Stross gets (un)spiritual, Ellis becomes a stringer for Reuters, Sirius interviews Rushkoff…

• 1 – Charlie Stross: This nation is a spiritual nation (not!)
  “Trying to come up with a response, a Church of England spokesman said the “impression of secularism in this country is overrated”. Yeah, right. You speak for an organization that has an audience draw 40% that of a Terry Pratchett mini-series on Sky TV.”
  (tags: politics atheism secularism results survey poll religion UK)
• 2 – Confusions in Artificial Intelligence
  “In the future, there may exist robots that are programmed to mimic sentience, or even spontaneously generate sentientlike behaviors (not explicitly programmed in!), but are, in fact, non-sentient.”
  (tags: philosophy futurism robots machines consciousness sentience intelligence artificial AI)
• 3 – Laser 3d scanning with a webcam
  “…they’ve come up with an interesting, low cost method of 3d scanning over at the Institute for Robotics and Process Control.” Tools for everyone!
  (tags: fabbing futurism technology home webcam hack tools scanning laser 3D)
• 4 – Warren Ellis to write weekly SL column for Reuters
  “Writer Warren Ellis, author of comic books, graphic novels, and two forthcoming novels, is bringing his “Second Life Sketches” to the Reuters Second Life News Center as a weekly column beginning next month.” F*cking awesome.
  (tags: genius comics Ellis Warren columnist journalism colum Reuters metavers Life Second)
• 5 – Douglas Rushkoff interviwed by R. U. Sirius
  “In essence, I’m saying that the gods are really created by people. They exist, but only insofar as people are willing to believe in them. They’re emergent phenomena.”
  (tags: economy money technology culture society metaphor story old Bible gods novel graphic comic Testament Rushkoff Douglas)