Peter Bunclark wrote on 2003-06-06 06:37 UTC: > > > The correct > > > time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of > > > how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on > > > comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal > > > standard for death certificates.
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=3D62BE42.359C0C9E%40udel.edu Well, he really doesn't go into a great amount of detail, about why his Coroner Standard Time (CST) should be an integral hour offset to UT1 exactly. > > I'd be interested to hear how one measures the > > leading edge of the human life to death transition > > pulse with a precision that makes the UT1 vs. > > UTC question even relevant. > > A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, > to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret > lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support > systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the > same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat. To anyone with even a basic understanding of human biology and modern intensive care practice, the notion that death could be determined within better than a minute, not to mention within 1000 ms, is nothing but ridiculous. Humans stay perfectly concious and altert up to about 12-15 seconds after the last heartbeat (even after decapitation, as Voltaire demonstrated during the French revolution so elegantly in his famous very last scientific experiment), and at normal body temperature, the central nervous system starts to suffer irreparable damage at about 200-300 seconds after the blood flow stops (~10x longer at 10 K lower temperature). Except for extreme accidents involving detonations or crashes (e.g., two planes colliding with GPS-guided 1-m precision alignment during a leap second in 2015, whose flight recorders use UTC and TI respectively), death is nothing but the gradual accumulation of tissue damage, and life is a function of the patience and funding of your intensive care team. The medical definition of death is simply the minute at which a doctor decides that this patient is dead and looks at a clock to turn this into the legal transaction that makes further recusitation attempts unnecessary. Or did you never wonder, why in so many reports critically wounded people transported in ambulances die the minute they arrive at a hospital, but almost never during transport? Anyone who ever attended a birth will also be able to attest that it is equally a gradual process that takes significatly longer than 1000 ms. I seriously doubt that the authors of the US regulations for timestamps on death certificates even understand the difference between GMT, UT1 and UTC, neither have they any practical need to do so. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__