• Diamondoid mechanosynthesis remains contentious: Philip Moriarty’s scalability critiques were weighed against Drexler’s detailed tool-tip chemistry in “Nanosystems” (700 MB scan at http://gnusha.org/stuff_to_deal_with/nanosystems.tar.gz), with the consensus that single-atom demonstrations (2003 Si manipulation, 2008 AFM “Si” writing on diamond) have not yet produced a credible path to industrial-scale fabrication.

• Participants drew a cautionary parallel between mechanosynthesis and fusion energy, warning that excessive bureaucratic “cooperation” and regulatory expectations could stall progress in the same way ITER is perceived to have delayed fusion.

• A cluster of open-source hardware resources circulated: a completed DIY microscope incubator (http://cheapassscience.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/the-diy-microscope-incubator-is-complete/), open CNC plans (http://diylilcnc.org/downloads/), and videos of the Mabel bipedal robot and wall-climbing robots with proposed roof-hook lances.

• A proposed medical-tourism rating site was discussed, with existing resources such as http://reviews.treatmentabroad.com/ noted as a starting point.

• A training curriculum for Vietnamese programmers was outlined, covering JavaScript, HTML5, iOS/Android, CSS3, OpenGL ES 2, Unity3D, and build-server practices; the ticket list is at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/training.txt.

• Bryan Bishop’s “MeetLog” quantified-self project, featured on QuantifiedSelf.com, revealed he speaks ~60 % of the time in meetings, prompting reflection on finer-grained conversation tracking and open-source social analytics.

• Patent-law commentary linked to an analysis arguing that if software methods are unpatentable, then computer-readable media claims should be too (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/08/if-the-software-method-is-not-patentable-then-neither-is-the-computer-readable-medium.html).

• The community reinforced its norm of informal, direct networking—illustrated by a hacker-style outreach (“yo dude i can write some code”) for a potential collaboration—bypassing traditional hiring barriers.