- The group debated whether genetics should be part of “transhumanism” at all until real, useful interventions exist, arguing that until then it’s just medicine and that eugenics offers no benefit to people already alive.  
- A practical thread showed kanzure writing a short Perl script (spiralgen.pl) to generate STL files for a membrane-less filtration spiral, then troubleshooting why Blender and viewstl only displayed a default cube—eventually discovering the vertex list was malformed.  
- STL file-format details were clarified: facet normals are outward unit vectors (often auto-calculated via the right-hand rule), and vertex order determines inside/outside orientation; simple ASCII STL was praised for its minimalism.  
- Origami as engineering was explored: links to MIT’s “programmable matter” thesis on self-folding origami (amorphous computing group) and complex paper models (Iron Man, brain) were shared, with discussion of tools like TreeMaker and the lack of 3-D preview in current software.  
- Bio-fabrication ideas surfaced: growing cell sheets as strong as paper, vat-grown lumber, and rolled cellulose tubes were proposed as routes to crease-free, self-assembling 3-D structures.  
- A frustrated lab anecdote described arcing inside a vacuum furnace and two PhD students incorrectly insisting that pressure readouts in torr and mmHg were different, prompting jokes about academic competence.  
- Links to open-source cognitive-architecture projects were posted: brain-game.sf.net and neocortex.sf.net implementing Jeff Hawkins’ hierarchical Bayesian memory-prediction framework.  
- Utopiah asked for a script or tool that would animate the complete revision history of a Wikipedia page, showing sentence-level stability and tag evolution—similar to IBM’s visual projects but directly applied to live articles.