- Richard Stallman’s tongue-in-cheek “Jinnetic engineering” essay (stallman.org/articles/jinnetic.html) was circulated as an example of how popular wishes for longevity often miss deeper systemic issues.

- The channel debated whether Lawrence Lessig might become Obama’s CTO; participants expressed excitement but noted he was only on a speculative shortlist.

- Open-source brain-stimulation projects were declared moribund: OpenStim is “dead” due to wiki inactivity, while Open-rTMS needs Monte-Carlo line-integral scripts to simulate magnetic coils.

- xp_prg proposed using Prolog to infer DNA sequences that would direct 3-D organism morphogenesis via protein-gradient diffusion; kanzure countered that biology lacks an absolute coordinate system and pointed to MIT’s gradient-programming language and amorphous-computation literature as prior art.

- kanzure demoed an in-progress open-source “Fantastic Contraption”-like 2-D physics sandbox for rapid mechanical prototyping; links to user-generated walkers, cranes, and launchers were analyzed for design elegance vs. complexity.

- Berkeley’s Sensor & Actuator Center presented 150 nm chitosan-based organic FETs fabricated with 5 psi nano-imprint lithography—simple enough to run in a water bottle, suggesting ultra-low-cost microfluidic bio-electronics.

- Links collected for computational-biology toolchains: MCell (3-D Monte-Carlo reaction–diffusion), E-Cell, SBML.org converters, and a personal wiki page cataloging open-source simulators.

- GitTorrent (gittorrent.utsl.gen.nz/rfc.html) was highlighted as a P2P protocol for distributed git repositories; fenn argued that Debtorrent for Debian packages is a more pressing need.

- Miscellaneous hardware notes: bkero ordered a BeagleBoard (beagleboard.org) for embedded hacking; gene advocated Nvidia stereo drivers plus red/blue glasses for immersive 3-D visualization.