Kester Brewin

Friday 29th February. Another leap year, another ‘correction’ in our faulty estimate of 365 days in a year. We thought perhaps the Universe should have given us tidy integers, orbits that ran to exact days, but the closer we looked, the further away our measures got. The 4-yearly leap day is an attempt to get [...]

The Telegraph reported recently that an Israeli MP has blamed the recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on gays. The Knesset has recently repealed various laws about homosexuality, and this created the siesmic events. Gays were also to blame for flooding in Britain last year, according to one Bishop, and one might also [...]

So the Oscars have been wept along to, and we’ve had the BAFTAs and the BRITs and the Grammys… I think people are missing a trick here. Come on Emergent, give us an award ceremony! We demand a tacky hotel and venue, with numbered tables, free alcohol and cut away shots to Andrew Jones as [...]

Wired reported a couple of days ago on the conclusions of Google co-founder Larry Page’s working group on improving life on earth, and the list of ‘14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century‘. They included things like making solar energy affordable, reverse-engineering the brain and providing energy from fusion. Energy, quality of life, quantity [...]

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It’s a terrific movie. If you haven’t yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you’ll need to see this one on the big screen. Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men [...]

As the Archbishop heads for Synod this afternoon to defend himself and, according to some exaggerated reports, save his job, I’ve been mulling over exactly why he has been under such pressure for his comments on Sharia Law. Even the shallowest examination of him as a man would reveal a hugely intelligent thinker and a [...]

Archbishop Rowan is getting huge amounts of flack for his comments on a selective use of some parts of Sharia law in certain communities in the UK. Typically, his arguments, based on some serious reading, have been caricatured and turned into shock headlines. Which suggests he was perhaps ill-advised – this sort of reaction was [...]

There’s a simple rule to follow if you want to make an ad about a car: make it total fantastical. Don’t mention traffic jams. Don’t mention the boredom of driving along motorways, the taxes and the emissions, the noise or anything else. Instead, make the car like a robot, or a dog. Make it jump [...]

Sorry been a bit quiet here. Kids’ birthdays, other writing projects… stuff. Anyway, a piece on the news caught my ear yesterday. Apparently a long-term study of the hunting habits of peregrine falcons has found that they have evolved their methods and are now increasingly hunting in cities at night. The thinking is that they [...]