- **Journal impact-factor dataset hunt**: kanzure needed a ranked list to prune ~2,000 journals; fenn pointed to http://www.sciencegateway.org/rank/index.html and in-cites.com rankings, while noting the absence of manufacturing titles.  
- **Mass journal downloading**: kanzure weighed downloading entire IEEE Xplore archives despite its anti-bot policy, and fenn requested 30 years of IEEE Spectrum.  
- **Tiling window-manager deep-dive**: bkero, Overand and kanzure compared scriptable WMs—wmii (Plan-9-style filesystem interface, bash-scriptable), xmonad (Haskell), awesome (Lua), ratpoison/stumpwm/rio—settling on wmii for its keyboard-centric stacking and workspace features.  
- **X session persistence tool**: bkero introduced xpra (partiwm.org/wiki/xpra) as “screen for X”, letting users detach/reattach graphical sessions.  
- **PETA’s $1 M “in-vitro meat” prize**: faceface and nsh discussed lab-grown “meat on a stick” and the ethical/financial implications of PETA’s challenge; kanzure later posted a wiki page summarizing the concept.  
- **Water-splitting manganese photocatalyst**: kanzure linked a paper describing a bio-inspired {Mn₄O₄}⁷⁺ cluster embedded in Nafion that achieves >1,000 turnovers under 1 V and visible light, with PDF archived locally.  
- **University course-scheduling as exact-cover problem**: kanzure ranted about manual timetable conflicts, then researched algorithmic solutions—Dancing Links, 5-minute granularity scaffolds, and a Perl-crawler/Java-solver used at Arizona’s GCC.  
- **Miscellaneous tech snippets**: discussion of optocouplers with 3.75 kV isolation and creepage distance, plus off-hand mentions of Ghost in the Shell, myostatin DBZ jokes, and a 108-inch Woot TV.