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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 - 11:50am Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7905 of 7910)
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.

No mercy so far. This thread is largely about the most important breakthrough the internet offers - the ability to collect information, close together, so that one can say "here, look for yourself."

If you can collect the dots then connect the dots and keep at it matching for both internal consistency and fit to external information from "the world" you can often find out the truth - if the truth actually exists in the real world.

The reason the process works so well - and the only reason it can work at all - is that with enough dots - the odds you are seeing a pattern by accident become vanishingly small - and with work, you can find out exactly the right answer for a particular purpose.

If there is one.

How about giving me back htmls refs to postings on this thread, huh?

rshow55 - 12:02pm Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7906 of 7910)
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'm not going to be able to respond to gisterme's question of yesterday - on "what is an oscillatory solution" - for reasons that are only partly my fault. I got distracted, a search facility I was planning on got wiped, and I got dazzled by a simulation. But I have given him much of what he ought to need.

An oscillatory solution is a solution for a particular problem - that involves real, specific interactions that may not be understood. People, using tools they happen to have that work for them - and communicating as best they can - talk about the problem, and try to cobble up something that works - and meets criteria. It doesn't necessarily have to be logical, or internally consistent in every way - and it may have contradictions - but if they try to work something out -- go back and retry when things go wrong - and keep setting the interfaces in ways that feel right to them - and that interact with others in a way they can understand - they can cobble together interactions that work some - and are stable - if they take their time. When it matters - those solutions - almost always inelegant - can get very much cleaned up - and for a particular situation - a particular relationship, and set of transforms can be the best possible in terms of specific and local criteria.

Some of these solutions are dazzlingly good - and it is almost always possible to find ones that avoid carnage, and do pretty well in human terms.

We can do a lot better than we're doing - and steps taken in the interatctions with Iraq and N.Korea have some good things about them. They need to be worked out - stabilized - lived with - and arranged so that they work well.

For people, a lot of the communication patterns look a lot like bird courtship. Because we're animals - whether we're "children of God" or not.

This isn't enough to satisfy my promise to gisterme - but a time has come where I HAVE to set myself up so I can do some searching. I'm taking the time it takes to do that. Might be back within two hours.

I remember that I've promised gisterme a better definition.

I'd be able to make a contribution, I believe, talking to officials of either Iraq or N. Korea - and could serve reasonable interests of decent US citizens by doing so. Now I have to do something I have to do - get a tolerable searching capacity myself - since the NYT search on this thread is down.

I'm reading more slowly than I have sometimes - but somewhat more carefully. You can't do everything. To be orderly, symmetrical, and harmonious about something, you have to be disorderly, not symmetrical, and disharmonious about something else. So, for satisfactory performance, you have to switch - often switch in an oscillatory pattern - between "contradictions."

rshow55 - 12:10pm Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7907 of 7910)
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.

Will respond to gisterme's very reasonable request later - after I do some necessary things here.

Unless you suppress attention about some things - you can't attend carefully enough to other things.

Nothing wrong with "repression" in this technical sense. Or morally interesting, either.

But when you get to questions like "Did Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth boff in the course of filming together?" - the question of repression becomes more interesting - and issues of morality become involved, as well.

A lot of "accidents" and "oversights" aren't accidental.

And if accidents happen (such as a thread search capacity going down) - some other actions are forced - - for instance - some updating.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense