🚀 go-pugleaf

hgibbons@guess.where.com (Hugh Gibbons) wrote:
 cryon@mindspring.com
>(Randy Smith) wrote:
>! 
>! Well, since we know of people who have been clinically *dead* for up

Note that there is an enormous difference between between _clinical_ death - 
basically, heart failure and deep coma - and actual death (variously defined, 
but essentially cessation of all neural and metabolic functions). Once upon a 
time, clinical death was just a hop and a jump from real death, but with 
modern resusciation it really just means "start CPR right NOW!!". With 
heart/lung machines to keep blood and oxygen circulating, "clinically dead" 
people can be kept alive for years, not hours.

>! to several hours (children drowned in icy lakes) and subsequently
>! revived, then this would negate your assertion regarding "continuous
>! interaction," would it not, Peter? The effects of ischemia are
>! minimized due to the low temp.
>
>I never heard of such a thing except in this thread.  When and where 
>did this happen?

Oh, it happens all the time. Not for hours though, just several times longer 
than they would normally be expected to survive without serious brain damage. 
ie 20 minutes instead of 4 or 5. If cryon has a cite for a survival of several 
hours, that would be very interesting indeed. 
>
>! Freezing *does* cause damage with current technology--great damage,
>! far beyond that which is possible to repair in the immediate future.
>
>Or, most probably, any future.
>
>! As an analogy, if I code some very complicated message via a coding
>! scheme which *you* cannot decipher, then that information, that
>! message is *destroyed* so far as you are concerned, right now as of
>! this moment. If however, science should advance in the science of
>! cryptology and then *be able* to decode my coded message, then that
>! information which you once thought lost is now "readable" to you. 
>
>That's a false analogy.  The message is not encoded with a hard-to-break
>cipher, it's erased by RANDOM damage, in other words, noise.  Once the
>SNR goes negative, sorry, the message can't be recovered.  A cipher 
>retains all information and does not introduce noise.

Most do. A couple of "special ones" do lose information and introduce noise. 
And it is mathematically provable that these latter can never be broken, 
regardless of any technological advancement.
By the way, the sci.crypt link is pretty weak; I'v removed it from the 
newsgroups line.

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