• A new low-voltage (1.2 V) sunlight-driven water-splitting catalyst was reported; participants debated whether the breakthrough was the catalyst itself or just routine electrolysis dressed up by the press.  
• bkero detailed his $4 k+ DIY electric-car conversion of a ’91 Toyota MR2 (8″ Advanced DC motor, 11 NiMH EV-1 batteries, Curtis controller) and his later 800 W-solar-charged electric bike, illustrating practical open-source hardware hacking for sustainable transport.  
• Discussion of optimal battery placement in EV conversions: trunk mounting gives ~50/50 weight distribution for cornering, while engine-bay placement preserves cargo space and improves crash safety, framed as a classic engineering trade-off.  
• kanzure linked a trove of personal technical documents at http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/ and later shared a curated list of upcoming AI conferences at http://nesteduniverse.net/events.html.  
• The channel explored open-source gaming progress, praising the visual polish of the Blender/Crystal-Space-based “Yo Frankie!” and noting that polished free games like Big Buck Bunny are funded by optional DVD sales.  
• kanzure introduced the concept of “egograms”—Clarke-style brain-dump letters—and proposed extending the idea to a patch-submission protocol for biological or simulated “child nodes” to feed improvements back to a parent system.  
• A speculative thread considered whether neural-network–based “brain farms” could be evolved or optimized like compiler passes, with the caveat that biological neural tissue remains hard to program deterministically.