We're getting a new university here. It won't quite rival Stanford or Berkeley - for one thing, it will admit just 40 students in its first year. But Singularity University, as the place will be called, can't be faulted on ambition. 

The school aims for nothing less than solving "humanity's grand challenges". This it will do via courses in such disciplines as nanotechnology, robotics, biotech and neuroscience, condensed into one nine-week summer term.

Founders include space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, Google co-founder Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil, author of the 2005 book The Singularity is Near. The university will be housed at Nasa's Ames research facility.

The Singularity, if you were wondering, is the imagined moment when technology starts to develop without our help. Not all of us are looking to hasten that day - so it's no surprise that the school has already attracted critics.

James Cascio, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, isn't impressed by the business-focused curriculum. "The message here," he says, "is that people don't matter." Others note that the faculty is 97% male.

Still, in recent years the Valley has become pretty straitlaced, so maybe it's time to welcome back some certifiably wacky thinkers. 

The prime movers behind the Easlen Institute in Big Sur - which gave the Sixties counter-culture what intellectual heft it carried - met at Stanford, after all.

The Valley's also where the CIA set up its psychic spy research programme and where, in the Eighties, the SETI Institute was founded to look for extraterrestrial life. All helped make the area what it is. Singularity University may yet be as influential.

* Local movies-by-mail company Netflix has quietly hit 10 million subscribers. Its revenues are up 13% on the year, and its stock has doubled since November — a next-to-miraculous achievement in this market. The recession has helped, as people stay at home. But the company is also managing the move to online distribution nicely.

* That was quick. Two weeks ago, Facebook announced new terms of service that seemed to say it owned everything you posted there for ever. Users howled. Now the company has backtracked, saying it will “return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised”.