- Participants discussed lightweight heuristics for automatically extracting the title from text-based PDFs, including looking for the first bold line on page 1, using PDFminer for programmatic parsing, and—when scans are embedded—running OCR tools such as Tesseract or gOCR on rasterized pages.  
- nmz787_i described a past project that combined Tesseract with geocoding: scraping sheriff-sale foreclosure notices (scanned PDFs), extracting street addresses via OCR, and plotting them on a map to identify nearby properties.  
- FourFire asked whether anyone uses RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) tools like Spritzlet to increase reading speed; nmz787_i replied that habitual keyword/phrase scanning plus peripheral vision is faster for research-oriented reading, while story or textbook reading remains slower.  
- The same sub-thread explored music as cognitive enhancement: nmz787_i loops instrumental genres (southern hip-hop, Romanian folk, techno, blues, Bollywood) to maintain focus, avoids lyrical or conversational audio, and notes that physical interface friction (keyboard, mouse, fixed screen) is a bigger productivity bottleneck than auditory input.  
- A short debate on BCI practicality concluded with kanzure’s quip that “so far a keyboard is the best brain-computer interface,” while FourFire countered that keyboards are impractical when mobile and touchscreens are undesirable.  
- nmz787_i sketched an experimental concept for high-resolution EEG: multi-electrode tomography sampled at gigahertz rates to capture microsecond phase shifts among overlapping neural pulses, potentially enabling pulse-code-modulation decoding for auditory or visual cortex signals; current literature only explores up to ~500 Hz.  
- Alcor’s official statement on the Brain Preservation Foundation prize was circulated; kanzure highlighted the claim that cryonics damage is now dominated by cryoprotectant toxicity and tissue dehydration rather than classical “cells bursting,” and questioned why other major failure modes were omitted.  
- Supporting links posted: Alcor’s position statement (alcor.org), the referenced McIntyre et al. ASC paper (evidencebasedcryonics.org/media/MBPP.pdf), and the Evidence-Based Cryonics blog index for further reading.