profit harvesting - noun phrase - A polite name for the act of finding each and every little remaining way to gouge money from someone or out of some thing. Called nickel and diming when hard currency was more common.
At long last, here are my notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference held by the Brighter Brains Institute on 21 March 2015. It took me a while to find the notebook I wrote them in, so that's why they're a few months late in coming. Anyway, my notes are under the cut.
Hank Pellissier - Transhumanitarian Projects
Goals: Extending life, increasing mental ability
Life expectency in Japan is 80, in Sierra Leone is 35
Hunger is still the greatest killer
Shipping food or backing projects
De-worming - parasiting infections in children
The energy deficit incurred by parasitic infection lowers IQ in children …
For many years it was believed by medical science that neuroplasticity, the phenomenon in which the human brain rapidly and readily creates neuronal interconnections tapered off as people got older. Children are renowned for learning anything and everything that catches their fancy (not always what we'd wish they'd learn) but the learning process seems to slow down the older they get. As adults, it's much harder to learn complex new skills from scratch. In recent years, a number of compounds have been developed that seem to kickstart neuroplasticity again, but they're mostly used for treating Alzheimer's Disease and not so …