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It is also worth considering that expedition leaders, and they are virtually all Sherpas, have the final decision on matters of safety. It is probably certain that almost every local leader of an expedition has had a foreign client whose instinctive response to a suggestion on canceling the summit attempt is: “No, I’ve paid to do this, I’m paying to help me do this.”
When the air is that thin, there is neither the guarantee of clear thinking nor space for lengthy debates. But if there is a waiver that has been signed by the client, let that waiver guide the decision.
If a climber takes 12 hours instead of the prescribed seven hours for the Camp 3 section, there should be no debates on whether the summit attempt should be made or not, irrespective of the US$50,000 paid.
The real risks, of death, are too high. And that risk is entirely unnecessary for the expedition leader who is advising to descend.
Contemplating death doesn't necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested. Following a review of dozens of studies, University of Missouri researchers found that thoughts of mortality can lead to decreased militaristic attitudes, better health decisions, increased altruism and helpfulness, and reduced divorce rates.
an extra portion of red meat a day, where a portion is 85g or 3 oz — a lump of meat around the size of a pack of cards or slightly smaller than a standard quarter-pound burger — is associated with a hazard ratio of 1.13, that is a 13% increased risk of death. But what does this mean? Surely our risk of death is already 100%, and a risk of 113% does not seem very sensible? To really interpret this number we need to use some maths.
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Since we assume Sam is consuming an average amount of red meat, we shall take him as an average man. We can see the effect of a hazard-ratio of 1.13 for Mike by multiplying all the
columns by 1.13 and recalculating 
and the life expectancy from age 40, which gives us 39 extra years for Mike. So the extra meat is associated with (but did not necessarily cause) the loss of one year in life expectancy. Over 40 years this is 1/40th difference, or roughly one week a year or half hour per day. So a life-long habit of eating burgers for lunch is associated with a loss of half an hour a day, considerably more than it takes to eat the burger. As we showed in our discussion of microlives a half-hour a day off your life expectancy is also associated with two cigarettes a day and each day of being 5 Kg overweight.
Of course we cannot say that precisely this time will be lost, and we cannot even be very confident that Mike will die first. An extremely elegant mathematical result says that if we assume a hazard ratio
is kept up throughout their lives, the odds that Mike dies before Sam is precisely . Now odds is defined as 
, where p is the chance that Mike dies before Sam. Hence ![\[ p=h/(1+h)=0.53. \]](/MI/d40b9c2650170fdc3055016f03d71148/images/img-0003.png)
So there is only a 53% chance that Mike dies first, rather than a 50:50 chance. Not a big effect.
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Finally, neither can we say the meat is directly causing the loss in life expectancy, in the sense that if Mike changed his lunch habits and stopped stuffing his face with a burger, his life expectancy would definitely increase. Maybe there's some other factor that both encourages Mike to eat more meat and leads to a shorter life.
It is quite plausible that income could be such a factor — lower income in the US is associated with both eating more red meat and reduced life expectancy, even allowing for measurable risk factors. But the Harvard study does not adjust for income, arguing that the people in the study — health professionals and nurses — are broadly doing the same job. But, judging from the heated discussion that seems to accompany this topic, the argument will go on.
Afterlife beliefs are the defining feature of religions (IMHO). So it is no surprise to find that religious people fear death.
Another fact, brought out in some detail in Gananath Obeyesekere's book on rebirth eschatologies "Imagining Karma", is that once we introduce morality into the picture then at a minimum the afterlife bifurcates: good people (however defined) go to a good afterlife; and bad people go to a bad afterlife. We see this in Egyptian religion and in Zoroastrianism and all their successors - including the Abrahamic religions. We see it in Indian religions with rebirth eschatologies as well.
So religious people not only fear death more, but have more reason to fear death. Since none of us is perfectly moral, perfectly good, we have reason to fear that our imperfections will condemn us to an unpleasant afterlife - and judgement in the afterlife tends to be inescapable unlike judgement in this life.
