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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @03:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the cutting-edge dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

To add a simple date to a tombstone in the late 90s, Ron Richard, an engraver based in Southern Massachusetts, would trace the numbers onto a sheet of rubber and cut them out with an X-acto knife. By the time he'd placed the stencil onto the stone and run over it with his sandblaster (sand bounces off of the rubber portions of the stencil and carves rock exposed in the voids in between), about 20 minutes had passed.

Today, the same process takes Richard about five minutes. "It's far, far different," Richard says of his job nearly 20 years after he started his business, Northeast Stonewriters.

Richard now uses his laptop computer, which he brings with him to the cemetery, to lay out the text he wants to engrave. He uses a specialized printer, designed for the sign industry, to cut the rubber stencil according to the appropriate sizes and fonts.

Engravers and etchers like Richard, according to a survey by the US Department of Labor, now have the most automated occupation in the United States.

In the context of the current narrative of robots and software taking over jobs, this sounds like a sad story. But when I called a handful of etchers and engravers who have been in the business for decades, that's not the story they told me.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @04:04AM (5 children)

    by vux984 (5045) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @04:04AM (#510916)

    Engraving a tombstone is a lot of work for some bullshit monument to a corpse.

    A memorial stone is orthogonal to there being a burial; you can have one without the other.

    It's a travesty that some people incinerate their corpse instead of letting it be used by the living.

    Incineration gets it out of the way in a relatively clean and efficient way. More people should leave their corpes to science, but not everyone should. Hell.. they are even a bit picky about what they want... "A good cadaver is generally young, fully intact and not too obese or riddled with disease." So... ideally... they want the cadavers of people who probably shouldn't be dead. ;) In any case, a LOT of dead people aren't going to qualify to be a medical cadaver even if they wanted to.

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  • (Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday May 17 2017, @05:32AM (3 children)

    by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 17 2017, @05:32AM (#510927)

    How dare you, my older-millennial body is certainly worthy of being examined by teenagers who think they're smart enough to cut into living humans

    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday May 17 2017, @08:08AM (1 child)

      by anubi (2828) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @08:08AM (#510963) Journal

      One could probably learn a lot taking apart a body riddled by disease.

      See what alcohol did to this liver? Look at those lungs... can you imagine those were in a living body? Guess these belonged to the Marlboro Man.

      I have learned a lot from taking apart failed things. Probably more than taking apart perfectly operating things. I received insight on what made them fail. So, hopefully, I do not make the same mistake.

      Or I'll more readily recognize the situation should I see it again.

      Thanks, Julian... I am also in your camp.

      I won't be here anymore and I won't need it, but maybe someone else needs a spare part. I know others can learn by disassembly, just as I have learned the same way.

      When they get through taking me apart, and trying to figure out what made me tick, then they can do the burning bit. Save the ashes though... it makes good fertilizer. Maybe part of me will be reborn as a tree.

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:00PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:00PM (#511304)

        My sister was always pretty amazed at seeing the MD students who light a cigarette, right after dissecting the black lungs of a smoker's corpse.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @12:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @12:59PM (#511053)

      How dare you, my older-millennial body is certainly worthy of being examined by teenagers who think they're smart enough to cut into living humans

      Don't worry, this guy's got you covered [youtube.com].

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @08:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @08:39AM (#510971)

    undignified use of corpses documented for science research.

    There is a difference between wanting your corpse to be optionally used for the advancement of science, and it being used either as a test subject for medical students (common) or divvied up into jars for entertainment/sale to collectors/etc. (Less common, but I've seen a few horrible news articles on activities like this coming to light.)

    Personally I am not worried about my corpse (unless it ends up like Beetlejuice with your corpse affecting you in the afterlife, or like some other horror movies where a persons soul was just tied in the vicinity of it so they saw all the horrible things people were doing to it afterwards.)