with a lot of different kinds of crosschecking. To say "no fair doing self reference" is like saying "no fair for a neuron to connect to anything but and input or an output neuron." It doesn't work that way, and can't.

We can find out how this organization works - as it connects to the language we actually use - the thinking we're conscious of (and unconscious of ) - or approach that understanding more closely.

That's happening - and happening on this thread.

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