- UAV “aerial deliverator” concept: participants debate payload limits, drop cushioning (airbags vs. foam), urban landing sites, and whether the real goal is replacing suburban SUV errands rather than downtown courier bikes.  
- Microwave oven hack: discussion of replacing crude timers with IR surface-temperature sensors plus mass/penetration modeling to create automatic, hotspot-aware cooking.  
- Synthetic-biology vs. traditional manufacturing: Tom Knight’s claim that “synthetic biology >> milling machines” is challenged on the grounds that current synbio tools themselves still require precision manufacturing and that biology is “noisy.”  
- Bayesian filtering as a tool: open-source packages (OpenBayes, BNT) are cited for both spam/troll detection and, experimentally, for automatically routing messages to the correct mailing list among 150+ technical lists.  
- Open-source hardware critique: frustration voiced that roadmap projects (e.g., “computronium” end-goals) substitute abstract frameworks for actual engineering deliverables.  
- DIYbio governance draft: reference to a nascent “debian-social-contract”-style safety and good-lab-practice document being prepared by Tito and Meredith for the diybio.org community.  
- Links of note: history of US prescription psychoactive use (CSICOP article), $20 DIY sonicator (PhysOrg), 5-axis CNC build video, microscope-cell-phone mod (Wired), and a transhumanist CFP from re-public.gr.