(First time poster, long time reader)

I'm currently volunteering for the Brain Preservation Foundation (http://www.brainpreservation.org/), and I'd like to ask for your  help.

The purpose of the BPF is to incentivize and evaluate the development of technology which can preserve a human brain in such intricate detail that all of the brain's cells and connections are preserved. It's the only prize of its kind for a relatively endangered, yet essential type of research.

We run a cash prize ($100,000 USD) called the "Brain Preservation Technology Prize" for the first team that can preserve a large mammal's brain to our high standards. The first $25,000 of that prize goes to the first team that can preserve the ultrastructure of a mouse brain.

Steve Aoki (http://steveaoki.com/), a musician that you might have heard of, is currently planning to give around $50,000 to one of four brain-related charities. One of these charities is the Brain Preservation Foundation! Whichever charity gets the most votes will win all the money.

This money is critically important to us to get the necessary supplies and lab time to administer the brain preservation technology prize. Evaluating brains that people send us involves electron microscopy, which is quite expensive (around $8,000 to evaluate a brain!) We are currently getting submissions and this extra money will give us the funds we need to run the prize.

To vote, just visit http://on.fb.me/15XFdTG, and click the "like" button by the "Brain Preservation Foundation" comment. You can see a graph of the votes at http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png (updates every 15 minutes). Thanks for taking the time to read
and vote!

More about the Brain Preservation Foundation :
http://www.brainpreservation.org/

More about the charity:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151608608587461

Votes graph:
http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png


I'd also love to hear your own opinions on the BPF and your assessment of its effectiveness, as well as your thoughts on  chemopreservation vs cryopreservation.

At various times, we've argued over whether rationalists always win.  I posed Augustine's paradox of optimal repentance to argue that, in some situations, rationalists lose.  One criticism of that paradox is that its strongest forms posit a God who penalizes people for being rational.  My response was, So what?  Who ever said that nature, or people, don't penalize rationality?

There are instances where nature penalizes the rational.  For instance, revenge is irrational, but being thought of as someone who would take revenge gives advantages.¹