- A discussion of direct energy conversion from radioactive sources highlighted three candidate technologies: thermophotovoltaics, magnetohydrodynamic plasma, and the “beta battery,” as alternatives to conventional heat-engine approaches.  
- Participants debated the stagnation of microprocessor architecture, criticizing Intel’s continued reliance on CISC/x86 and praising ARM’s milliwatt-scale efficiency as evidence that RISC should have displaced CISC by the early 1990s.  
- A DOE biodiesel production report (osti.gov/15008801) was circulated, but the group dismissed biodiesel as “stupid and inefficient,” preferring to focus on more radical energy solutions such as nuclear-powered homes.  
- Stephen Wolfram’s 1988 “tablet computer” concept (stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/computing/88-tablet) was lamented as an unrealized vision that could have accelerated personal computing decades earlier.  
- The channel brainstormed low-friction methods for bootstrapping SKDB (a hardware design commons) by embedding “semantic search facilitators” and “storywizards” into everyday web searches to auto-capture the parts and tools people actually use.  
- A PubMed paper on biodefense versus bioterrorism (PMID 18771576) and a satirical “genome biologist meets St. Peter” editorial (PMID 18671833) were shared, underscoring ongoing concerns about open-access availability of critical research.  
- Career-strategy chatter weighed building a university bioreactor against attending a talk by Morris Chang, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, with the consensus favoring the latter for cross-cultural insight into advanced fab capabilities.