- Discussion of a “secret society” concept pitched as a way to court wealthy individuals by befriending them at exclusive venues and steering them toward funding anti-aging research and related transhumanist projects; the pitch explicitly mentions budgeting $100 k for venue access and recruiting “hot females” for “honeypot operations.”  
- Concern expressed over the fragility of key bioinformatics resources: participants note that KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) is “having problems,” prompting reflection on how the community would cope if such databases suddenly disappeared.  
- Reference to the GMES competition (likely the Google–sponsored “Google–Microsoft–Elsevier–Springer” data-mining contest) as a current event of interest for open-source biology and data-integration efforts.  
- Exchange about open-source hardware economics: debate over whether it is acceptable to build expensive open-source lab equipment versus the imperative to keep costs low; a Make-zine rule of thumb (“charge 2.6× cost”) is cited.  
- Mention of Alibre CAD being acquired by 3D Systems, coupled with criticism of Alibre’s recent marketing missteps circulated via e-mail.  
- Side note on the difficulty of scraping the OpenFabrication repository, described as “hard to scrape” and demoralizing for data-archiving efforts.  
- Brief technical aside on the limitations of desktop search tools (tracker-search lacking phrase search) and the impracticality of searching 20 GB of local data without better indexing.  
- Link shared to a Hack-a-Day post about a Chilean teenager who built an automatic earthquake alarm, framed as an example of grassroots hardware innovation.  
- Passing mention of RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) from 1970s US and Soviet lunar missions, leading to an invitation to a Friday “lunch-and-learn” session on the topic.