I would guess >90% of whiz kids haven't.
Surely you mean ‘hadn't’ here?
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it. You could blame that on the Internet, but that's for popular culture to learn that a sci-fi genius didn't know.
On the other hand, I could easily believe that Harry has only heard of this in a way that makes it sound like nonsense, and he never followed it up. Its absence doesn't detract from the story for me.
Er, Fry was alive when he got frozen. I hadn't heard about the idea of cryopreserving legally dead people in hope that not-yet-available technology to revive them will be invented until years later than I watched that Futurama episode. (Then again, I read way less sci fi than HJPEV.)
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 98. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: