| Thursday,
October 18, 2006 I don't have much mail on the new National
Space Policy, and the few items I do have say in essence "it's not real,
this will be business as usual, and NASA will sabotage any actual military
space effort."
I also note that North Korea threatens war. US space access assurance,
denial of space to enemies, and protection of US space assets is key to US
military capability. I would presume that whatever their other deficiencies,
the President, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff understand
this very well.
And the President did sign a National Space Policy that looks a lot like
the one we wrote for Reagan in 1988 but which was not adopted by Bush the
First.
=========
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/programs/gamedesign/
Sign of the times?
===============
File this under rumors:
I heard a story on the radio about a relative of DiMaggio saying that her
mother knew who murdered Marilyn Monroe.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1280835
There are all kinds of stories about Marilyn Monroe in June DiMaggio's
book.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Marilyn-Monroe
-s-Studio-Sex-Session-s-Nightmares-11928.shtml
This surfaces every now and then. Perhaps it's time I told my own
Marilyn Monroe story.
I never met Marilyn Monroe. We didn't come to California until two
years after she was dead. After I got to Los Angeles I met and became
friends with Stan Progar, who had been a senior editor at the Los
Angeles Herald-Examiner when it was a Hearst paper. Progar told me that
he had investigated Monroe's supposed suicide, and had evidence that
Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night, and there was evidence
that Robert Kennedy had visited Monroe the night she died. He had
sources, and the story was ready to run, when it was spiked by the
intervention of Hearst himself. I have no verification of this. I never
met Wm Randolph Hearst. I do know Will Hearst, but I have never
discussed this with him, and I doubt he knows this story.
About a week after Progar told me that story, I was having coffee with
Progar in the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills when Joe DiMaggio came in. Stan
called him to our booth, introduced me to him, and told a brief summary of
his story (which I am sure he had told DiMaggio before). DiMaggio said he
believed all of that; that he was certain Marilyn was murdered to prevent
her from talking about her White House visits with John Kennedy and her less
well known affair with Robert Kennedy. DiMaggio insisted that Marilyn was
going to remarry him, and she would never commit suicide. He claimed the
murder investigation was fixed by the Attorney General of the United States.
This would have been about 1969. I don't believe I ever met Dimaggio again.
I find that I am not the only one DiMaggio told this to:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=904&id=167402003
I know nothing more than this. I do not know Stan's sources for
establishing that Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles the night Monroe died,
and DiMaggio offered no evidence other than his beliefs. The Los Angeles
coroner ruled her death a suicide, and I never met any LAPD detectives who
thought otherwise although I have heard rumors that some LA cops had their
doubts. It's one of those stories that never seems to die, but one would
have thought that if there were something substantive there, it would have
come out by now. The DiMaggio's have been hinting for decades, but never
came forward with anything specific.
========
A report on IE 7.
========
We have a great deal of mail this
morning.
======
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion
Having just read some of the comments about my participation on TWiT last
August, I was reminded of Burns.
I seem to have polarized much of the audience...
I do have a problem with some panels: I tend to think in paragraphs, not
sentences. There may be important thoughts that can be summarized in a
single sentence, but I don't generally have the ability to do that.
Every now and then David Em and I think we ought to do some kind of show,
but the technical requirements for producing these get to be overwhelming. I
suspect it's back to writing. In any event I tried to take the earlier
comments seriously for TWiT 73.
==========
Hi Jerry.
Orson Scott Card's latest essay, this time on
Groupthink:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-10-08-1.html
Cheers,
Mike Casey
Actually, the first part of Scott's essay, on "Theoretics" and the end of
English in Universities, is at least as important as the groupthink section
about physics. But the physics is important:
We even have
leading String Theorists saying, in effect, "Because String Theory gives
us no way to describe why the universe functions as it does, we can only
conclude that the universe we live in is a random event. We happen to
live in the universe that happened to produce physicists, and so all
we're studying is the accidental rules of this universe, when there
could just as easily have been any of a million -- or an infinite number
of -- different rule sets that were just as valid."
As Smolin
points out, that is a declaration that science is over. Because if the
rules could be anything, then there's no point in trying to discover
what they are; in effect, there are no rules. Calling it "random" is
just the atheist's way of saying "The universe is this way because God
made it so, only there is no God." There's simply no room for science in
that picture.
Do scientists understand what Scott is saying here? Let me repeat:
Calling it
"random" is just the atheist's way of saying "The universe is this way
because God made it so, only there is no God." There's simply no room
for science in that picture.
Is this where rationalism has taken us? Because to most of us, the
universe does seem to make sense. It's not easily understood, but we
have known that since Biblical times.
"My thoughts are
not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,' says the Lord.
'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than
your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts."
But we do understand much of this universe. Now Science is saying that
none of it makes any sense at all? We have cast out all of religion, from
Aquinas to Kierkegaard, because Science was a better explanation; and now?
I am reminded once more of my Voodoo
Sciences essay, which seems more applicable today than when I
first wrote it. Alas, the remedy I proposed is less likely now in these days
of peer review and groupthink.
Thursday TOP
Current Mail
|
