- MIT Bitcoin Expo 2015 live-stream was watched and transcribed in real time; full session transcripts (welcome, Charlie Lee keynote, Andreas Antonopoulos on game-theoretic decentralization, trading & derivatives, regulation, security/usability, and audience Q&A) were posted to diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/mit-bitcoin-expo-2015/.

- Joi Ito’s keynote urged “be a nowist, not a futurist,” emphasizing rapid reaction to emerging trends over multi-year forecasts; he also recommended the 31C3 talk “From Computation to Consciousness” by Joscha Bach (media.ccc.de).

- A provocative audience question warned that fecal microbiota transplants can transfer personality traits, allergies, and even depression, raising the specter of “stealth FMTs” and the need for “tamper-proof assholes” against engineered gut-bacteria attacks.

- Discussion of quantum-criticality in biology referenced a Physics ArXiv Blog post and the Springer paper “Are Biological Systems Poised at Criticality?”; skepticism was voiced that similar avalanche dynamics appear in many non-living systems.

- Practical biohacking advice was requested by an undergraduate biophysicist seeking beginner-friendly protocols for electroporation, DNA assembly, and PCR; no specific links were supplied in-channel.

- California labor law was summarized: most IT/software roles are “exempt,” so employers owe no overtime; Lockheed Martin was cited as an example where hours 41–45 were unpaid but beyond 45 were either paid overtime or banked as time off.

- Optical Archival Disc (300 GB, Sony/Panasonic) was noted as a long-term cold-storage medium expected to launch Q2 2015.

- A QR-code reverse-engineering tutorial (“Decoding Small QR Codes by Hand”) and an open-source chip database (74hc595/chipdb on GitHub) were shared as technical resources.

- Rolf Rolles’ NoSuchCon 2014 slide deck on “Program Synthesis in Reverse Engineering” was linked as a method for automatically recovering high-level logic from binaries.