- A single-neuron brain-computer interface experiment is reported in which a paralyzed monkey regained control of its own arm, extending earlier work where monkeys controlled robotic limbs.  
- Participants debated the practicality of Dyson spheres versus distributed fusion reactors for large-scale energy, with criticism that gravity-confinement “star-shells” are inefficient compared to compact reactors.  
- A gravity-train concept—drilling a straight evacuated tunnel through the Moon and using centering magnets—was proposed as a low-energy lunar transport system, prompted by new evidence of moonquakes and radon outgassing.  
- Maker Faire Austin was attended; kanzure networked with Boston FabLab and Bug Labs (modular, reconfigurable consumer-electronics blocks) and discussed data-swapping via mailed hard drives.  
- IBM’s “Numerati” project to model employees mathematically and schedule knowledge work in minute-by-minute increments was highlighted as a real-world implementation of ideas similar to Marshall Brain’s “Manna” automation scenario.  
- Military-grade wearable displays (800×600 VGA goggles) and MIT’s long-running but still largely unseen AR prototypes were noted, with calls for actual screenshots of the interfaces.  
- Practical scripting tips were shared for automatically renaming cryptic PDF files by extracting title metadata or parsing pdf2html output with awk/sed.  
- Links collected include the cellular-automaton simulator MJCell, open-access journal archive Infomine, Haskell tutorial “Learn You a Haskell,” and the newly announced Singularity University.