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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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lchic - 09:00am Oct 7, 2003 EST (# 14513 of 14529)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"Mirror mirror on the wall ... " Great line for a story :)

wrcooper - 09:41am Oct 7, 2003 EST (# 14514 of 14529)

bluestar23

I was reading a number of posts in which cantabb was trading flames with other posters. I've seen the same behavior involving cantabb in other forums. It got boring. But I'll take him off and give him another try.

I don't understand at this point why everybody doesn't simply put rshow on "Ignore". It works. Put lchic on "Ignore" also. rshow is on this forum, no doubt, because the NYT moderators know he'll simply return under another handle if they ban him.

If you'll remember, he's been banned at least twice I know of. He changed his handle slightly and returned each time. They've made the decision to let him have his fun, and so long as he stays put in "Missile Defense," they probably won't step in. There's no other reason I can think for permitting this forum to go on, since the moderators intervene regularly on other forums to bring people back on topic, but not here. Why? Take a guess.

Look, put rshow and lchic on "Ignore" and forget about them. Yes, I too think rshow is bonkers, and his little lchic, too. Since arguing with them is pointless and complaining to the NYT won't bring action, let's "Ignore" them and move on.

Will

rshow55 - 12:28pm Oct 7, 2003 EST (# 14515 of 14529)
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.

Fredmoore http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.I0otbe4BL0C.1007157@.f28e622/16220 raises a good question - and I'm trying to respond. I'm a little tired - and will take a few hours.

For guidance, and a lot of other purposes - the notion of "connecting the dots" is interesting - polynomial processing is one way ( I think a primordial way) of "connecting dots". There are others - and when one asks how much more people can do than a Latent Semantic Analysis program can do with statistics - some facts that a lot of people know may be worth remembering.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/pap2/ includes this:

VISUAL AND LOGICAL CODE IN AN ANIMAL CONTEXT

" It is instructive to focus on the complexity and power of human and other animal pattern-recognition and manipulation. The limitations of current machine image processing may make us focus on the difficulties of relatively simple image handling. It is proper that we do so, but we should not forget how sophisticated and logically coupled animal and human image processing really is. We thereby underestimate the tasks neural processing must do. Patent searching offers an impressive and clearly observable example of animal image processing capacities in combined form.

" Patent examiners and other searchers look through large, organized piles of drawings. While searching, a trained patent examiner (such as Albert Einstein was) interprets about one patent drawing per second. A trained patent searcher will search a patent drawing, and correctly rule on its relevance in the context of a case, in about the time that searcher would have taken to read five words. Trained searchers routinely cover 20,000 separate (and usually multi-figured) patent drawings per day. For each drawing, the operational question "Does this drawing relate to the invention being searched in any important way?" is asked and answered. The number of database-like decisions that go into this process of drawing interpretation must be prodigious. The manipulations of patent searching involve both images and logic, and is mostly nonlinguistic.

In addition, there are patterns that are linguistic. These patterns, combined with statistics - permit people to understand (and misunderstand) a lot - and give hope of focusing.

And permit them to manipulate discourse elements - "dots" if you will - as complicated as news stories - and fit them into larger patterns.

Gisterme asked about oscillatory solutions in January - and I didn't get as far as I'd hoped. I'm thinking about doing better now. The relative silence of the board is something of a relief - it will take me a while to digest yesterday - and to respond in ways that fredmoore , at least, may find constructive.

bluestar23 - 01:23pm Oct 7, 2003 EST (# 14516 of 14529)

<a href="/webin/WebX?14@13.I0otbe4BL0C.1007157@.f28e622/16224">wrcooper 10/7/03 9:41am</a>

thanks for the post..but I stilll think it's wrong to leave Showalter unmolested whilst he hijacks and raves insanely....he has no right to do what he does and be left alone for it....he should be banned regardless for abuse of the Forum...

bluestar23 - 01:31pm Oct 7, 2003 EST (# 14517 of 14529)

rshow55:

"At the level of substance the recent piling on here is more serious than the Jayson Blair case."

Embarrassing, ridiculous nonsense from the mentally ill showalter...

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense