One would assume that significant tracking of patients with nuclear pacemakers was done. Letting one end up in a crematorium may not have ended well. If the energy source was well enough protected to survive cremation (a suitable ceramic not unlike the sources used in space probe RTGs might be viable) one would wonder if stalking about various memorial gardens and the like where ashes may be interred with a Geiger counter could be fruitful.
This brings to mind one of the all time great opening lines of a novel. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” from Iain Banks’ The Crow Road.
One would hope, but perhaps not assume. People can live a long time. Companies go out of business. Records get lost. Families forget about what medical procedures their family members had. People lose track of what they should be keeping track of.
When my father-in-law died, I was his medical power of attorney. All his other relatives were already dead. The crematorium asked me if he had a pacemaker, and I happened to know that he did, so I told them. But what if I hadn’t known? There must be a lot of people who die and the person who gets asked this question doesn’t know whether there’s a pacemaker. Or there may not even be anyone to ask. It doesn’t surprise me that crematoria often encounter undisclosed pacemakers. Although, come to think of it, why don’t they just always cut the cadaver open and check to make sure?
It doesn’t seem that any kind of physical check for pacemakers is routinely done, at least in the UK. The paper cited above by Dr. Strangelove says "Most crematoria staff believe that checking the cremation form is the best method of ensuring that pacemakers have been removed before cremation. "
Most xray lasers have a pretty high repetition rate, so you could heat sips of coffee much faster than you could drink them. Unfortunately they will be very small sips, and linear accelerators aren’t very portable.
The problem with pacemakers is that they get installed in various locations. They don’t get installed next to the heart, only the leads do that. You put the pacemaker proper somewhere where it is easily accessed for replacement and doesn’t get in the way of everyday life. Crematorium staff are not going to go fishing about all over the thorax of every client they get.
A metal detector would be a reasonable answer, but say a portable ultrasound machine could provide a definitive answer. But if the documentation turns out to be pretty reliable, with very few false negatives, it probably isn’t worth the hassle.
Rather than an active heating source, what we really need is a substance with a fantastically high specific heat, like 1000x that of water. So it takes hours to heat up to coffee temperature but then won’t cool down again for hours.
I think you’ll have a hard time finding a substance like that, but what already exists are phase change materials that melt at a comfortable coffee temperature. Pour in screaming hot coffee and the material melts (lowering the coffee temperature in the process). When the coffee goes below a certain temperature, the material freezes, releasing the heat of fusion and keeping the coffee at that threshold. Like reverse ice cubes.
Unfortunately, the real-world materials like that don’t have a great heat of fusion, so they don’t work as well as you’d hope. Maybe not bad in an insulated mug, though.
My first thought, after reading the title, was that there are certainly enough dedicated coffee-drinkers to finance another attempt at Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower. I’m quite sure we can get transmitted power to be practical (with a little help from AI?).
And it’s certainly a lot more practical to have a “smart” cup that can detect the presence of coffee, regulate temperature precisely, and even signal for a fresh brew.
What you want is a mug incorporating a homeostatic material (just the right homeostatic material of course, a small matter of metamaterial design).
In this manner, we create exemplary internally-regulated, self-sustained homeostatic systems, SMARTS (Self-regulated Mechano-chemical Adaptively Reconfigurable Tunable System), that maintain a user-defined parameter—temperature—by exploiting a continuous feedback loop between various exothermic catalytic reactions in the nutrient layer and the mechanical action of the temperature-responsive gel.