• The Allen Telescope Array and its 1997 predecessor, the 512-microphone Huge Microphone Array, were dissected as large-scale phased-array systems, with links to the original paper (doi:10.1.1.30.7061) and the SETI ATA site, and participants clarified that parabolic dishes achieve gain by discarding off-axis wavefronts rather than active beamforming.  
• Launch-assist concepts were brainstormed, including a 4 000 km “launch loop” accelerating payloads at 2 g, a 2 000 km Earth-tunnel railgun, and 1 000 km polyethylene momentum-exchange tethers in orbit to circularize sub-orbital trajectories.  
• Open-source medical ultrasound dominated discussion: a 1963 Siemens Echo-Encephalograph teardown, the $7.9 k–$200 k price range of commercial units, FDA seizures of “keepsake fetal video” scanners, and the proposal to use PVDF piezoelectric film for DIY transducers despite Canadian export controls on sheets thicker than 200 µm.  
• Extracellular-matrix purification from pig organs was explored, with technical notes that 10 nm filtration removes all viruses, HPLC can isolate proteins but is low-throughput for collagen, and industrial cosmetic-grade collagen already exists; regulatory loopholes such as labeling devices “for non-human hominids” were also highlighted.  
• A Nature paper showing that male human odor alone stresses lab rodents and skews pain assays led to calls for standardized “human odor assays” and mandatory logging of experimenter gender to improve reproducibility.  
• Distributed hardware collaboration was debated, with proposals to replace wheeled telepresence robots with low-wage human proxies wearing streaming cameras, and participants listed early open-source EDA tools (KiCad, OpenSCAD, RepRap) while lamenting the absence of universal hardware compilers or standard interface-description languages.  
• Personal knowledge-management architecture was discussed for the diyhpl.us wiki, weighing flat files versus Neo4j, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL JSON stores, and referencing distributed version-control wikis such as ikiwiki and the Oddwiki Software Bazaar list.  
• Historical automata were analyzed for mechanical computation: the 1774 Jaquet-Droz “Writer” uses a two-dimensional barrel cam to encode a vector font and can implement universal combinational logic, while Thomas Jefferson’s pantograph and modern autopen were cited as precedents for automated document duplication and signature replication.