• NASA’s upcoming astrobiology announcement (HQ_M10-167) sparked speculation about possible extraterrestrial evidence, including tongue-in-cheek references to “cyborg Sagan” and Spirit rover images that might show an alien hand.

• Ben Goertzel released a 5-minute Humanity+ overview video outlining the organization’s three core missions: beneficial artificial general intelligence, anti-aging research, and an “Internet of Things” layer that turns everyday objects into social-data conduits.

• Participants questioned whether Thiel Foundation funding routed through Humanity+ to OpenCog would primarily hire more programmers instead of improving project management or community coordination, raising doubts about the openness of the open-source AGI effort.

• Mechanical Turk was presented as a near-term AI training pipeline: ROS modules already outsource computer-vision micro-tasks (e.g., bounding-box labeling) to human workers, using the resulting labeled data to bootstrap vision models until the robot no longer needs the crowd.

• A thought experiment explored ultra-low-cost teleoperated robots as a way to offshore physical labor (e.g., folding laundry) the same way call centers offshore voice services, while noting that current teleoperation is viable only where human presence is impractical or nearly cost-free.

• Kanzure will present on RepRap and the Gada Prize (deadline 31 Dec 2012) at the December 2010 Humanity+ conference in Los Angeles, alongside Aubrey de Grey’s anti-aging talk.

• Hackerspace achievements solicited for an Ignite talk included Copenhagen Suborbital’s amateur rocket, the nascent BioCurious biotech lab, FabLab TED presentations, and L0pht’s historical buffer-overflow research.

• Ongoing work to reconstruct NanoEngineer-1’s version history continued: kanzure and fitzsim analyzed SVN-to-Git migration artifacts (empty commit messages, “Moved remotely” pairs, orphaned branches) to restore a coherent branch structure for the open-source nanotech CAD codebase.

• Discussion of protein-function taxonomies highlighted EC numbers for enzyme catalysis, PANTHER/Reactome/SCOP/CATH/InterPro for structure, and the Gene Ontology (GO) as the accepted functional ontology, with the browsable tree available at amigo.geneontology.org.