While I was waiting for my mythical piece in The New Atlantis to come on line (Real Soon Now) I was looking over the spring issue, and found this piece on the legal definition of death. His purpose is to define when it’s morally acceptable to harvest organs, but I don’t think that it will work as well for cryonicists (a subject I discussed several years ago). The problem with the legal definitions is the word “irreversible.” It’s not really possible to know prospectively whether or not a given biological state is irreversible, because this is an ever-moving target and a function of available technology, whether in your geographical or temporal location. As I noted in my cryonics piece, many conditions that would have been considered “irreversible” in the past (e.g., cessation of respiration after drowning) can now be routinely reversed, without even special tools–just knowledge of CPR.
The only truly definitive definition of death is the concept of information death, in which the ashes of the brain are scattered to the winds. And the fact remains that death is a process, not a discrete event, and as technology continues to advance it will be possible to reverse it as we go deeper and deeper into the process.
ames Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, said: “I strongly support space travel. The whole notion of Gaia came out of space travel. It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.
“There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we’d have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There’s a lot of puritanical silliness about it.”
And that doesn’t even get into the benefits of moving polluting industry off planet.
I’m shopping at American for flights from SFO to LAX, and they have a variety of non-stops for fifty-nine bucks. But what’s bizarre is that they offer one-stops as well (e.g., through Seattle, or Dallas). And they only charge four hundred bucks for them. How many people buy one? You have to really want the miles, and like riding in airplanes. I wonder if it’s just an artifact of their reservations software, that no one has bothered to fix? Or if they’ve ever actually sold one?
…the truest answer as to why we do not accept Medicare is that the service does not focus on what we feel is paramount: practicing effective and efficient medicine in order to ultimately achieve and maintain the good health of our patients. The service’s paltry reimbursement structure coupled with its impossible to-adhere-to regulations doesn’t allow us to offer a complete service to our patients. This complete service includes wellness care as well as the ability to take the time to understand each patient’s unique medical needs and circumstances.
The crux of the issue is that Medicare worries about the forest, in other words, the internal process, money management, reimbursement and policing agreements, data mining, and organizing dozens of internal bureaucracies. These agendas and policing policies help the Medicare service to manage the forest, however these are often in direct conflict with what we feel is key to effective healthcare: taking care of the individual, or each tree.
OK, Dems, want us to have confidence in a “public option”? Fix Medicare first.
For anyone having similar problems to mine with Firefox 3.5 in 64-bit Linux, here’s the solution. You have to use Adobe’s beta 64-bit flash (or get the 32-bit wrapper installed properly). Here’s the scoop.