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Muslims seem to be more likely to believe in a vindictive god, and less likely to believe in a forgiving god. The authors put this down to fundamental differences in Islamic and Christian religions.
That's possible, but I'm also inclined to think that Christianity has reinvented itself over the past 100 years. As social structures have evolved, the idea of god as a punisher has fallen out of fashion - indeed, many modern Christians don't have any meaningful belief in Hell at all. -
the observation that the non-religious have a very low fear of death. Other studies have also shown that the non-religious have a higher suicide rate. Could these two observations be linked?
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all of us - religious and non-religious alike - have a kind of innate response to the fear of death that makes us more accommodating to the idea of supernatural beings (at least, those ones that are culturally accepted as possibly real and not complete fantasies).
Countering this, on the other hand, is something called Worldview Defence. This is the well-known phenomenon that when we are reminded about death, we tend to cling onto comforting, reassuring beliefs about the world. We become more positive about our own ethnic group or nation, for example, and more hostile to strangers.
For the religious, this also includes a heightened attachment to religion. For the non-religious, however, the reverse effect seems to occur.
For the non-religious, being reminded of death makes them instinctively more superstitious, but also overtly more hostile to religion!
How many people died? It's one of the first questions asked in a war or violent conflict but it's one of the hardest to answer. In the chaos of war many deaths go unrecorded and all sides have an interest in distorting the figures.
The best we can do is come up with estimates but the trouble is that different statistical methods for doing this can produce vastly different results — see the Plus article Body count which reported on controversy surrounding the death toll of the last Iraq war. Statisticians know how well different methods do in theory and under ideal assumptions, but wars rarely adhere to these. And we can't concoct a war in the lab to see which method does best.
But recently a unique document has helped throw some light on the question of how to count the dead.
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two methods that are commonly used. One is based on household surveys: a random sample of households from around the region are asked to name their dead and statisticians estimate the total figure from the responses, much like an opinion poll gauges the mood of the nation from the opinions of a random sample of people.
The other involves taking two independent samples of deaths recorded throughout the region and comparing them. If the overlap between the two samples is large — if many deaths appear in both — then chances are that the overall number is relatively small, as you've managed to "catch" many deaths twice. Conversely, if the overlap is small, then the overall number is probably large. There are mathematical equations that make this intuition rigorous and give you an estimate of the total number. The method was initially developed for ecologists trying to estimate the number of animals that live in an area. It's called capture/recapture, as in this case the method works by capturing a number of animals, tagging them, releasing them back, and then capturing another sample to see how many animals got caught twice.
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numbers are essential in establishing truth. It's important to get them right. Exhaustive approaches like the Kosovo Memory Book take years to complete and, in the absence of complete information, all you're left with is a statistical approach.
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mainstream politicians fear religious institutions that oppose voluntary euthanasia, even though individual believers often do not follow their religious leaders’ views. Polls in various countries have shown that a majority of Roman Catholics, for example, support legalization of voluntary euthanasia. Even in strongly Catholic Poland, more people now support legalization than oppose it.
In any case, the religious beliefs of a minority should not deny individuals like Dudley Clendinen the right to end their lives in the manner of their own choosing.
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Surveys show that more than two-thirds of Canadians support legalization of voluntary euthanasia – a level that has held steady for several decades. So it is not surprising that the report received strong backing in the mainstream Canadian media. What is more puzzling is the cool response from the country’s political parties, none of which indicated a willingness to support law reform in this area.
There is a similar contrast between public opinion and political (in)action elsewhere, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and several continental European countries. Why, when it comes to dying, do democratic institutions so often fail to translate what people want into legislation?
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""窃以少年老成，中国称人之语也；年长而勿衰，英、美人相勖之辞也，此亦东西民族涉想不同、现象趋异之一端欤？青年之于社会，犹新鲜活泼细胞之在人身。新陈代谢，陈腐朽败者无时不在天然淘汰之途，与新鲜活泼者以空间之位置及时间之生命。人身遵新陈代谢之道则健康，陈腐朽败之细胞充塞人身则人身死；社会遵新陈代谢之道则隆盛，陈腐朽败之分子充塞社会则社会亡."
