Postby Technomancer » Sat Jan 08, 2005 11:09 am
Ingemar wrote:Suprisingly, the Paris gun wasn't the biggest cannon ever built. In Gulf I, the US/UN/whoever found an (unfinished) cannon built by the Iraqis, so big that it had to be built on the side of a mountain and with a bore so wide that a VW Beetle could drive through it. Some believed that it was meant to target Israel.
I remember that, it was a fairly impressive thing, and a result of the HARP project back in the 1960's. The idea was to create super long range guns capable of striking long distance targets or putting something in orbit. Interestingly, I remember hearing that one of the prototypes was left packed up somewhere in southern Nova Scotia.
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov
