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I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

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Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#261

Post by echelon »

joering2 wrote: post #177
melling wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 500,000 people die of cancer in the US, and over 8 million worldwide. Maybe you can't do something about one particular person today but millions of more future deaths can be prevented. Some of the people here will be dying "early" deaths in 10 or 20 years. You won't be saying: "well, you've gotta go someday when you have a couple of kids", for example.

I like your post, but before you will inspire few folks to visit some cancer fighting "non-profit" venture, it is important to look at cancer further then just those companies that are fighting it (but of course would never want to end it for good - I mean after all they have a lifetime mission (and salaries to pay), right?) You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question…

This is just so uneducated.

Do you know how cancer biology works?

Accumulated cell and nuclear damage from an endless assortment of factors cause cells to enter disease states. When certain errant states that regulate cell proliferation and apoptosis begin to accumulate, cell populations begin to drift into the cancer territory.

The number one cause of cancer is life. There are accelerating factors in the environment, for sure, but cancer is simply an error state of our biology. It's the machinery of higher order life breaking down and entering a pattern that doesn't self-regulate.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#262

Post by JamesBarney »

happy-go-lucky wrote: post #247
mind_heist wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His writing is just what I needed right now, at this time in my life. Particularly about how to be happy. This is the particular blog post in which he talks about 'how to be happy' http://hintjens.com/blog:99

> 8. Revalue your time > Stop wasting your time on commuting, boring jobs, meetings, TV. Do only things that you feel are worthwhile, with people you like. If this means a cut in income, so be it. Be the person you really want to be. Don't take it all too seriously, we all die. Thank you.

Just spent 9 hours in a conference arguing about how we are going to implement 12 months worth of features which are slated release in 3 months.

Quote hits very close to home.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#263

Post by int_19h »

duaneb wrote: post #226
scottlegrand2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't kick a 500-year lifespan out of my genome, would you?

Yes. Living for 500 years sounds exhausting, pointless, terrible for the environment and my descendants, and a selfish use of resources.

Exhausting and pointless are obviously subjective.

As for the environmental issues and being selfish, this doesn't have anything to do with how long you live, but rather with how you live. Obviously, a society with life expectation that is so long would have to reduce the birth rates substantially (or, rather, keep them the same in the births-per-lifetime department). But if you can do that, then there's no reason why it's any more straining on the environment, whether its 1 person living for 500 years, 5 people living for 100 years each, or 10 people living for 50 years each.

You could say it's "selfish" to live one life where there could be ten, but how can one be selfish with respect to non-existing persons? How is it different from someone being "selfish" and not having children, for example? And why wouldn't it apply to ourselves with our current lifespans? Why not, say, euthanize everyone at 30, and use the existing resources to sustain more short-lived people, if the number of people having lived is the metric?

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#264

Post by icebraining »

greendragon wrote: post #225
icebraining wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda hard to ensure it keeps being trustworthy after you're dead. Also, who said it was random? What if they simply run out of money, for any of the hundreds of reasons why companies do? Laws can't magically force them to keep it running if they literally can't afford to.

We don't even need to what-if: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/suspensionfailures.html All I'm saying is that these scenarios can be sufficiently covered by contracts with the institute you want to preserve you. You can specify that in the unforeseen event of needing more funds to keep you preserved, that you are terminated and buried or cremated in such-and-such fashion without even trying to seek funds from poten…

It doesn't matter how the contract compliance law works now; it matters how it'll work 20, 40 or 60 years after you're dead. How can you be so sure that a law won't be passed giving the right to the family to override those clauses?

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#265

Post by alatkins »

sevensor wrote: post #67
jwildeboer wrote: post #33

I have known Pieter since around 2002. We didn't meet or talk that often, but usually we would have a fun few hours every FOSDEM. On one of those occasions we defined "our" religion, stallmanism.com Pieter transferred the site and domain to me a few days ago. In the past few months I have been almost obsessed with consuming everything he wrote and published. It is exactly my way of thinking. Of questioning reality an…

I first became aware of Pieter from the 0MQ documentation. I stumbled across community and process section of the 0MQ guide and I was hooked. I've been tremendously moved by the dignity and humanity with which he's faced terminal disease.

