# Summary of #hplusroadmap IRC Discussions

• Participants discussed biological simulation models, including a C. elegans (nematode worm) physical simulation written in Lisp that demonstrated how simple point mass physics can model organism movement, with Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) highlighted as being "more expressive and tens of times faster than Python" for scientific computing.

• The OpenWorm project was mentioned as developing PCI-SPH (Predictive-Corrective Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) code for OpenCL, showing the community's interest in GPU acceleration for biological simulations.

• Extensive discussion focused on Sci-Hub's operations and vulnerabilities, revealing it uses university proxies to access paywalled papers but fails to remove identifying watermarks, with participants suggesting implementation of delays, watermark removal, and better proxy management to protect sources.

• A tool called pdfparanoia (https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia) was shared as a solution for removing watermarks from academic PDFs, with one user providing Russian translations of documentation to help Sci-Hub operators.

• Detailed critique of Soylent meal replacement emerged, with concerns about its nutritional completeness, particularly regarding micronutrient forms (like vitamin K1 vs MK-4) and potential starvation of gut bacteria due to overabsorbability of simple nutrients.

• Participants debated DNA computing approaches, noting that while there are "Avogadro's number computational units in a bucket of DNA," the technology suffers from "atrocious crosstalk and low signal to noise ratio," referencing Erik Winfree's work at Caltech (http://dna.caltech.edu/).

• The group discussed digital archiving challenges, including Google's acquisition of Henry Spencer's Usenet archives (141 magnetic tapes containing 2 million messages from 1981-1991) and methods for storing data using image metadata on services like Flickr.