- A mysterious “first e-book” was mentioned—described as a machine-readable text never intended for humans—prompting half-serious speculation about AI time-travelers seeding early digital culture.  
- Discussion of the long-stalled Gada Personal Manufacturing Prize: kanzure noted that multiple projects had satisfied the technical criteria, yet no formal entries were ever submitted and Humanity+ never reached out to the teams.  
- eudoxia linked to the still-unpublished Drexler/Smalley “debate” book “DSDM” (http://www.molecularassembler.com/DSDM.htm) and asked whether anyone was still waiting for its release; kanzure replied that “waiting is for losers.”  
- A brief but pointed debate arose over Rachel Haywire’s political shift toward “national-anarchism” and alleged white-supremacist themes, with participants citing her blog posts on racial separatism.  
- strophariad sought advice on joining a DIYbio group in Chicago; yashgaroth reported the local group inactive, and kanzure pointed to the global list at http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/groups.  
- paperbot’s low (~16 %) success rate was criticized; kanzure and nmz787 discussed the difficulty of integrating the Zotero translation-server build system to improve PDF scraping.  
- kanzure expressed skepticism about grain3d.com’s claim to perform “gcode optimization” tailored to individual 3-D printers, prompting juri_ to label it “BS” given the complexity of materials and geometries.  
- juri_ shared a New York Times article on the newly announced U.S. BRAIN Initiative to map the human brain (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html).