Likewise. The ZeroMQ book such a pleasure to read, has to be one of the best written tech books I've ever read. I learned so much about distributed systems from that book, even though I've got a PhD in the subject.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#266

Post by [deleted] »

emodendroket wrote: post #75
Artoemius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, in Europe, even less people seriously consider cryonics as an option, despite the population being generally less religious. Some view it with cynicism. Others just laugh.

Probably because it's quackery. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/everybody-freeze-pein

[deleted]

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#268

Post by greendragon »

icebraining wrote: post #264
greendragon wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even need to what-if: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/suspensionfailures.html All I'm saying is that these scenarios can be sufficiently covered by contracts with the institute you want to preserve you. You can specify that in the unforeseen event of needing more funds to keep you preserved, that you are terminated and buried or cremated in such-and-such fashion without even trying to seek funds from poten…

It doesn't matter how the contract compliance law works now ; it matters how it'll work 20, 40 or 60 years after you're dead. How can you be so sure that a law won't be passed giving the right to the family to override those clauses?

Contract law has had a good run so far, I expect it to continue to have one unless we kill all the lawyers. Even then the concept of a written will is very old.

Maybe I should rephrase my overarching point since it seems to be lost in the details. Concerns over scamming by exploiting family or in general not doing with your remains what you wanted to have done ought to be the least of one's concerns when making a decision on cryonics, unless there's a serious problem with contract law in Europe. I believe Alcor won't even accept you unless you have an official, legal will about it, precisely to defend against family members overriding your decision, since case law on upholding wills is pretty solid. That suddenly changing in 20-60+ years seems pretty unlikely. There are bigger threats to spend more time modeling. Even proponents only estimate around a 5% chance of successfully being revived, were they suspended today (see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht...). I don't think anyone who is signed up thinks they have a sure shot at revival, let alone dying in a convenient enough fashion to be usefully preserved, and the two big cryonics orgs in America certainly don't market it that way. The calculation usually goes that for a modest monthly payment on a life insurance plan covering ~$80k, you have a small chance of cheating death, versus having no chance (barring truly magic-like powers like reconstructing you from others' memories/dna/browser history/etc.) if you die and get buried or cremated the normal way.

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#269

Post by jwildeboer »

zump wrote: post #26

Erm, why is he not frozen?

Because he didn't have billions and prefers that his money is spent on a future for his three children. His cancer was rare, so he donated his body to science, in the hope it might save people from what he had to endure. (In private he told me it also saves the costs of a funeral. That's Pieter for you ;-)

Re: I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.

#270

Post by noname123 »

escot wrote: post #174
LeanderK wrote: post #24

This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe/hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc. I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resour…

There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…

Open Source Projects/Platforms:

ADAM (Big Data Genomics, code-base I think worked currently by UC Berkeley AMPLab and Microsoft Research group focused on cancer research) https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam/labels/pick%20me%20u...

BioConductor (R package that is very popular for crunching different genomic analysis, RNA-Seq)https://www.bioconductor.org/developers/

Galaxy (Platform for reproducible genomics workflows in the cloud)https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Support

Public Available Data Sets:

Cancer Genome Atlas (contains expression data for different kinds of cancer) http://cancergenome.nih.gov/

NCBI Short Reads Archive (contains the genome assembly of a lot of published papers): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra

European Nucleotide Archive: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena, e.g.,

For a recent major paper, "The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations"; you can grep for "accession code"(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...), follow the link and download the whole raw assemblies of all samples here: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB9586

MOOC:

https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data-analysis

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

StackOverflow:

https://www.biostars.org/

http://seqanswers.com/

Jobs:

NYGC, JCVI, CRB, Sanger, BGI, Broad, NIH, NCBI, Janelia Farm; any research group in universities; any informatics job at pharmaceutical or pharma startups.

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