September 10, 2016 at 02:35AM

Today I Learned: 1) Here's an interesting little fact concerning the politics and game theory of global warming, as pointed out by George Artavanis. Although the usual proposed mechanism for stopping or slowing global warming is to cut greenhouse gas emissions, there are other, technologically feasible ways to stop global warming and potentially even reverse it. Fueling blooms of oceanic plankton is one way. Another would be to release or seed large amounts of sulfur gas into the atmosphere to generate cloud cover. Those techniques are fairly likely to work, and they're actually pretty cheap to implement -- the only problem is that we don't know what kind of side effects they could have, and pushing back too hard on global warming could potentially be just as catastrophic as making it happen in the first place. So, pretend you are the head of government of some small island nation. Perhaps an island nation that is literally going to sink into the ocean if global warming proceeds. The other nations of the world aren't doing what it's going to take to stop global warming. Suddenly, it sure looks like it's in your best interests to seed the atmosphere and start cooling down the planet! If you get a mini ice age for your trouble? Not a problem! That will only really affect Europe and North America. And so, here is one additional little incentive for the big countries to come up with a good solution to global warming -- if they don't, some little country is going to deploy a really, really bad one. 2) Also from George Artavanis, a game theoretic term called "salami tactics". Salami tactics are a method of undermining threats of sanctions (or nastier things, like nuclear war) by "slicing" out little pieces at a time. You start by violating some agreement just a tiiiiny bit -- enough that you get something, but small enough that nobody is willing to engage in costly sanctions to punish you. Then you escalate just a little bit more. Then just a little bit more. At every step, it's really, really hard for the other side to justify hurting themselves a lot just to punish you. The name comes from the way you're slicing away bits of your agreement, like slicing off pieces of salami. I really can't get over that name. 3) There is at least one library of yeast clones with GFP tags of every gene. Each clone has GFP attached to one protein-coding gene, so if you want to know how much of some gene is expressed under some condition, you just pick out the right clone, grow it up, put it in the condition you're interested in, and see how much it glows. This fact brought to you by Andy Halleran.