• The White House’s 2013 OSTP memo now requires every federal agency with >$100 M in R&D spending to make taxpayer-funded papers freely available within 12 months of publication, a milestone celebrated by open-science advocates and documented at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf.

• nmz787 released open-source firmware and schematics that turn a $4.30 MSP430 LaunchPad into a drop-in replacement controller for the fans and lamps of broken DLP projectors, illustrating how commodity microcontrollers can salvage high-value optics for DIY bio-imaging or AR projects.

• Channel consensus held that real-time, on-device facial recognition on current mobile hardware is still CPU-bound; storing a 50–100 byte eigenface descriptor for every human (~800 GB total) is feasible, but cloud off-loading adds ~50 ms network latency plus compute time, making sub-second recognition impractical today.

• A practical debate on lab-automation networking concluded that Ethernet beats USB for multi-drop distance, RS-485 suffices for low-bandwidth sensors, and the current “Raspberry Pi + small microcontroller” hybrid is the least-bad compromise until deterministic, network-capable microcontrollers with package managers emerge.

• Participants criticized the Arduino ecosystem for lacking a Debian-style package manager, forcing fragile copy-paste libraries and Git submodules; they also noted that AVR-class chips’ 2 kB RAM and 8-bit buses cannot host full networking stacks, while Linux SBCs lack on-board ADCs and require 3.3 V level-shifting.

• DIY neuromodulation resources were shared, including curated reading lists on transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) and low-intensity ultrasound neuromodulation at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/tdcs/ and http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/ultrasound/.

• The $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences—bankrolled by Brin, Zuckerberg, and Milner—was noted as evidence that billionaire patronage is increasingly steering funding toward longevity and regenerative-medicine research.

• Google Glass’s closed, cloud-only API and $1 500 price tag were dissected; kanzure argued that offline, on-device facial recognition is essential for real-world utility, while others explored repurposing TI pico-projectors and MyVu headsets for low-cost DIY HUDs in stage performances.

• The channel mocked “Roko’s Basilisk” as a flawed Pascal-wager variant and criticized Kurzweil’s non-engineering pronouncements, comparing some transhumanist rhetoric to scientology and citing a 2006 self-castration incident as a cautionary tale of cultic behavior.

• Fiction recommendations included Roger Williams’ “The Metamachine of Prime Intellect” for dark singularity narratives and Greg Egan’s works for rigorous post-human storytelling, with discussion on how to narrate incorporeal minds without anthropomorphic stand-ins.