If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.
HackerNews truly does pull from a large swatch of interesting people, doesn't it?
Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
181–190 of 277 posts
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#182Just got me thinking: What would it take for us to get to a point where there are small, safe nuclear powered "batteries", that can supply enough electricity for a building.
Far better would be a Pebble Bed Reactor, which more or less fits into a couple of shipping containers and provides a building's worth of power and heat for about ten years with a similar level of maintenance as a diesel genny.
That doesn't sound like any PBR I've ever heard of. Which design are you talking about?
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that low-empathy privileged commenters are to be expected on HN, but I nonetheless find it impressive that such a short comment can illuminate so many biases in one go.
Flip take : using social media to feign empathy for abstract contexts - ones that you actually have zero emotional connection to - is merely how left leaning people signal their bona fides.
I hear what you're saying but it's helpful to look at this with an additional layer of abstraction.
This is not just virtue-signaling in combat with edginess-signaling for their respective audience. It's more importantly a testament to prevailing sub-ideologies within portions of the population.
Edgy comments in tech forums like these are a signal of larger-scale class warfare (a loaded term, but bear with me). White collar techworkers think nothing of building skinner boxes and ad services all day as they are rewarded handsomely for it. In combination with all sorts of other factors, you end up with worsening social conditions across the board.
Some guy being nonchalant about dead Brazilian families and taking pleasure in signaling it is just a manifestation of overall societal nonchalance about rights and negative externalities among high-skilled workers and capital owners. These are real phenomenons that have consequences regardless of whether I myself might virtue signal about rejecting them.
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious whether it was standard practice for you to check for a pacemaker prior to cremation or whether the process relied on a family member informing you?
The doctors that sign off the cremation have to provide info on pacemakers/artificial joints and so on to the crematorium
> artificial joints
Would you have to remove the joints as well then? How are you meant to properly dispose of something like a knee or a hip?
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves I cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"
You really should not. 60 beats per minute means that in ten years the leads of a pacemaker will be bent *315 million* times. That's an order of magnitude higher than we typically test fatigue resistance, and even if we were that confident about being able to produce flawless materials, there are millions of different enzymes and acids and temperature fluctuations in the body. Any one of those could impact the fatigu…
All of this sounds fine in theory as an explanation but was material fatigue actually why the technology was abandoned? Like you say, those complications are rare and the section that was quoted by the other commenter seems to imply that the opportunity to upgrade the patient's hardware was the real motivator (since obviously the opportunity to swap batteries wasn't a factor for the nuclear variant). It seems more like a question of if regular upgrades produce results significant enough to justify opening the patient up again after implanaing what's currently state of the art. Or is surgery obligatory in either case?
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
The doctors that sign off the cremation have to provide info on pacemakers/artificial joints and so on to the crematorium
> artificial joints Would you have to remove the joints as well then? How are you meant to properly dispose of something like a knee or a hip?
Autoclave and sell for scrap?
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know. You can't just ignore the bulk of the input and still call it 'efficiency' though. Even manufacturers call this 'coefficient of performance', not efficiency.
Since precise use of language is so important to you: > "You can't [...]" He did, so obviously he can. You mean shouldn't , not can't.
An implied qualification of "you can't [while remaining logically consistent]" is common usage.
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you have quite a bit of knowledge on the subject. I had to get a pacemaker a couple years ago, and am an embedded engineer. I hope to live another 50 years at least, so this is an interesting subject for me. Maybe my cardiologist is just trying to make me feel good, but he says my leads will likely last 30-50 years. Intuitively that seems unlikely, but we'll see. It's got to be one of the most engineer…
Quoted post unavailable.
You are getting downvoted for the conspiracy theory aspect of your post and for throwing shade on a guy with the pacemaker. If you care about being liked, say likeable things.
Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers
#189If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.
HackerNews truly does pull from a large swatch of interesting people, doesn't it?
boiling it down, what would you say is the link between most common HNers?