Singularity – for and against; Doritos in spaaaaace; shock horror homosexual brains just like straight brains; UK bans TV product placement, Alan Moore interview …

• 1 – Inviting Death From Space
  “… yes, on the morning of June 12 2008, the EISCAT high-powered space transmitter station on Svalbard used its array of radars to beam a Doritos ad at a solar system 42 light years from here.” Seti and product placement – two great tastes &c.
  (tags: sponsorship advertising astronomy product-placement SETI)
• 2 – Norms and Deviations: Whos to Say?
  “All we can be sure of is that the struggle between the impulse to normalize — to specify a center and then police deviations from it — and the impulse to repel the normalizing gaze and live securely in a community of one’s own will never be resolve
  (tags: politics philosophy otherness society community deviation normal difference)
• 3 – Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex
  “The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex.” Gee, who knew?
  (tags: research neuroscience structure brain gender sexuality)
• 4 – An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter
  “I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision.”
  (tags: philosophy technology singularity Hofstadter intelligence futurism artificial-intelligence AI)
• 5 – Human-Equivalent AI
  “Such an intelligence could come a long way in a really short time, or perhaps not. The point is that we don’t know. If a pundit expresses skepticism, their opinion is more likely to reflect the limitations they know apply to humans — not limitations
  (tags: singularity artificial-intelligence AI)
• 6 – U.K. shuts out product placement
  “The U.K. media minister has attacked product placement in TV shows and said he will not allow the practice on British broadcasters even though it has been approved by the European Union.”
  (tags: product-placement television media marketing advertising UK)
• 7 – Pádraig Ó Méalóid talks to Alan Moore, part 1
  “I’m quite happy with the work that I actually own, which means that ninety per cent of my work I have effectively disowned, which of course was painful, but it’s a small price to payif it means that I have to have nothing to do with those people ever
  (tags: Alan-Moore interview culture comics art)