- A new Flask-based tool, youtube-audio-flask (https://github.com/nmz787/youtube-audio-flask), was released for stripping audio from YouTube videos; it appears to wrap youtube-dl and was built in a single 10–12 hour sprint.  
- Discussion of OpenCASCADE’s Boolean-operation performance revealed that the library is “slow slow slow,” and developers are advised to fuse objects as a compound rather than sequentially to avoid severe speed penalties.  
- NASA’s adoption of OpenCASCADE inside the OpenCSM/OpenMDAO framework was noted, along with a link to the related AIAA paper (http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2013-701).  
- ParametricParts.com was highlighted as a promising web-based CAD platform that uses the CadQuery library (built atop FreeCAD/OpenCASCADE) and offers Python-scriptable parametric design examples.  
- A public Google spreadsheet containing the current chemical inventory of the BioCurious community lab was shared (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15LmSsGT9WfagNrTvBFH6O8fybF4U4K23AHiUr9jd05k/edit#gid=0).  
- Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) was introduced as a potential low-tech cognitive hack, with Wikipedia and curated YouTube video search links provided for further exploration.  
- Server-performance issues on diyhpl.us were traced to high disk I/O from livestreamer video archiving, prompting discussion of Apache bottlenecks and possible migration to lighter web servers.  
- A brief philosophical aside on cosmogenesis questioned causality and the origin of the universe, prompting the terse recommendation to “read cosmology stuff.”