Friday, June 23, 2006
President Bush pledged a ballistic missile defense in place by
the end of 2004. By election time, interceptors were snug in
their silos, (WN 22 Oct 04) .
It worked perfectly -- not a single ballistic missile has fallen
on the U.S. since. However, North Korea is now threatening to
test a new ballistic missile capable of reaching our mainland.
In response the U.S. "activated" the system. Bring it on! Wait,
you mean we've been spending $10B a year for a system that wasn't
on? "Leaving it on would cost even more," I was told. Besides,
it's never been tested against a surprise missile, it was bad
enough when we knew the exact launch time and trajectory.
A few weeks ago a cab picked me up at the U. of Wisconsin Physics
Dept. to take me to the airport. The driver began, "You a
physicist? I like physics. You know this guy Steven Jones?
He's a physicist. He proved the World Trade Center couldn't have
fallen that fast on 9/11 unless it was rigged with explosives."
I'd heard it before. Today there's a good story about Jones and
the 9/11 "conspiracy" by John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher
Education. Seventeen years ago Steven Jones imagined that cold
fusion is responsible for Earth's molten interior. That's what
led Fleischmann and Pons to rush into print with their dumb idea.
The 1999 Mann Report concluded that the 1990s were the warmest
decade in a thousand years. It helped solidify public concern
over warming. It also infuriated many Republican lawmakers and
industry groups. At the request of the House Science Committee,
the National Academies reviewed the Report, and agreed with the
overall thrust. The same deniers objected to the review
WN has long recommended that the polygraph be replaced by a coin
toss. It would catch half of the lies, which is a lot better
than the polygraph. There would be a little "collateral damage"
from false positives, but there's a lot of that anyway. However,
the Wash Post on Tuesday had a story about discrepancies between
polygraph results obtained by different federal agencies. Who
could be surprised? We are forced to admit that the coin toss
would suffer the same difficulty, presumably to the same extent.
According to an editorial in yesterday's Nature, however, there
are two start-up companies preparing to offer fMRI brain scanning
devices as lie detectors. Many neuroscientists think the claims
made for fMRI are overblown. Should company officials therefore
be asked to submit to brain scans? That's the real problem. If
it works, it would represent the ultimate invasion of privacy.
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