- The Victorian “X Club” paper was invoked as a historical precedent for today’s open-science movement, showing how 19th-century gentleman-amateurs and professionals jointly shaped early biology and suggesting similar hybrid models for modern transhumanist R&D.  
- RepRap’s fragmentation—poor Sanguino board documentation, 50+ blogs, forum-only communication—was dissected as a barrier to entry; participants floated forking the design and debated bridging web-forums with email via Drupal “femail,” Sympa hybrids, or ikiwiki mbox plugins.  
- A ULS-25ER laser cutter’s obsolete Windows-only drivers, RS-232/LPT cabling, and 20-lb steel chassis were cited as textbook examples of why open-source hardware is essential for lab-grade equipment.  
- Facebook social-graph data scraped by Pete Warden and Google’s public sitemap of all user profiles were highlighted as controversial, high-value datasets for network-science research.  
- Debian’s governance—mentorship, vouching, months-long vetting, Schulze-method voting—was proposed as a template for a transhumanist co-op that balances openness with quality control.  
- Work on the Emotiv EPOC EEG headset continues; the immediate technical hurdle is decrypting its AES-encrypted data stream even though the key is already known.