[time-nuts] Determining Time-Nut infection severity

William H. Fite omniryx at gmail.com
Mon Oct 25 14:21:54 UTC 2010


Mike is correct.  Brain activity does not screech to a halt but peters out
over a period of minutes once the heart stops beating.

When we (I'm in the medical field and not, by any stretch of the imagination
an engineer) speak of someone being "brain dead" or "flat line EEG," we
don't really mean that there is no electrical activity in the brain at all,
only that there is no purposeful activity.

That is why, in most jurisdictions--not all--death is defined as cessation
of heartbeat.  In the eyes of the law, that's a dichotomous variable; it is
or it ain't.  Which means, from a legal perspective, at least, that when lay
people say that so-and-so was dead for a time and then brought back, they
are correct, cornball as it sounds.

Actually, heart beat doesn't cease like snapping a light switch but trails
off into meaningless blips and wiggles that can go on for a while.

Clinical death, to physicians and other health professionals is when the
machine has quit and it can't be fired up again.  Vague, yes, but perfectly
adequate.

So.....I see no way in which one could determine with precision when life
ends.  At least not with the precision that this group would consider even
minimally acceptable.




On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:26 AM, Mike Naruta AA8K <aa8k at comcast.net> wrote:

> I suspect that at time of death, brain activity
> doesn't instantly cease, but decays.
>
> Unless we would be able to monitor all brain
> activity, we are stuck with a bald man paradox,
> perhaps calculating the half-life of brain activity.
>
> Maybe we could attempt to measure the weight of
> the departing soul (Dr. Duncan MacDougall 1907)?
> Surely the soul of a time-nut is more substantial
> than, say, a politician.
>
>
> Mike (Dead Weight) AA8K
>
>
>
> On 10/24/2010 11:26 PM, Steve Rooke wrote:
>
>>
>> But isn't the clinical definition of death, brain death, as the heart
>> may stop but the person be resuscitated tens of seconds later. In our
>> terms, tens of seconds is like a lifetime so heatbeat is out as the
>> TOD metric. I would propose we develop a hat with inbuilt electrodes
>> that touch the scalp and measure brain activity. Once this has decayed
>> to the level as clinically defined as brain dead, a timestamp should
>> be made against a standard that is reasonably accurate to the degree
>> of uncertainty of the death event, IE. it is likely that the brain
>> activity will stop instantly with such a sharp cutoff as to be less
>> than a ms, us or whatever. The hat would include an integrated GPSDO
>> built upon a flexible PCB board design with integrated path antenna
>> positioned at the top. This could easily be powered by solar cells
>> charging very thin lithium ion flexible batteries embedded in the hat.
>> Of course the hat needs to be worn 24x7 so it would have to be of a
>> design that lends itself to sleeping hours as well therefore being a
>> sleeping cap so something like a beanie may be a starting point.
>> Extensions to the design may be a time display which would, of course,
>> double as the TOD display for those concerned with your internment and
>> the engraving of your tombstone. A PPS and disciplined oscillator
>> connection could also be incorporated as a form of mobile reference
>> for the wearer. As for cleaning, two of such hats would be owned by
>> the user with one "in the wash" while the other is being worn. Of
>> course, careful planning and design needs to be taken in the choice of
>> circuitry and construction so as to all the hat to be cleaned. There
>> is, of course, the faint possibility of death during the swapping of
>> but some careful planning of how to do the hat swap may alleviate this
>> window.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
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