- The Whole Earth Catalog and its founder Stewart Brand were highlighted as key historical nodes linking early virtual communities (The WELL), the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, and the first publication of Gerard O’Neill’s space-colonization concepts.  
- Participants debated the feasibility of space-based heavy industry, citing 1970s-era reader letters that claimed vacuum heat-transfer limits make refining metals in space impossible; no contemporary NASA counter-experiments were identified.  
- A discussion on symbolic metrology introduced the idea of representing physical quantities with structured symbols rather than raw numbers, touching on geometric dimensioning & tolerancing (GD&T) and the “tacit knowledge” problem in precision measurement.  
- Brain-visualization plans were outlined: using Google Earth-style 3-D renderings of fMRI and 20 µm-resolution Allen Institute data to let users tag psychological states, share training sets for neural-tissue cultures, and serve as a “computational scaffold” for biofeedback experiments.  
- Skepticism was voiced about the payoff of 3-D brain simulations given current resource constraints, with the counter-argument that short-term functional relevance might still emerge from shared training data sets.  
- “Viral banking” was mentioned as a project that reportedly secured $200 k in VC funding, though no definition or business model was provided.  
- A grant proposal for “writozyme” (an enzymatic data-storage concept previously discussed by fenn) was said to be in preparation.  
- Technical side topics included lightweight virtual-world alternatives to Second Life (LiteSim vs. OpenSim), graphical disk-usage tools (Filelight), and the search for a new SMTP relay host for heybryan.org.