- Stanford’s Neurogrid project is pursuing “simulate neurons in silicon,” while an alternative vision is to run artificial neural networks “close to the metal” for higher efficiency.  
- Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit is shipping as the 1.2 W “Fathom” USB stick for mobile neural-network inference, though availability is still invitation-only.  
- GP-Write (formerly HGP-Write) released a draft white-paper (engineeringbiologycenter.org) that targets a 1,000× cost reduction in DNA synthesis; participants note this still leaves a bacterial genome at ~$40 k, far above the $0.01/genome goal needed for practical use.  
- Cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) facts circulated: 11–13 % of maternal plasma DNA is fetal, fragments are ~200 bp, and the signal disappears within ~2 h postpartum—useful for non-invasive prenatal work.  
- British Standards Institute document BS 8611, “Robots and robotic devices—Guide to the ethical design and application of robots,” was sought as a reference on robot-ethics hazards.  
- Ward Cunningham’s recent JavaScript-only redesign of wiki.c2.com was criticized for breaking accessibility and hindering web-scraping; the change was justified as a defense against traffic that was throttling the legacy Perl CGI backend.  
- A new Windows code-injection technique dubbed “AtomBombing” (breakingmalware.com) was shared as a noteworthy security development.  
- Cargo-cult programming and related jargon (“deep magic,” “black magic,” “heavy wizardry”) were discussed, with links to the Jargon File and reflections on Cunningham’s redesign as a form of cargo-cult engineering.