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A Geek Funeral
We've recently talked about a geek wedding, and now reader Sam_In_The_Hills writes in with news of his brother's geek funeral. "I've not seen this topic covered here before even though it's one that will concern us all at some time: what to do with our corporeal remains after we've left for that great data bank in the sky. For my recently departed brother (long illness, don't smoke!), I thought this nice SPARCstation would be a cool place to spend eternity. Yes, he's really in there (after cremation). I kept the floppy drive cover but for space reasons removed the floppy drive, hard drive, and most of the power supply. I left behind the motherboard and power switch and plugs to keep all openings covered. The case worked quite well at his memorial party. His friends and family were able to leave their final good-byes on post-notes. Anyone who wanted to keep their words private could just slip their note into the case through the floppy slot. All notes will be sealed in plastic and placed within the case. There has been one complication. His daughters like the look of it so much they aren't now sure if they want to bury him. One more thing: the words on the plaque really do capture one of the last things he ever said. Of course as kids we watched the show in its first run."
"Anti-smoking jab"?
Surely a recommendation to not do what recently (and slowly, and no doubt unpleasantly) killed your brother in a post about his funeral arrangements isn't on the same level as cheap moralistic point-scoring.
It's like comparing a Jack Thompson op-ed hit piece to a a eulogy for some kid who was shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For the record, I think that anti-smoking campaigning took on a distasteful moralistic tone some time ago; but the notion that you can't mention the subject after watching your brother die slowly of it seems a bit much.
When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died. Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced with new material we drank, ate and breathed in through the year. It is as if living is a type of standing wave through which matter flows.
My point? I wouldn't care what happened to my remains. I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.
Look, the guy probably died from lung cancer or some other complication that resulted from smoking. The dangers of smoking are well known, even and especially to smokers. Give the grieving family member a break for putting in an anti-smoking message into the write-up. You might think smoking is great and gets you through the day, but if you leave this world due to some smoking complication, I doubt the grieving members of your family that you leave behind are going to give a crap about the roads you helped build with a couple bucks in tobacco taxes seeing as how you're no longer with them.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
TFS didn't put anyone down for smoking and it didn't suggest we tax smokers, all it said was *don't smoke*. Which is actually pretty good advice.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Would that count as a zombie botnet?
*ducks*
RIP
Do we need the anti-smoking jab
I don't know. If your sister died due to liver-failure as a result of alcoholism, wouldn't it be understandable if you disliked alcohol?
If one of my siblings died as a result of an addiction to cigarettes, I believe I too would warn people about the risks of smoking.
I don't believe it's a jab, either, just harsh reality.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
There are several more traditional geek options. You can donate your brain to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center and get their cool "I'm going to Harvard!" card. Plastination is a pretty interesting option as well. There's also the more generic "donate to science" option, which usually means you get to help train the next doctors going through Gross Anatomy. I have to recommend the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" for more information. It's really a hilarious read and very educational.
Not really, you don't. It's a choice. There are other ways.
Homicide is illegal in most countries.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Truly epic misinterpretation of, "I'd like to be incinerated in the Sun".
Jason-Palmer.com
That's not really a fair argument. After all, who ever died from not smoking?
It's a perfectly fair argument. If you die from a smoking-related illness, then you have smoking to blame for your death. If you die from an obesity-related illness, then you have too many cheeseburgers to blame for your death.
Are you going to suggest that, if someone dies from a smoking-related illness, it doesn't matter because they would have died someday anyway? Well, sure, if that's the attitude, then just shoot heroin while you're driving the wrong direction on the freeway. When you die, however, be prepared for your family to resent your callous disregard for the consequences of drug abuse and reckless driving.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
http://www.alcor.org/ . My wife and I are both signed up for cryonic suspension. Even if the chances of success are low, they beat the pants off of the alternative!
