- Clement Vidal’s “gravitational-lens SETI” proposal was discussed: super-massive black holes could function as galaxy-scale radio beacons and telescopes, offering nine orders of magnitude sensitivity gain over Earth arrays, prompting debate on how to statistically distinguish such alien engineering from natural phenomena.  
- A remote dog-training helmet concept was prototyped: a <$80, 3-D-printed head mount that wirelessly triggers a servo-actuated cheese or Kong treat dispenser via BLE/Wi-Fi, with open hardware files and safety considerations for dogs from chihuahua to Belgian Malinois.  
- Mechanical computing revival: participants explored 2-D barrel cams as compact combinational-logic engines (XOR, NAND, SHA-256) and lamented the disappearance of fluidic logic gates once used in rad-hard missile and nuclear-plant controls, citing Leibniz-era marble machines and reversible buckling-spring gates as precedents.  
- Protein-structure and directed-evolution resources were shared: the open-source Victor C++ toolkit, a GPU-CUDA paper on 3-D protein similarity search, enzymatic protecting-group methods, and microfluidic “evolution chips” that automate mutation, selection, and meiosis in picoliter droplets.  
- File-size optimization experiments compared ffmpeg, ImageMagick, and gifsicle for animated GIFs versus H.264 MP4, concluding H.264 wins on quality-per-bit but lossless GIF can beat it when dithering is removed.  
- EEG-based “meditation wars” two-player game link was circulated, along with the full 154-page U.S. v. Ross Ulbricht Silk Road indictment and related op-sec analysis.