- Ben Reinhardt’s essay on the limits of research grants was critiqued for ignoring the scale and mechanics of NIH ($26 B/yr) and NSF ($8 B/yr) funding and for underestimating the expertise required to evaluate proposals.  
- Discussion of NSF grant review practice: program officers recursively solicit expert opinions by e-mailing authors of related papers, but the process is still subjective and constrained by limited budgets.  
- University overhead on grants and the implicit requirement that PIs hold university appointments were highlighted as major inefficiencies in the current public funding model.  
- Kickstarter-style “dominant assurance contracts” were proposed as a possible mechanism for funding public-good research, tempered by examples such as the Fontus self-filling water-bottle scam that show how slick marketing can outcompete technical merit.  
- DARPA’s use of program reviews and site visits was contrasted with NSF’s lighter-touch approach; participants noted that even DARPA’s model struggles when research outcomes cannot be internalized as financial returns.  
- A new 20-layer electrostatic artificial-muscle actuator requiring <500 V was shared as a low-voltage, power-dense option for microrobotics (TechXplore article).  
- A Wi-Fi Game Boy cartridge project was linked; participants suggested extending it to on-the-fly ROM streaming and joked about a follow-up “WiFi64” for the Commodore 64.  
- PARPA (a private “DARPA-like” funder) and the broader 2021 “Modern Science Revolution” of alternative funding models (FROs, fast grants, crypto-backed science) were discussed, with concern that startup incentives still discourage open publication.  
- Evidence for language shaping cognition: deaf signers show superior spatial memory attributed to classifier constructions in sign language, and an Austronesian tribe that uses absolute cardinal-direction terms develops strong internal compass abilities—cited as weak Sapir–Whorf support.  
- Proposal to raise societal rationality by adopting a monoparsable logical conlang (better than Lojban/Toaq) as a native or auxiliary language, possibly seeded on a Mars colony, was floated as a long-term transhumanist project.