Kester Brewin

Via TimeOut, the London Noise Map. It’s a pretty sophisticated resource, with maps produced by postcode, time of day, major roads excluded or included etc. What’s interesting about the article that accompanied the piece in TimeOut is that it showed that Londoners find road noise to be their great source of irritation. In a world [...]

In the previous post I began to set out some further thoughts on gift, springing from my reading of Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption. I want to continue to develop the thoughts outlined there about the ‘leisure class’ that Veblen describes. Essentially, we might now see them as the aristocracy, or celebrities. They are [...]

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I’ve picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The [...]

“What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?” Does anyone actually want this? Would a vegetarian eat it on absence-of-animal-cruelty grounds? Can they really replicate that bacon-sandwich smell? Technorati Tags: Science, Technology, Vegetarianism

Had a great time chatting to Barry Taylor yesterday – who’s over in the UK ‘writing a film score’ (yeah right Barry – we believe you We got on to talking music. I’d recently heard John Bell talk about protest music, and, harking back to the good old days of Dylan and Joan Baez, he [...]

“One of the great losses of the Information Age is texture. Consider the pre-computer desk: a litter of papers, large and small, handwritten, printed and typed, course and fine; letters in varying hands, envelopes of various sizes bearing stamps from all over the world. Here are books, annotated and bookmarked; here is a typewriter with [...]

Perhaps I’m being professionally defensive here, but having looked at RateMyTeachers.co.uk I was left wondering whether this was actually a project that had any use. Part of the beauty of the ‘ratings’ section of sites like Amazon and Flickr is that they actually allow you to make decisions – which seller is reliable, which photos [...]

In response to the previous post, a link from Daniel to a wonderful cartoon at ‘Gaping Void‘: Mike commented on the last post that we all just need RSS readers. I don’t think the volume of information is the problem; I do think this cartoon is right on the money. It reminds me of the [...]

Wise words from Eric Kintz on why frequent blog-posting is unhealthy. Discussed here on TSK. In summary: #1 Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting #2 Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway #3 Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 #4 Frequent posting [...]

If you’ve read the book, you’ll have picked up on the theme of ‘dirt’, and its place in forming communities. Deciding what’s acceptable or unacceptable, what’s ‘in’ or ‘out’, what’s ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’ is a way that a society creates its identity… And we only need look at passages like Leviticus 12ff to see just [...]