fowler@uw-beaver (Rob Fowler) (08/13/85)
In all the bruhaha about the "coffee pot" I only saw one exposition in the press describing it. As I recall it was like an airline kitchen unit. The specs were impressive. It was designed to produce hot water (for soup and other dehydrated stuff) and beverages for an entire planeload of troops when necessary even though it would be used only by the aircraft crew on cargo runs. Although I've forgotten the actual water boiling requirement I noted at the time that my range at home wasn't likely to meet it. It was something like a continuous stream of boiling water at 1 gal/minute. As I said, I only saw the description once and I think it appeared in a column in an Op Ed page of a local paper. One thing that dismays me about the press is the fact that even when an issue is covered in many articles over a long period of time that the actual fact content of the coverage is pretty low. I really wish that instead of the usual "reaction of celebrities, reaction of the press, and predigested editorial opinion" style of followup that editors would devote more space to plain, boring facts so that the reader could react independently and form his own opinion based on those facts. If the facts of these episodes were more widely known it could sure cut down on the volume of net traffic. Of course there's still the problem of separating relevant fact from fiction and irrelevancies. -- Rob Fowler (uw-beaver!fowler or fowler@washington.arpa)