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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 - 08:48am Sep 5, 2002 EST (# 4197 of 4197)
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.

Beautiful stuff ! Edison would have enjoyed it - but wanted more discipline, I'd guess. Edison could have been partly wrong about that.

3894-95 rshow55 8/22/02 2:29pm includes this:

"how IS it that things pop into your head, and how IS it that, if you keep talking about those things, and thinking about those things, they get clearer?

"I really got bit with that question - at a very impressionable age. When I was 14, I invented something (an exercise device, it was, and useful in its way) but it doesn't matter so much what it was -- what really set me off, and changed my life, is I went to the United States Patent Office -- spent nearly a whole summer there -- immersed in human creativity.

"After that, the questions

" how do people invent things? "

and

" how do they figure out things? "

"really took hold of me. Because it is a miracle how creative people can be - and how fast they can put things together -- and learn language, and sort out their world --

"anyway, I got interested in how people invent things -- how they get words, pictures, and math to fit together. Fascinating stuff. Never been the same after that.

"Wanted to figure out HOW to be an inventor, well enough to teach it -- wanted to figure out how the brain works in action -- got interested in coupled math problems --

"Never been the same since .... going on for 40 years ago now.

"This was clear -- people DO figure things out.

"And if you "put your mind to" something -- very often you can do it.

"Still seems like a miracle to me.

"Got so I could invent some. Got so I could do some math -- one thing and another.

"Got interested in the notion that it might be possible to break the code of the brain. Various reasons to want to, some people wanted to.

"Anyway, a part of that is trying to figure out how, someway or other, people sort out things so they get patterns in their heads. I met a lady, Dawn Riley, on the NYT threads, and she just had to be the most creative intellectual poet-artist I'd ever seen, and we got to working on a kind of code-breaking - breaking the code of "the social-linguistic construction of reality" , showing how it works by example, and combing out some consistent, correctable errors in the construction procedures by which we usually construct our "reality."

3894-95 continued - and are linked if you click rshow55 .

Here are the links for 3894-3904:
3894 rshow55 8/22/02 2:29pm ... 3895 rshow55 8/22/02 2:31pm
3896 rshow55 8/22/02 2:37pm ... 3897 rshow55 8/22/02 2:37pm
3898 rshow55 8/22/02 2:38pm ... 3899 rshow55 8/22/02 2:42pm
3900 rshow55 8/22/02 2:45pm ... 3901 rshow55 8/22/02 2:51pm
3902 rshow55 8/22/02 2:53pm ... 3903 rshow55 8/22/02 2:59pm
3904 rshow55 8/22/02 3:12pm

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