61–70 of 105 posts
There was a great article on nrk.no about how people are still not decomposed in their graves after 70 years: https://www.nrk.no/viten/xl/plassmangel-og-blaleire-gir-stor... One example is clay. Burying in clay rich ground will slow decay because it limits the flow of air. Another example is from the late 1950s where people would be buried in plastic wrap, to make the burial process more sanitary. They did this for 1…
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Mercury? There is no lead in dental filings. In fact, filings are mercury free as of the last couple of decades.
I think lead was used in dental amalgams but I don't know when it was phased out. But yeah, mercury too.
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@spinach: “I don't think it's particularly disrespectful, isn't all that's needed a change of perspective? What makes it disrespectful, precisely?” Your processor's all fucked up, your information tray is jammed. Personally, I'd feel a little queasy eating strawberries from my own garden fertilized with my dear ole gran. To reduce the cadaver into compost would totally disrespect such shared memories as were had with…
Those strawberries were your aunt before she was born. Did you know strawberries and other foods go into producing humans? And when we die we, if given a natural death, we can go into producing foods again? It's always been that way. If you want to make the argument that @spinach's view is poisoned by futurism, you ought to take a look at yours which I'd argue is poisoned by modernity. You are the earth, you are of t…
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@spinach: “I don't think it's particularly disrespectful, isn't all that's needed a change of perspective? What makes it disrespectful, precisely?” Your processor's all fucked up, your information tray is jammed. Personally, I'd feel a little queasy eating strawberries from my own garden fertilized with my dear ole gran. To reduce the cadaver into compost would totally disrespect such shared memories as were had with…
Those strawberries were your aunt before she was born. Did you know strawberries and other foods go into producing humans? And when we die we, if given a natural death, we can go into producing foods again? It's always been that way. If you want to make the argument that @spinach's view is poisoned by futurism, you ought to take a look at yours which I'd argue is poisoned by modernity. You are the earth, you are of t…
But they never read me stories and fed me chicken soup when I was ill-in-bed aged ten!
“shared memories are immaterial, detached from that person once they die”
You just don't get it do you, I've got old photos of my deceased relatives, they're just made of paper but I wouldn't want to compost them either.
There was a great article on nrk.no about how people are still not decomposed in their graves after 70 years: https://www.nrk.no/viten/xl/plassmangel-og-blaleire-gir-stor... One example is clay. Burying in clay rich ground will slow decay because it limits the flow of air. Another example is from the late 1950s where people would be buried in plastic wrap, to make the burial process more sanitary. They did this for 1…
Given the dwindling space for burials: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/11/03/urban-cemeter... and the energy/greenhouse gas emission costs of cremation, I can see this taking off. There's a picture and caption not discussed in the text: > Katrina Spade, upper left, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains, looks on Tuesda…
The dwindling space for burials... In the middle of urban areas.
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Feeling attached to that kind of judgements is part of culture. Luckily culture changes trough time, this news opens the possibility that in some years this alternative could be as respectful as sustainable.
Cultures don't change. New cultures form. Old cultures die. The judgement is attached to the significance of the person. The right casket, right dress, right ceremony. But ritual comes from religion. A new religion around sustainable life will adopt this method. The others who adopt will be the fringe individuals.
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Natural burial is completely different to composting. Have you read the article? When someone dies, their body is taken to a human composting facility [..] After wrapping the deceased in a simple shroud, friends and family carry the body to the top of the core which contains the natural decomposition system [..] It would be done in a contained vessel which [..] would be rotated to provide physical disruption so oxyge…
Active composting isn't. However most graves seem to already be efficient enough at it that you can bury a new corpse in one every few years without being blocked by the remains of the previous inhabitant.
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I think lead was used in dental amalgams but I don't know when it was phased out. But yeah, mercury too.
The word "amalgam" means a mixture of mercury with another metal. A lead amalgam would be too soft to use as a chewing surface (it would have a texture like chewing gum). Traditional dental amalgams were mixtures of silver or gold and mercury.
I wonder if this has happened in the past, we just don't have archaeological records of it because the bodies have been composted?
The composting happens slower that way, but it still does.