# Key Points from IRC Discussion (June 30, 2013)

• A substantive debate occurred about Ben Goertzel's AI research approach, with critics dismissing it as "finely crafted bullshit" while defenders positioned it as a legitimate extension of probabilistic logic approaches found in standard AI textbooks.

• The first dedicated Brain-Computer Interface academic journal was announced to launch in January 2014 (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/aboutThisJournal?journalCode=tbci20), addressing a significant gap in specialized publishing for BCI research.

• Participants engaged in a technical discussion about black market antibody production, covering methods for reverse engineering antibodies through mass spectrometry, peptide sequencing, and Edman degradation to determine protein sequences.

• The economic feasibility of underground pharmaceutical production was analyzed, with the suggestion that useful medicinal drugs could potentially be bootstrapped with $10-50k investment given sufficient expertise, using Jin Ling cigarettes as a model for black market distribution.

• A technical conversation explored tools and challenges for extracting structured data from the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, with participants recommending Tabula (https://github.com/jazzido/tabula) for converting PDF tables to usable data formats.

• Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis was critically examined, with some participants questioning the philosophical premise that our universe might be a computer simulation created by a post-human civilization.