I can't believe how familiar that first level was to me. Didn't get lost at all. Amazing the things we remember.

If your son is two now the first thing they'd do as an adult presented with these old pictures is get online to find out what scanner to use to best get them into digital format where they belong.

Images stabilized on the retina (say, for example any opaque elements on a contact lens) quickly become invisible. Our visual system relies on very rapid, continuous, small eye movements that constantly change the position of the image of the external world on the retina. A contact lens display, on top of every other technical hurtle, would have to compensate for this in a way that the visual system could readily interpret. It would also take a lot of practice to get used to display elements displaced from the exact center of your vision that you could never move your eye to focus on (like trying to get a better look at a 'floater' in your eye that keeps moving away).

And of course there's also, "CEASE FIRE! CEASE FIRE! . . NOBODY MOVE, I LOST A LENS"

A small minority of 'different' people in your community often makes people uncomfortable when part of the culture is professing just how right and good it is to agree and identify with the majority. When that minority attempts to become vocal they are by definition wrong and therefore it is justifiable to punish them. If all you have to prove that you're living your life correctly is the assertion by yourself and those around you that it is so any argument against what you believe is dangerous. Certainly authority figures (from politicians to parents) won't allow dissenting opinions to spread, like some horrible disease.

People aren't persecuted for their religion. They are persecuted because their religion (or ethnicity or social status or etc.) is different from the majority of those around them. Group-think and ignorance will attack what it doesn't understand or can't control in whatever form it takes.

One could argue that, historically, atheism is the most persecuted belief system still in practice. It would explain the relatively small proportion of the population that atheism makes up, as well as why that small proportion is spread throughout the world with no great central region to call home.

If there's money to be spent on publication I would use open journals exclusively. If there's money.

There's definitely a continuum between the two extremes I mentioned. Fortunately there are some general purpose open journals, though one could argue a sacrifice of impact shying away from more focused journals. One can only hope that the more an author pays the less the subscribers pay (assuming the cost to edit, format, host/print etc. is comparable across journals).

Choosing to publish in a journal that charges subscription fees has the advantage that it doesn't cost you anything to publish your work and the disadvantage that a restricted audience has access to your work (with the usual excuse being that most in research/academic settings can use institutional subscriptions and who else would be interested anyway?).

Choosing to publish in a journal that is free to all has the disadvantage that it can cost quite a bit (thousands of dollars for the last one I did) to publish your work and the advantage that anyone with a computer and internet access has access to your work.

Having said that, any grant funded project likely has money marked specifically for publication (dissemination) costs (personally I think publication costs are a better investment then conference presentations but that's just me). If you know you want to have your work freely available AND you are funded by an NIH grant there's no good reason why it can't be done without publishing in a subscription based journal that's going to bitch about letting everyone see your article for free after a year.

Leave the subscription journals for the poor SOBs that don't have grant money coming in (another problem).

I'd be more interested to know whether this will speed up acquisition of BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signals during fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The temporal resolution (time between frames) of fMRI has been a huge limiting factor in research. Increasing the rate even by a modest factor of 3 would go a long way to towards making fMRI competitive with EEG (electroencephalogram) (which can collect data in real time but with very little spatial resolution). While you're wikiing, check out DTI (diffuse tensor imaging).