arms-d@ucbvax.ARPA (06/11/85)
From: The Arms-D Moderator (Harold Ancell) <ARMS-D@MIT-MC.ARPA> Arms-Discussion Digest Volume 3 : Issue 43 Today's Topics: Arms-D Returns Neutron bombs and nuclear winter Il Principe e Discorsi Help Star Wars software Reversal Emotions, Morality, & Actions ABC Program The Fire Unleashed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Note from the Moderator: Sorry about the week+ long hiatus in digests; I moved last week and our new, improved phone comany(s) took a long time to get my phone set up. Digests will become a lot more frequent again. Sometime while this was happening, submissions to ARMS-D@MC and ARMS-D-REQUEST were apparently failing with weird error messages from the UCB mailer. The messages did get through to MC, which is where it counts; they weren't getting through to a co-moderator. The upshot is don't worry about error messages you get when you send mail to ARMS-D unless you get error from your host mailer saying it can't send to MC or from MC's mailer saying "I see no ARMS-D here." I've fixed up the archiving situation on MC (digests starting with 27 hadn't been getting archived.) ARMS-D digests are archived in BALL;ARMSD ARCnn, where nn ranges from 1 to 12. This digest will be the first in BALL;ARMSD ARC12. Enjoy. - Harold ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 85 04:30:29 pdt From: rimey@Berkeley (Ken Rimey) Subject: Neutron bombs and nuclear winter > From: <decvax!watmath!looking!brad@Berkeley> > > It seems to me that even if the superpowers became convinced of > this, all that would result is a strategy change involving the use > of neutron bombs on cities instead of regular H-bombs. Neutron > bombs disable the city and destroy the industrial base without > causing a major firestorm, from what I have heard. (When I say > destroy the industrial base, I mean make it unusable) Except for its ability to kill people who are shielded from other blast effects by say a tank, I don't see how a neutron bomb is much different from an ordinary nuclear bomb of similar explosive power. (This hypothetical ordinary bomb is smaller than those found on ICBMs.) Whether a bomb is designed to produce lots of fast neutrons certainly has no bearing on whether it will start fires. Whether any bomb will start a firestorm, who can say? Knocking down factories makes them unusable. The neutrons won't carry THAT much momentum. :) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they will induce an important amount of radioactivity. I don't mean to address whether small bombs and careful targeting could wipe out industry without causing nuclear winter. I suggest only that neutron bombs are not relevant. Ken Rimey rimey@ucbvax ------------------------------ Date: Sun 2 Jun 85 17:29:05-EDT From: Rob Austein <SRA@MIT-XX.ARPA> Subject: Il Principe e Discorsi All this talk of Realpolitik caused me to dig out my copy of Machiavelli. I found the following at the end of Max Lerner's introduction to the book, seems somewhat apropos. Machiavelli sought to distinguish the realm of what ought to be and the realm of what is. He rejected the first for the second. But there is a third realm: the realm of what can be. It is in that realm that what one might call a humanistic realism can lie. The measure of man is his ability to extend this sphere of the socially possible. We can start with our democratic values, and we can start also with Machiavelli's realism about tough-minded methods. To be realistic about methods in the politics of a democracy at home does not mean that you throw away all scruples, or accept the superior force of "reason of state," or embrace the police-state crushing of constitutional liberties. To be realistic about the massing of power abroad in the economic and ideological struggle for the support of men and women throughout the world does not mean that you abandon the struggle for peace and for a constitutional imperium that can grow into a world republic. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 85 10:19:32 EDT From: Jeff Miller AMSTE-TOI 4675 <jmiller@apg-1> Subject: Help A request for help from any and all; I'm trying to track down a mailing address for a West German electronics firm; TST < Tele Security Timmann > in Poecking, W. Germany. I've about tapped out all sources for their full address and telephone no. TST manufactures secure voice encryption equipment, supplies about 14 foreign armies. Information available from Janes is sketchy. J.Miller P.S. Thanks for info on h-h ( Helicopter vs helicopter ) which has come out in recent discussions. ------------------------------ Date: 31 May 85 12:41:23 PDT (Friday) From: Hoffman.ES@Xerox.ARPA Subject: Star Wars software In the April 19 issue of 'Science', there was a news article about Pentagon research grants to universities. A companion piece entitled "Star Wars Grants Attract Universities" included a statement that "100 million lines of error-free software code must be written" followed by a quote from Edward Wegman of the Office Of Naval Research that "we don't want to have a few lines of bad code mistakenly set off a nuclear weapon," reportedly said "only partly in jest." In the May 31 issue of 'Science', there is a letter in response from Anthony Ralston saying, in part: ... In no foreseeable future -- and this certainly covers the 10- to 20-year period during which the SDI is to become operational -- is there any valid prospect of writing 10 million or 100 million or anything approaching this number of correct lines of code. There is even less prospect of writing a program such as this that will work the first time it is used, as it must. No regimen of testing or simulation and no application of program verification techniques is even on the horizon that would not leave such a vast program with many bugs. Thus, quite aside from any other technical, political, or economic objections that might raised about the Star Wars system, its computer software problems doom it to failure. ...