Lone Gunman

Despite the growth of open access, most sci­en­tific jour­nals are still closed and the access debate rages on. Now, how­ever, the closed access RNA Biol­ogy has cho­sen another option: it requires all sci­en­tists sub­mit­ting an arti­cle for pub­li­ca­tion to also cre­ate a Wikipedia arti­cle out­lin­ing their findings.

From the journal’s new sub­mis­sion guide­lines:

At least one stub arti­cle (essen­tially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author’s user­space at Wikipedia (pre­ferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add lit­er­a­ture ref­er­ences to avoid speedy dele­tion). This arti­cle will be reviewed along­side the man­u­script and may require revi­sion before accep­tance. Upon accep­tance the for­mer arti­cles can eas­ily be exported to the main Wikipedia space.

via Read­WriteWeb

Tak­ing the lead from Par­dis Mahdavi’s lat­est book, Pas­sion­ate Upris­ings, The Nation looks at Iran’s ‘sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion’ in these days of polit­i­cal dis­sent and upheaval.

Some­how, one sus­pects that the grass­roots push to change sex­ual mores can­not be totally divorced from the effort, on the part of fem­i­nist activists but also some reformist par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and even liberal-minded cler­ics, to improve the sta­tus of Iran­ian women under the law. But the women in Mahdavi’s study seem to occupy a wholly per­plex­ing his­tor­i­cal moment, or a palimpsest of his­tor­i­cal moments. They live in a theoc­racy with a pre­mod­ern, reli­gious legal code, and they are under­go­ing, all at once, what we in the West would rec­og­nize as a 1960s-style sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion, 1970s-style second-wave fem­i­nism and the con­tem­po­rary post­fem­i­nist embrace of female sex­u­al­ity, with all its com­plex­i­ties. The mes­sages these women receive are mixed, to say the least.

From an arti­cle dis­cussing the effect farm emis­sions have on the envi­ron­ment: a graph depict­ing the dif­fer­ent amounts of car­bon diox­ide pro­duced from rear­ing var­i­ous ani­mals for con­sump­tion.

It’s inter­est­ing to see how var­i­ous food­stuffs com­pare, but I’d really like to see another com­par­ing pounds of CO₂ to pounds of pro­tein (rather than just raw product).

via Link Banana

Cry­on­ics: the low-temperature preser­va­tion of humans and ani­mals that can no longer be sus­tained by con­tem­po­rary med­i­cine until resus­ci­ta­tion may be pos­si­ble in the future.

When one dis­cusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futur­ol­ogy, med­i­cine, tech­nol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy are debated. A few weeks ago a num­ber of high–profile blog­gers, headed by the excel­lent Over­com­ing Bias, have been doing just that. Here are a few posts in the conversation:

We Agree: Get Froze (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

Even with mod­ern anti-freezes, freez­ing does lots of dam­age, per­haps more than what­ever else was going to kill you. But bod­ies frozen that cold basi­cally won’t change for mil­len­nia. […] Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death vic­tims today could live on as (one or more) future ems. And if future folks learn to repair freez­ing dam­age plus what­ever was killing vic­tims, vic­tims might live on as ordi­nary humans.

Cold Spouses (Bryan Caplan, Library of Eco­nom­ics and Liberty)

One unpleas­ant issue in cry­on­ics is the “hos­tile wife” phe­nom­e­non. The authors of this arti­cle know of a num­ber of high pro­file cry­oni­cists who need to hide their cry­on­ics activ­i­ties from their wives and ex-high pro­file cry­oni­cists who had to choose between cry­on­ics and their rela­tion­ship. We also know of men who would like to make cry­on­ics arrange­ments but have not been able to do so because of resis­tance from their wives or girl­friends… As a result, these men face cer­tain death as a con­se­quence of their partner’s hostility.

You Only Live Twice (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Overcoming Bias)

Hated Because It Might Work (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

The Best Sen­tence I Read Yes­ter­day (Tyler Cowen, Mar­ginal Revolution)

[On cry­on­ics] my cur­rent view is this: one’s atten­tion is extremely scarce and lim­ited, as are one’s affil­i­a­tions.  Inso­far as you have the lux­ury of think­ing “big­ger thoughts,” those thoughts should be directed at help­ing oth­ers, not at help­ing one­self. […] Fur­ther­more the uni­verse (or mul­ti­verse) may be infi­nite, so in expected value terms it seems my copies and near-copies are already enjoy­ing a kind of col­lec­tive immortality. […] What prob­a­bil­ity of future tor­ture would cause us to wish to die for­ever rather than be res­ur­rected?  And should I there­fore be scared by the idea of an infi­nite uni­verse?  Do Dar­win­ian selec­tion pres­sures — defined in the broad­est pos­si­ble way — sug­gest it is worth spend­ing energy on mak­ing enti­ties happy?  Or do most enti­ties end up as suf­fer­ing slaves?

Tyler on Cry­on­ics (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

Out­law­ing teas­ing as a form of bul­ly­ing is a step too far, says psy­chol­o­gist Dacher Kelt­ner in The New York Times, as cur­rent research shows that teas­ing is “a form of social play […] essen­tial for learn­ing to man­age com­plex social inter­ac­tions”.

The rea­son teas­ing is viewed as inher­ently dam­ag­ing is that it is too often con­fused with bul­ly­ing. But bul­ly­ing is some­thing dif­fer­ent; it’s aggres­sion, pure and sim­ple. Bul­lies steal, punch, kick, harass and humil­i­ate. Sex­ual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threat­en­ing passes. They’re pretty inef­fec­tual flirts. By con­trast, teas­ing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we pro­voke to nego­ti­ate life’s ambi­gu­i­ties and con­flicts. And it is essen­tial to mak­ing us fully human.

via Mind Hacks