- The 2005 “Calxia” project—an open-source attempt to bootstrap a self-sustaining civilization in Chile’s Atacama Desert using a C-130 fuselage habitat and closed-loop life-support—was re-examined; participants now propose rebuilding it as an SKDB-driven space-habitat analog and are coordinating with the new Moon-Mars Analog Research Station (MMARS) effort scheduled for March 2010 deployment.  

- Wet-lab experimentation surfaced: drazak described running ELISA and PCR in parallel, noting weak signal significance and the desire for an automated ELISA machine, prompting the counter-argument “if it’s worth doing, build it yourself.”  

- The SKDB hardware-package repository faces a platform decision: the current Django-based “djangit” front-end is criticized as un-Pythonic and overly complex, while a Mercurial-backed “hatta-wiki” is proposed as a lighter alternative; participants debate whether extensibility or simplicity is more important.  

- A units-handling bug in SKDB blocks progress: Python raises “Unknown unit 'pi'” when geom.py tries to instantiate Unit("pi/2 radians”), even though GNU units itself recognizes “pi,” indicating a parsing issue in the combined units database.  

- Productivity and burnout strategies were discussed, including a proposed 3-hour-work / 1.5-hour-play cycle, the use of org-mode for task tracking, and tai chi/qigong as focus aids, with consensus that visible progress outweighs rigid scheduling.  

- Notable links shared include the ProtoForge project (http://protoforge.org/), the “freespaceshot” free-lunar-flyby contest for students, a Google TechTalk on qigong, and digital-camera noise fingerprinting research claiming 100 % accuracy in linking photos to their source cameras.