- Babak Parviz’s talk “Back to Nature for the Next Technology Revolution” (University of Washington) was shared as a ResearchChannel video on bio-inspired electronics and future interfaces.  
- Discussion of Make Magazine and Instructables as an “incestuous” media loop: Make links to Instructables and vice-versa because of family ties (Saul Griffith married to an O’Reilly) rather than organic community merit.  
- Octopart (parts search engine) and the lack of a universal “buy now” button were noted; Amazon’s industrial API was mentioned as only supporting bulk orders (10+ units).  
- Seasteading and deep-sea mining: manganese nodules and high-grade metal ores on the ocean floor were highlighted, along with UN licensing requirements and profit-sharing rules.  
- Ginkgo BioWorks and the BioBrick parts registry were introduced, including a link to their robotic DNA-assembly protocols (partsregistry.org/Assembly:Robotic_assembly).  
- NASA telerobotics photo sets and papers on automated manufacturing work-cells were circulated, showing early-1980s robotic calibration and manipulation systems.  
- Symyx and Robiotec were pointed out as companies offering automated laboratory platforms for high-throughput chemistry and biology.  
- A speculative physics discussion covered a 500 MV/m “electron balloon” concept from arXiv:0805.0230 and the possibility of quasi-superconducting levitating vehicles.  
- Joseph Jackson appeared on the Speculist podcast (FastForward Radio) to discuss “the end of scarcity” and open-source abundance strategies; listeners found his arguments surprisingly coherent.  
- Kanzure proposed writing “Strategies to Prevent Total System Failure,” framing it as a response to perceived civilizational fragility.