From: John Marlow (johnmarlow@gmx.net)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 07:39:17 MDT
Ah, well see, that explains it--'twas ronnie raygun loaded the
cannon. Doing his bit to help the environment (eighty percent of all
airborne pollution is caused by chickens, don't you know).
As a side note, 80% of all political incoherence is caused by quayle.
jm
On 5 Apr 2001, at 8:31, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> 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
>
John Marlow
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