Roughly translated, Chinese people like to compliment young people for being mature, where as British and Americans like to encourage each to stay young while growing old. Young people are like the fresh and active cells of a body. If there is no metabolism and the old cells don't get replaced by the young ones, the body dies. Society works the same way.
Chen Duxiu said this in 1915. Nearly a century later, we are still trying to make young people boring old people."
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BISHOP JACQUES FOURNIER: From the moment that you believed that human souls die with the body, did you believe that men would be resurrected or would live again after death?
GUILLEMETTE: I did not believe in the resurrection of human bodies, for I believed that just as the body is buried, the soul is also buried with it. And as I saw the human body rot, I believed that it could never live again.
JF: Did you have someone who taught this to you, did you learn it from someone?
G: No. I thought it over and believed it by myself.
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JF: Did you believe that the soul of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, is dead or with his body?
G: Yes, for, although God cannot die, Jesus Christ died, all the same. Therefore, although I believed that God has always been, I did not believe that Christ’s soul lived and subsisted after his death.
JF: Do you now believe then that Christ was resurrected?
G: Yes, and it is God who did that.
JF: Do you currently believe that the human soul is anything other than blood, that it does not die at the death of the body, that it is not buried with the body, that there is a hell and a heaven, where souls are punished or rewarded, and there will be a resurrection of all men, and that the soul of Christ did not die with his body?
G: Yes, and I have believed it since the last holiday of the Ascension of the Lord because at that time I heard tell that My Lord the Bishop of Pamiers wanted to carry out an investigation against me about it. I was afraid of My Lord Bishop because of that, and I changed my opinion after that time.
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thinking about life and thinking about death and neither one particularly appealing
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life — all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.
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Here it is important to defy all the cowardices of prejudice and to establish, above all, the real, that is, the physiological, appreciation of so-called natural death — which is in the end also "unnatural," a kind of suicide. One never perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a coward's death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush.
Abstract
Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but these experiments indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead. Experiment 1 found that PVS patients were perceived to have less mental capacity than the dead. Experiment 2 explained this effect as an outgrowth of afterlife beliefs, and the tendency to focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. Experiment 3 found that PVS is also perceived as “worse” than death: people deem early death better than being in PVS. These studies suggest that people perceive the minds of PVS patients as less valuable than those of the dead – ironically, this effect is especially robust for those high in religiosity.
Highlights
► Vegetative patients are seen to have less mental capacities than the dead. ► People focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. ► Religious people show this effect most strongly, because of their afterlife beliefs. ► PVS is also seen as a state worse than death. ► These findings reveal an irony behind fights to keep PVS patients alive.
psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware than individuals who are completely, stone-cold dead.
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People tend to accept that the dead are likely to be mentally impaired. They're less likely to be aware of their environment, have emotions, a personality, to remember events from their life, be able to influence current events, know right from wrong.
Bizarrely enough, however, the dead score higher on all of these than the brain dead. In the words of Gray et al, the brain-dead are more dead than dead! -
For the religious, it didn't matter whether whether they just said David was dead, or went into details about the corpse. Religious folks thought that David's mind survived regardless - except course, if he was brain dead. Dead people have a mind, brain-dead people don't.
For the non-religious, the corpse mattered. If there was a corpse, then David's mind was dead - just as dead as if he was brain dead. That's good - that;s what the non-religious are supposed to say. Dead people don't think.
But if they didn't mention the corpse, well then even the non-religious were tempted to say that David's disembodied mind persisted somehow. They weren't as confident as the religious, but there seems to be a nagging suspicion that David's mind lingered on after death. - 1 more annotation(s)...
Traditional, mythic accounts of the origin of death extend back to the earliest hunter-gatherer cultures. Usually these stories are morality tales about faithfulness, trust, or the ethical and natural balance of the elements of the world.
