- Lemminkainen proposed an “East Bay hardcore journal club” (2 Feb 2014, 14:00–17:00 at Ligandfort) where each attendee brings a favorite recent paper; the goal is to map cross-field connections rather than re-review the same article.  
- The same venue may host a pre-BRAINS conference session on 8 Feb, leveraging early access granted to organizers of http://brainsconference.com/.  
- kanzure shared the “SafeCurves” site (safecurves.cr.yp.to) that evaluates elliptic-curve choices for cryptography; discussion noted that Bitcoin’s curve is flagged as insecure by these criteria.  
- paperbot served two neuroscience PDFs: a 2011 instrumentation paper (0957-0233_22_11_115801) and a 2013 Neuron article (PIIS0896627313005321), demonstrating the channel’s routine use of automated retrieval for paywalled literature.  
- mknight dropped a link to “MKRAND – A Quantum Cellular Randomness Well” (http://www.tag.md/public/mkrand-TA1.tar.gz) before immediately leaving, prompting skepticism about drive-by self-promotion.  
- ThomasEgi recounted the 1990s PGP export workaround—printing source code in books to ship legally overseas—highlighting historical tension between code-as-speech and munitions regulations.  
- kanzure questioned why Mozilla’s Servo browser has any keyboard shortcuts at all, citing its README note that Ctrl-L currently works only on macOS.