- A Hacker News thread and Center for Responsible Nanotechnology blog post claim that self-replicating nanorobots are now feasible, while a Duke University paper on billions of light-addressable, self-assembled nanostructures was cited as supporting evidence.  
- The Biocurious DIY-bio group launched a public wiki to coordinate events and document open-source biology projects.  
- A hardware-versus-software prototyping debate concluded that material sourcing, tooling inventory, and fixture setup—not machining itself—are the dominant bottlenecks, illustrated by anecdotes of a 24-hour bracket turnaround versus stalled year-long CNC builds.  
- Google Mobwrite, an open-source patch-theory library for real-time collaborative editing, was proposed as a tool to accelerate distributed hardware design workflows.  
- Automatic differentiation and Cornell’s symbolic-regression “Eureqa” tool were highlighted as practical ways to discover mechanical-system parameters without hand-computing derivatives.  
- The H+ Summit 2010 (Boston, June 12–13) was announced, with kanzure scheduled to speak and demo a Facebook app alongside Andrew Hessel; discount codes were offered.  
- Sourcemap.org was introduced as a copyleft-hardware supply-chain transparency platform, though criticized for emphasizing CO₂ metrics over functional data.  
- Participants critiqued Andrew Ng’s CS229 machine-learning notes for omitting contextual meaning of symbols and over-relying on calculus derivations without explaining their relevance to large-scale data problems.  
- The Hessian matrix was emphasized as the key to proving convexity in optimization, while logistic loss was defended as the closest differentiable surrogate to 0-1 loss that preserves convexity.  
- Locally weighted linear regression was argued to be misnamed because it behaves like a spatial Gaussian filter rather than returning a simple linear function, prompting a recommendation for clearer alternative notes at http://people.rit.edu/~jcdicsa/courses/SML/03linear.pdf.