Also, if I may tout my own unofficial FAQ: http://datan0de.livejournal.com/144534.html
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
It is possible to quit. If you won't work on the problems in your life that make you smoke, and you're subjecting someone else to your secondhand smoke, then fuck you. I don't care how addicted you think you are; it might be true, but it's no excuse for making anyone else breathe your nasty smoke. I say this as a repeat quitter (over a year this time so far though) and when I smoked, I did my best to get downwind. Your right to clean air supersedes my right to feed my monkey.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Homicide is illegal in most countries.
We should legalize it, tax it, and spend all the money earned towards an anti-homicide campaign.
Oh come on, it's:
Dell, you're getting a dude!
I want nothing left of my corpse.
Give any useful organs away. Let a child see a sunset through my corneas; let my heart break again in the ribcage of a teenager; let my lungs have their breath taken away when holding a new infant.
My skeleton can inspire and educate biology students. My brain can shed new light on diseases, either ones I don't know I have yet or as a control group.
When I'm dead, I'm done with the meatsack. Anyone who wants it can have it.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
You're making quite a few presumptions here. I'll try to take your main points one at a time, and will ignore the ad hominems and obvious trolling:
* I'm not screwing anybody over. I have no children and no plans to have any. My wife and I both established *plenty* of life insurance long before making any cryonics arrangements. If I go down tomorrow my wife is well taken care of, and vice versa. The separate policies that cover our cryosuspension are just that- separate. And no, we're not wealthy by any means- at least compared with the average non-student slashdotter. I suspect you're grossly overestimating the cost of cryonic suspension and the cost of an insurance policy for a healthy non-smoker in his early 30's.
* You may find my assessment of the Patient Care Trust's financial stability "laughable", but I find the idea that it'll take 1000 years for us to obtain control over matter at the molecular level patently absurd. Eric Drexler estimates that it'll happen within our lifetimes (or at least my lifetime), and the trends in nanotech development point to him being not too far off. Even if he's wildly optimistic, I suspect that nothing short of a global cataclysm will keep us from reaching that goal in this century, and I'm willing to bet my life on that. (And as I mention in the FAQ, if a global cataclysm does happen then we're all SOL anyway.)
* Why would they bother to revive us? Again, I covered this in the FAQ. The PCT is under contractual obligation, and one of the requirements to be on the board of directors is that you have to have a family member already in the tank, so they have a vested interest in their well-being. Why does anyone help anyone in a critical medical situation? You can call the question naive if you like, but the fact is that people do help each other. If nothing else, it's likely that anyone who does get revived will be highly motivated to rescue their fellow cryonauts. (I base this statement on my personal interactions with over 2 dozen Alcor members, every one of whom would take that position.)
If you prefer to disregard basic human empathy entirely, and are looking for a completely economic/rational reason, as technology continues to improve and spread eventually the cost of reviving patients will be less than the cost of maintaining their stasis.
* I'll disregard your conjecture about the future population levels in "1000 years", as well as your incorrect assessment of the cost of cryosuspension, but I will point out that defeating aging is far less of a challenge than reviving a vitrified person. Assuming that the revived person is instantiated in a "meat body" (which is not a given), undoing age-related damage will likely be a side effect of undoing suspension-related damage. In fact, I can scarcely imagine a scenario where that wouldn't be the case.
* I don't know that being revived will be better than being dead, but a society that's a living hell is a society that won't be in a position to revive cryonics patients. And if nothing else, being revived gives me the ability to make that decision for myself. If I'm revived and for some reason prefer oblivion then I can simply find something large and fast moving to step in front of. If I rot in the ground then I rob myself of any control over my fate. (And for the record, I don't believe in Heaven either, so that argument is a waste of time.)
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
.. but what you did here was really awesome.
Funerals and memorials should be about celebrating a person's life, not mourning a person's death. It appears that you and your brother both had a whimsical sense of humor, and that you were able to harness that and put together a very unique tribute that captured the essence of what he loved in life. I don't know how or when I'm going to go (nor do I want to) but when that time comes, I'd love to think that my family will be as creative and thoughtful as you were here.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground