- Participants discussed the state of whole-brain emulation, noting that IBM’s Blue Brain project was only simulating ~50 000 neurons—far fewer than the ~250 000 in a fruit-fly brain—and questioned what methodological advances, if any, justified the modest scale.  
- Memristor-based neuromorphic hardware was highlighted via two links: a BrainBlogger overview and an IEEE Spectrum article on the “Moneta” memristor brain project, framed as potential paths to more biologically realistic emulation.  
- Open-source CAD efforts were mentioned when kanzure pointed to the new OCE-dev Google Group, an initiative to clean up and maintain the Open CASCADE geometry kernel for hardware design and 3-D printing workflows.  
- A business model for monetizing idle domain names was proposed: create a marketplace that lets owners lease high-value domains (e.g., $50/month plus a $10 k buy-out option) while automating payments and taking a 10 % fee, aimed at the estimated 1 million “interesting” domains among 130 million registered.  
- Concerns over organizational dysfunction surfaced when kanzure reported that Humanity+ had not paid for contracted web-work, sparking debate about informal agreements, late-payment penalties, and the value of formal contracts.  
- Marketing ROI skepticism arose after kanzure revealed that the Life Extension Foundation paid $15 k for three months of banner ads on H+ Magazine, yielding only 442 clicks ($33 per click) with no evidence of conversion.  
- The upcoming film “Limitless” (based on Alan Glynn’s novel “The Dark Fields”) was critiqued for its clichéd portrayal of cognitive enhancement leading inevitably to stock-market speculation rather than broader transformative impacts.  
- Community communication preferences shifted as ybit described aggressively pruning Facebook friends to ~700 science-interested contacts and relying instead on IRC, Gmail labels, and meetlog-style tools for higher signal-to-noise ratio.  
- Max More’s request for nootropic advice on the Extropians list was deemed outdated, prompting kanzure to recommend the Longecity (Imminst) forums as a more current and experiment-rich resource.