- Paul Rothemund’s UT Austin talk on DNA origami was live-scribed at http://adl.serveftp.org/lab/2009-09-15-rothemund-utexas.html; attendees noted that the field-standard design tool caDNAno is built on Adobe Air, while the open-source alternative NanoEngineer-1 is written in C/Python and GPL-licensed.  
- Participants debated the economics of long, error-containing DNA strands: for DNA-origami structures the total error rate is acceptable, whereas gene-coding applications would find the same error distribution prohibitively expensive to synthesize.  
- A Schlumberger guest lecture on oil-field nanotechnology was also transcribed and posted at http://heybryan.org/school/me136n/2009-09-15.html.  
- Discussion of open-source biology infrastructure turned critical: several members argued that the diybio mailing list is dominated by non-technical “reinvent-the-wheel” posts and proposed stricter, science-only forums such as diysci or “cluefulbiopeople.”  
- ybit sketched a revised business plan (http://filebin.ca/rtotgu/b4200.png) for a streamlined junkyard that supplies cheap hardware and lab space while freeing personal time for AI and robotics hobby projects.  
- genehacker shared a metallurgy paper showing that aluminum and other metals can be precision-molded using high-gradient magnetic fields (http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9802/Li/Li-9802.html#ToC4).  
- kanzure committed new unit-test modules to the SKDB repository, adding range-checking for mixed-unit quantities and delegate-finding utilities for matching similar object dictionaries in GraphSynth.  
- General frustration was voiced over poorly written autoconf scripts that reject PyQt 4.3.3 for requiring “4.2 or later,” prompting tips on Debian package pinning via /etc/apt/preferences.