X-Message-Number: 18245
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 23:45:13 -0500
Subject: This Week At CI?
From: 

Mr.  wrote:

>>Cryonet remains the place for information about cryonics, and I 
hope that "This Week at Alcor" will continue to be posted in its entirety

there.  I don't think I would have the time or otherwise always bother to

pull up the browser and read things not included in the digest.

>>I would also encourage the Cryonics Institute to do something similar,
and 
to post it to Cryonet.  More visibility would only benefit everyone.  For

example, why am I going to have to wait until my friend receives a paper 
copy of something in the mail, to read Dr. Pichugin's progress report?<<

To answer the last question first, Mr. F.:  you don't have to wait.  The
progress report, along with other news items, is on the What's New
section of CI's web page.  Just click the What's New link on the main
page at http://www.cryonics.org.  

As for CI's putting a 'This Week At CI' post weekly on Cryonet --
speaking purely for myself, I wouldn't recommend it.  Cryonet, for all
its virtues, has one or two failings, and one of them is a tremendous
noise-to-signal ratio.  It's a good thing there's a list where people
interested in cryonics can stop by and chat about anything, of course,
but is cryonics in any serious way advanced by a week of rigorous debate
over 'Vanilla Sky', say, or by the perennially looping choruses on
'selfhood', Turing Tapes, and Olga Visser?  The actual work of advancing
cryonics is very different from the pastime of talking about it.

This (no offense intended) is one of the burdens of 'This Week At Alcor'.
 Looking over the last post, I read that Mike Perry is studying FrontPage
(Good God!  Dreamweaver!  Dreamweaver 4, Mike!  Dreamweaver!), that Dr.
Lemler did not sing Kum Ba'yah at the Pizers', that Joe Hovey now has to
commute, that Hugh Hixon spent Christmas at the Lemlers, and that Jessica
Lemler thought the meal there was wonderful.  In all sincerity:  I am
glad that Hugh and Jessica had a good time and ate well.  I had a nice
Christmas too, enjoying dinner with several friends at a Chinese
restaurant, and later on curling up in an easy chair with a glass of
Zinfandel by the Christmas tree, re-reading Donald Davie's "Purity Of
Diction In English Verse".  (All right, all right, OK:  I had a Michelob
and watched the Flintstones.)  And now that the cryonics world knows
everyone's holiday eating habits, is it any better off?  I kind of doubt
it.  This isn't really critical information.

In Alcor's place (to answer Mike Perry's earlier question), what I would
do is post This Week At Alcor online, and only mention the substantive
highlights on Cryonet when they occur.  That way people interested in
weekly progress reports could get them easily enough, and Cryonet readers
would get the creme de la creme.  For the bottom line is that significant
advances and actions and decisions are, by their very nature,
intermittent:  they just don't take place every week.  Workaday routine
in the cryonics business is what it is everywhere else:  routine.  It
doesn't hurt to publicly outline some of that routine, and of course it's
nice to know that people at Alcor work hard and are individuals with
faces and lives and are simply good and amiable folks generally.  But
then we all knew that already.

As far as getting information about CI, CI policy is that when there's
something genuinely worth mentioning, it'll get on Cryonet and mention it
in a concise post, so that no one has to dig around in a long general
update to find it.  And if anyone wants more information, there's the web
site, and the What's New page, and the Immortalist, and our own
electronic newsletter to which anyone can subscribe.  The e-newsletter is
(I am ashamed to say) atrociously late, because both it and the
Immortalist and the web site itself are in the midst of major overhauls,
hopefully to be consummated soon.  But one of the things CI is planning
to do is place articles and complete issues of the Immortalist online in
the near future, as well as archive the newsletter on a web page.  So
there shouldn't be a shortage of up-to-date information about CI for
anyone, on Cryonet or off.    

But on the whole we think it's better to post genuine news when it really
happens; and to make it available online to the entire world, and not
just the 300 or so subscribers here.

I should say in passing that if you really want to get substantive
information about what's happening in the cryonics world, I think what
you should do is not depend on Cryonet, where, to be frank, the dross now
and then overwhelms the gold, but instead read The Immortalist, and
Charles Platt's Alcor Forum.  I can't give Charles enough credit on the
Forum:  really a superb publication, touching on issues of genuine
substance, and not hesitating in the least to be critical where criticism
is appropriate and to showcase conflicting views.  Accentuating the
positive has never been Charles' forte, of course, but his prose makes up
for it, and the issues I've seen have been comparatively even-handed.  To
date, his newletter is really a class act.  

As for the Immortalist, it is simply the only cryonics magazine there is
that covers the entire cryonics scene.  Contrary to the rumor that it is
a ventriloquist act for CI, The Immortalist is the one publication that
makes it a point to include voices from across the entire cryonics
spectrum.  And it performs a particular service for Cryonet readers:  it
picks out excerpts from those substantive posts that Cryonet does
occasionally sport and makes them available for people that don't or
can't wade through the daily emailings.  Thus, the latest issue has
comments from Robert Ettinger, Jim Yount, Thomas Donaldson, Mike Darwin,
Charles Platt, Doug Skrecky, Dave Pizer, Ben Best, Yuri Pichugin, and
even yours truly.  Mr. Fair4us writes:  "...why am I going to have to
wait until my friend receives a paper copy of something in the mail, to
read Dr. Pichugin's progress report?"  You don't have to wait for your
friend, Mr. F., if you subscribe.  Why don't you?  Subscribing is
tax-deductible, and the money goes to education and research, noble ends
both.  Why wait to hear about progress in research when you could help be
a part of it, and check out some snappy prose in the bargain too?

David Pascal
http://www.cryonics.org

(Oh, and P.S.:   I said that I was just speaking for myself in this post,
and I am, above;  but I believe I can speak for both myself and everyone
at the Cryonics Institute in wishing Jessica Lemler and James Sikes both
a wonderful wedding and the very happiest of marriages.  On that issue we
can all agree.)   

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