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The idea of death as a consequence of human deeds is not universal. The image of death as a being in its own right is common in modern as well as old folklore.
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But the idea of death as a humanlike being is mostly characteristic of traditional folktales that dramatize the human anguish about mortality. By contrast, in the realm of religious ideas, death is regarded less as an identifiable personal being than as an abstract state of being. In the world of myth and legend, this state appears to collide with the human experience of life. As a consequence of human's nature as celestial beings, it is life on Earth which is sometimes viewed as a type of death. In this way, the question of how death enters the world in turn poses the question of how to understand death as an essential part of the world.
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The real question posed by the “Torchwood” scenario is: what would happen to all our death-defying systems if there were no more death? The logical answer is that they would be superfluous. We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame. Suddenly, we would have nothing to do, yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.
Mother Theresa said "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Josef Stalin said "One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic." Numerous experiments have helped verify the truth behind what both the saint and the mass murderer knew intuitively, that we relate more closely to what happens to one person than to what happens to large numbers of people.
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Paul Slovic, one of the pioneers of research into the way we perceive risk, calls this greater concern for the one than the many "a fundamental deficiency in our humanity." As the world watches but, insufficiently moved, fails to act to prevent mass starvation or stop genocides in Congo or Kosovo or Cambodia or so many more, who would not agree with such a lament. But as heartless as it seems to care more about the one than the many, it makes perfect sense in terms of human psychology. You are a person, not a number. You don't see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don't see a crowd. You see an individual. So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers. "Statistics," as Slovic put it in a paper titled "Psychic Numbing and Genocide" , "are human beings with the tears dried off." This tendency to relate more emotionally to the reality of a single person than to two or more people, or to the abstraction of statistics, is especially powerful when it comes to the way we perceive risk and danger, because what might happen to a single real person, might happen to you. As the familiar adage puts it, "There but for the grace of God go I."
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Statistical numbing plays a huge role in what the news media covers, and what it doesn't, since the media are in the business of bringing us information we are likely to pay attention to, and our attention is less drawn to numbers than stories about individual people (which explains the success of the narrative device of weaving stories about big issues around a personal example). Less coverage means less concern, because we certainly can't be moved by these tragedies if we don't know much about them. And public concern drives government policy, so statistical numbing helps explain why nations so often fail to expend their resources to save people elsewhere who are starving, or dying of disease, or being raped and murdered, in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
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countries with a more diverse religious landscape did not, in fact have a higher homicide rate. However those with ethnic and linguistic divisions did.
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Chon's analysis suggests that ethnic and language barriers can increase murder rates, but religious differences do not. However, there are a few caveats.
The first is that we're looking at individual homicides here, not full-on wars or inter-communal violence. What's more, it could be argued that religious divisions exacerbate tensions mainly when they're aligned with ethnic and linguistic fault lines - they crystallise and fortify existing divisions. - 1 more annotation(s)...
There is an obvious tension between our self-evident diversity and a highly normative concern with or idealization of appearance. While Amy Winehouse turned her overly normative critical apparatus on herself, Breivik applied his with monstrous consequences on just about anyone other than himself (as has been pointed out, unlike so-called “spree killers,” Breivik never had any notion of seeking his own destruction). One was a self-hater, the other would appear to be more a delusional self-lover. But both seem to have been suffering from hypernomia.
We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.
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Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.
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I’d rather die. I respect the wishes of people who want to live as long as they can. But I would like the same respect for those of us who decide — rationally — not to. I’ve done my homework. I have a plan. If I get pneumonia, I’ll let it snuff me out. If not, there are those other ways. I just have to act while my hands still work: the gun, narcotics, sharp blades, a plastic bag, a fast car, over-the-counter drugs, oleander tea (the polite Southern way), carbon monoxide, even helium. That would give me a really funny voice at the end.
I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.
Knowing that comforts me. I don’t worry about fatty foods anymore. I don’t worry about having enough money to grow old. I’m not going to grow old.
I’m having a wonderful time.
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