A doctor writes about our unrealistic attitudes towards death, related in a way to an article I linked to last December.

With unrealistic expectations of our ability to prolong life, with death as an unfamiliar and unnatural event, and without a realistic, tactile sense of how much a worn-out elderly patient is suffering, it’s easy for patients and families to keep insisting on more tests, more medications, more procedures. Doing something often feels better than doing nothing. Inaction feeds the sense of guilt-ridden ineptness family members already feel as they ask themselves, “Why can’t I do more for this person I love so much?”

Here’s something we may be grappling with in the not to distant future… do intelligent computers have the same right to life as humans?

The question then arises – and this is the beginning of the moral dilemma: Can we turn them off at will? Such “humanoid computers’ would not like it; qua human, they would begin to cry when we reached for the off switch. Can we legitimately pull that switch? If they claim to be as soul-like as we are, do they therefore have an inalienable “right to life’?

A fascinating, and sobering, article on the personal attitudes of doctors to their own deaths:

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

When it’s over it’s over? In the meantime live everyday to the fullest.

Informative, though far from uplifting, reading… a list of well known musicians who died before their time.

A brief, though touching, excerpt from a book “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals”, written by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal in 1996, describing the reaction of a herd of elephants to the death of a family member:

Afterward, the others sprinkled earth over the carcass, then went off into the surrounding bushes to break off branches, which they placed over Tina’s body. By nightfall the corpse was almost completely covered. When the herd moved off next morning, Teresia was the last one to leave. Facing the others with her back to her dead daughter, she reached behind herself and felt the carcass with her foot several times before she very reluctantly moved off.

US film critic Roger Ebert talks about mortality, and overcoming his fear of death, in an excerpt from his recently published memoir Life Itself:

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

Television watching has just joined the list of activities to be enjoyed in moderation, after new research has found that viewers may lose up to 22 minutes of their life for each hour they spend sitting in front of the TV.

Television watching is a sedentary activity which is known to be harmful to health and is distinct from getting too little exercise. But a new study suggests its damaging effects may even rank alongside those from smoking and obesity. The study includes bad news for advertisers: it found that if you get up during the commercial breaks and run around, you may be able to ameliorate television’s worst effects.

A micromort, a concept conceived by Stanford University professor Ronald A. Howard, measures the one-in-a-million probability of death associated with any given activity or undertaking, such as say smoking, driving, or residing in areas with high levels of pollution, and make for an easy to understand means of assessing risk.

Via Lone Gunman.

A US study has found that the mortality rate surges in the week following pay-day… with a large number of deaths resulting from car accidents and substance abuse, presumably as people get out and about spending their wages.

“What surprised us was how broad-based the phenomenon was,” says Evans. “We found increased mortality after payday for the young and old, low and higher income groups, for married and single individuals. The increase in short-run mortality also occurs for a large number of causes of death. The effect was particularly pronounced for car accidents, heart attacks and especially substance abuse,” according to Evans.

Many blogs fade away through neglect, their writers going about life possibly even oblivious to the fact they once blogged. Some more officially cease publication for whatever reason. Sometimes there is a farewell post, other times a website is simply deleted without a word.

But I wonder how many of us will bow out from blogging in the way the late Derek K. Miller, who recently died as a result of illness, did. Knowing the end was near, as Miller did, how many would have the fortitude to write a final post that was as affecting, and moving, as his?