# Summary of IRC Log from #hplusroadmap (July 24, 2014)

• A video link was shared about the KATRIN (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment), a project designed to measure the mass of the electron antineutrino with sub-eV precision by examining the spectrum of electrons emitted from tritium beta decay.

• A discussion about moving large scientific equipment highlighted the KATRIN spectrometer, a 200-ton device that had to be transported across Europe for neutrino mass measurements.

• A comment from Hacker News was shared criticizing biotech software as often being "a gimmick used to hike up prices" with companies charging "hundreds of thousands of dollars for software that was barely functional."

• A participant mentioned that for 1536-well plates in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), labs have reverted to older methods of submerging plates in alternating water baths, with machines using lasers to weld caps onto each well.

• A link was shared to a project that repurposes optical mouse sensors as cameras (mousecam), with accompanying code repository on Bitbucket.

• A discussion about code quality in Docker included debate about variable naming conventions, with participants discussing whether renaming variables from "error" to "err" was a meaningful improvement.

• The Docopt library for Python was mentioned as a "Pythonic command line arguments parser," though one participant criticized its documentation examples as inconsistent.