X-Message-Number: 5908
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 17:09:48 -0800 (PST)
From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <>
Subject: The Great Cryonics Debate

As a few people have pointed out, the long-running cryonics debate
on sci.cryonics, uk.legal, and sci.life-extension has exceeded the
capability of the forwarding arrangement between the CryoNet mailing
list and sci.cryonics to convey adequately all that has been happening.
That is not _always_ bad, because USENET postings often quote in
entirety a previous message, with just a few new comments interspersed.
While that is accepted on USENET, that style doesn't work as well for
a mailing list.  Nevertheless, as described below, some things can
be done to fill in the gaps.

Message #5383 describes how the forwarding between CryoNet and
sci.cryonics is done.  You can direct your CryoNet messages to be
autoforwarded to the USENET sci.cryonics news group (but not also
uk.legal or sci.life-extension) by including "SCI.CRYONICS"
(in capital letters) in your Subject line.  If you need to crosspost
a USENET message to several news groups, though, then please do the
USENET posting yourself, since the CryoNet software is not set up to
do that.  Also, remember that the sci.cryonics news group is _supposed_
to be for scientific / technical issues related to cryonics, so the
closer you can stay to that charter, the better.

For the sci.cryonics to CryoNet forwarding I have tried to direct
representative and interesting sci.cryonics messages to CryoNet,
but doubtless have missed several that should have been forwarded
and perhaps forwarded a few that I should have skipped.  If you
notice a sci.cryonics message that should have gone to CryoNet but
did not (within a few days of its posting to USENET), then you may
want to forward it to CryoNet yourself (or send it to me at
 for forwarding to prevent possible duplication).

FYI: CryoNet currently has about 265 subscribers, whereas the readership
of sci.cryonics was somewhat over 10,000 a few years ago, sci.life-extension
had even more, and I don't know about uk.legal.  If someone has more
up-to-date figures for the readership of those USENET news groups, I would
like to see them.  My files include a note to check:
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.lists/
and look for "USENET_Readership_report_for_..." to find the Arbitron
summary.  I couldn't find any such thing a short while ago, but perhaps
one will show up within a few weeks.  Or have those postings been
discontinued?

Even at the 10,000 figure for sci.cryonics, though, it's easy to see that
the poster-to-lurker ratio is quite large.  As a few people pointed out,
one does not need to convert the "anti-cryonics" side of the debate
to your point-of-view for the debate to be worthwhile.  There are _many_
people watching that debate, making up their own minds, but not posting.
A debate also helps one see the "anti-cryonics" arguments and practice
fencing with them.

Before posting, though, bear in mind that your total readership is not
only today's 10,000 or more people, but also everyone who scans the
sci.cryonics, uk.legal, or sci.life-extension on-line archives in the
future.  Thus not only your brilliant posts but also your petty,
uninformed, or mistaken posts will be readily-accessible to the world
from now onward.

    Kevin Q. Brown
    


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