[T]he project itself is intellectually dishonest. Is intellectual honesty one academic value that will succumb to the economic difficulties in which universities find themselves? --Rodney Hoffman ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 May 85 09:55:04 PDT From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE.ARPA> Subject: Reversal > Date: Tue, 28-May-85 07:49:12 PDT > From: ucbcad!tektronix!carlc@UCB-Vax.ARPA (Carl Clawson) (the physics net) > Subject: Yet Another Flaky Paradox > This has more to do with clear thinking than with physics, but here goes: > > When you look in a mirror, the image you see is reversed left to right. > Why is it not also reversed in the vertical direction? > -- Carl One might also ask why an image is not reversed in sex, e.g. man changed to woman. Or why time is not reversed, or why charge is not reversed, or why the mirror image of a legal decision is not the reversal of the decision. A mirror does not reverse everything. It produces an image that can be gotten from the original from the process called parity transformation which is a description of what a mirror really does, not some ideological generalization. I am glad that you brought this "paradox" up because it is a simple illustration of the origin of the kind of fuzzy thinking that resulted in the "Star Wars" proposal. Much like the word "reversal", the word "shield" conjures up a concept. It brings up the vision of an impenetrable surface that is interposed between us and the enemy. It is purely defensive but unfortunately there is no reality to the concept in the context of nation-nation confrontation. "Star Wars" is the result of the typically ideological refusal to take "no" for an answer. It is an attempt to jerry-rig the physical world to do some equivalent thing, sort of like trying to design a mirror that would produce a sex-reversed image. No amount of engineering will suffice; it only happens in Sci-Fi. Much time, energy, and ingenuity is going into the project of pursuading people to BELIEVE in the concept and this has nothing to do with its reality! If people can be pursuaded to believe in it, rather like some believe that Uri Geller has power to do things that are known ("common sense") by all to be impossible, then they will FEEL safe. Of late in this country many people have been pursuaded that their innate ability to discriminate between reality and fantasy is merely a manifestation of "doomsaying" or "negativism" and just hampers them in "getting with the program". A magic show is fun because the audience knows it is being fooled. The same show would be an insult to the intelligence of that same audience if they were being asked by someone they are supposed to respect to believe that they are not being fooled. This is the case of Reagan and "Star Wars". --Charlie ------------------------------ Date: 30 May 85 19:02 EDT (Thu) From: _Bob <Carter@RUTGERS.ARPA> Subject: Reversal [Excerpts from above message from Charlie Crummer removed - Mod.] Why don't you just answer the question to PHYSICS and save the irrelevant polemic for ARMS-D? Carl knows about parity reversal. That's obvious from the way he asked. But it is an interesting question to lots of lay readers the list. This first occurred to me when I was a small child, and it took me a bit of hard thinking to figure out. It's fun to think about again. Hearing you emote about something completely unconnected is about as much fun as getting one of those prerecorded phone calls selling life insurance. You're thoughtless and self-indulgent to cc: to both lists. Most of us read them both anyway. One good reason for not mixing the two up: People who do find themselves saying some quite dopey things. As: or why the mirror image of a legal decision is not the reversal of the decision. _B ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 5 Jun 85 13:20:59 PDT From: Richard Foy <foy@AEROSPACE.ARPA> Subject: Emotions, Morality, & Actions Charlie Crummer questions if a human being can act without emotion. People wyo think that they are acting with cold logic, without emotion, have fooled themselves. They think that they hve put aside their emotions. Instead they have pushed them out of awareness. That is they have put a disconnect into the corpus collosum which connects their left hemnisphere with the right hemisphere. Their non-verbal hemisphere still has the pattern of the emotion. It still connects the pattern with the hypo-thalamus and the amigdala which generate the energy of the emotion. They still are under the influence of the emotion. They just aren't aware of it. Thus they act less wisely than if they were in touch with the emotion. It like the person who shouts: "WHO'S ANGRY? I'M NOT ANGRY." (Drastically simpified) The structure of the brain, the biochemistry of the brain and endocrine system do not allow one to act without the energising of the hypo-thalamus. They only allow us to be unaware. richard foy ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jun 85 09:58:25 PDT From: Richard Foy <foy@AEROSPACE.ARPA> Subject: ABC The Fire Unleashed Seeing The Fire Unleashed last night made me almost want to give up. However the fact that so many people are beginning to really see the hazards gives me enough hope to continue. ------------------------------ [End of ARMS-D Digest]