- A PNAS paper was shared showing that learning new color names rapidly increases gray-matter density in intact adult human cortex, prompting discussion about extending this principle to olfactory vocabulary.  
- Criticism of the Open Hardware Summit’s choice of polling software was voiced, with a link to a post-mortem blog post arguing that poor technical decisions undermined the event.  
- The cost of data.gov was questioned: at $333 k per month, participants estimated it could fund only ~31 programmers at market rates ($80/hr), and noted that usaspending.gov provided no transparency on the breakdown.  
- The Open Source Micro-Factory concept from OpenFarmTech was highlighted as a model for distributed, low-cost manufacturing.  
- Gitduino was discussed as essentially a lightweight markup plus version-control workflow; standard 3-D formats (.stl, .scad, .step, .iges) were deemed sufficient, and mandating every repo be a full SKDB package was considered impractical.