From: Michael Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 06:31:19 MDT
Its my opinion that at least some stories that are declared 'urban
legends' are merely undocumentable via the web (i.e. not immediately
verifiable by couch potatos). I distinctly remember reading about the
chicken gun in AW&ST several times, and that once someone was dumb
enough to use a frozen chicken in it, which did promptly shatter the
windshield it was aimed at. As for dating when I read it, I can only say
it occured at some point during the Reagan administration, as that was
my prime AW&ST reading period.
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Michael Lorrey wrote:
> >
> > True story, about 15 years old or so. Read it first in the pages of
> > Aviation Week & Space Technology....
>
> Are you sure? All online sources list it as an urban legend:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=frozen+chicken+urban+legend
>
> (And no, this is not a prejudiced set of search terms. I would expect
> this to pick up "This is not an urban legend" pages as well as "This is an
> urban legend" pages, in case of a dispute. But since I didn't think of
> that until after doing the original search, I went on to search, just in
> case, on "frozen chicken actually true", and turned up only more
> disconfirmations - plus, eerily enough, a link to an online copy of Vernor
> Vinge's original "True Names" short story.)
>
> Interesting comments from an original chicken tester:
> http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/chicken_cannon.html
>
> -- -- -- -- --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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