- Intel and Oregon Health & Science University are jointly applying supercomputing to large-scale genomic data analysis to speed up personalized-medicine pipelines.  
- Chris Olah’s 2014 post “Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology” (http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/) was highlighted as a key resource for understanding high-dimensional representations in deep learning.  
- A Quanta Magazine article on ant self-organization (https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140409-the-remarkable-self-organization-of-ants/) was discussed, linking to the underlying ECAL 2011 paper (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262297141_Advances_in_Artificial_Life_ECAL_2011.pdf) that explains how simple local rules generate complex nest and raft structures.  
- Participants argued that “photo-with-handwritten-note” is a weak form of online proof and advocated cryptographic timestamping (e.g., blockchain signatures) as a more reliable alternative.  
- A short technical debate questioned whether PGP alone suffices for identity verification or if Bitcoin’s timestamping is also needed to prove ownership of a given address.  
- kanzure released a public archive of “bitcoin-related fanaticism” at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/fanaticism/, collecting writings that document extreme Bitcoin enthusiasm.  
- The OpenWorm project’s IRC channel (#openworm-office) was noted as abandoned, with no successor channel identified in the log.  
- A network-wide freenode outage (SIGTERM followed by SSL session drops) was observed, prompting speculation that it forced mass expiration of exposed SSL sessions.