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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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 10:16am Aug 23, 2002 EST (# 3924 of 3932)
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.

I've added this to the text you see when you click 'rshow55" above:

If you're looking at random combinations, and only one possibility is right, how big is the search? How much does it help to eliminate possibilities, in this random case?

Let's compare N! , N!/(N/2)! , and N!/(N/5!) for three values of N . . . 10, 20, and 40

10! = 3,628,800 . . . . . . . 5! = 120 . . . . . . . . . . . .2! = 2
20! = 2.433 x 10e18 . . . 10! = 3,628,800 . . . . . 4! = 24
40!= 8.16 x 10e47 . . . . 20! = 2.433 x 10e18 .....12! = 4.79 x 10e8

For N= 10 . . N!/(N/2)! =3.024 x 10e4 . . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.814 x 10e6
For N= 20 . . N!/(N/2)! = 6.704 x 10e11 . . . N!/(N/5)! = 2.027 x 10e16
For N= 40 . . N!/(N/2)! = 3.358 x 10e29 . . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.703 x 10e39

or, looking at reciprocals

2!/10! = 5.513 x 10e-7 . . . . . . . 5!/10! = 3.307 x 10e-5
4!/20! = 4.932 x 10e-17 ....... 10!/20! = 1.492 x 10e-12
12!/40! = 5.871 x 10e-40 . . . . 20!/40! = 2.978 x 10e-30

When things become known, and the number of remaining variables gets smaller, finding answers is hugely easier in "random" cases.

Suppose one child is trying to read a text, and knows 80% of the words? Suppose another child approaches the same text, and knows 20% of the words? Who has a chance?

Getting the most basic, most frequent facts and relations straight is very important.

For fundamental reasons, for the most common things, it is also very hard. The odds are overwhelming that both individuals and cultures have made, and will make, many mistakes - - many of them important and deeply embedded in areas where performance is not good. That's both a challenge and a source of hope.

We can do much better than we're doing in reading instruction - and we have strong reasons to want to do so.

The kinds of things that can make reading instruction better can make a lot of other things better, too.

When we learn basic things, the odds of our successfully solving problems can get much better - and impossible jobs can become possible, and sometimes even easy.

rshow55 - 10:29am Aug 23, 2002 EST (# 3925 of 3932)
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.

Adams, Marilyn Jager's BEGINNING TO READ: Thinking and Learning about Print MIT Press 1991 is an impressive book, and has been influential. I deeply respect it.

I've read it carefully several times.

Adams documents the prodigious amount of work and thought that has gone into reading instruction.

As Brent Staples points out, we know a great deal, and do some things much better than we used to - and some things better in some places than others.

I'm going to argue, precisely from the complexity of the situation - and the agony of many of the students -- that there is room for large improvements - from the point of view of almost everyone concerned - and preserving the good, warm, useful things that are already well done.

Though there would be the need for some exception handling at the level of doctrine.

If I'm wrong, I'll try to be clear about it - and propose simple, testable things. I'll be doing so in the course of making a statistical argument that is very important to basic issues of getting fact systems to correct closure.

Including missile defense as a good and important example much discussed on this thread.

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