Paul Crowley (
ciphergoth) wrote2010-01-21 09:29 am
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Cryonics
I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?
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I find it a bit worrying that the most promising technologies in the table on page 43 - SOM and SEM, especially combined with array tomography - have relatively little discussion in the text that I can see. This makes me suspect that they're only even superficially attractive because not enough is known about them to know they don't work.
Also, given that the conclusion says 'this sets a resolution requirement on the order of 5 nm at least in two directions,' there's far too much discussion of technologies that can only scan down to resolutions two orders of magnitude higher than this. So the text gives the optimistic prediction that '[KESM] enables the imaging of an entire macroscopic tissue volume such as a mouse brain in reasonable time', but what good is that given that KSEM only scans down to 300nm x 500nm? It's an obvious question, and I'd expect an honestly-written paper to answer it. Because this paper doesn't, I smell a rat (or, more likely, someone clutching at straws).
The discussion starts 'As this review shows, WBE on the neuronal/synaptic level requires relatively modest increases in microscopy resolution...' which may be technically true but vastly understates the difficulty of increasing the resolution of the techniques discussed.
Again, though, I'll defer to someone who's done this stuff more recently than I have (and in a medical area - I was mostly looking at metal-matrix composites rather than anything organic).
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You seem to be still treating the PDF as a serious roadmap. I'd characterise it as a 'map of the swamp, with several of the circling alligators marked with an "X"', which I suppose is a roadmap of sorts, but not one that's going to show you the way home.
I'm not sure if you simply don't find my objections credible (fair enough, given the source; my blog reply is hardly a peer-reviewed paper) or whether you have a rebuttal of them.
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though I haven't pointed Sandberg to it yet.
Thanks again!