X-Message-Number: 22213
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 14:35:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: 
Subject: Rick Potvin

Rick Potvin maintains a discussion page which is mentioned
here from time to time. The page primarily consists of Rick
discussing things with himself.

Rick seems to feel absolutely no interest in fact checking.
Some of the material is more or less on-target, but other
segments contaierrors. Sources are seldom mentioned, and
quotes are seldom used. The journalistic standards are below
those of a college newspaper.

For instance, we have: "There is a groundswell of support for
encouraging the management, board and advisors to start
donating 5% of their annual gross income to Alcor."

One person has suggested this and has said he is willing to
do it himself. I think one other person has agreed in theory.
No other takers, so far as I am aware. The groundswell has
not been visible from where I am sitting.

I don't have time or interest to continue through Rick's
threads one by one, but anyone who visits his site should
read each page as if it has a big UNVERIFIED sign across it.

One last point re intermediate temperature storage: Rick
mentions Brian Wowk's design (which was described briefly in
the last Alcor News at www.alcornews.org) as being "5%" of an
answer to the intermediate temperature storage problem.
This is meaningless and insults the creativity of the design
and the work that went into building a prototype.

The truth is that Wowk's system works as advertised, but may
require purchase of a new Dewar, and like any system
(including liquid nitrogen) it will have potential failure
modes. Todd Huffman will be exploring these failure modes
during the next few months, after which we will have a
comprehensive report, to enable Alcor members to decide
whether they want to pay more money for the intermediate
temperature option.

I have no idea why Rick found this so hard to understand,
and his implication that he was instructed not to write about
the system is misleading. I simply told him it would make
better sense for him to wait till we have some data to
report. At the back of my mind, of course, I was thinking
that I would rather see a factual report than some half-baked
speculations based on an incomplete understanding.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22213