Kester Brewin

Every once in a while something comes along that leaves you with so many questions it’s just impossible to know where to start. The promo video for ‘After The Rapture Pet Care’ is one such thing: (HT the very Darwinian Head of Biology, Mr Simon King ) How does one begin to unpack this? First [...]

I’ve a short piece on Alan Turing in this month’s Third Way. If you don’t already subscribe, you should. One of the key strands of Turing’s thinking was on whether a machine could think like a human. After World War 1, where men had been treated like disposable fighting machines, and World War 2, where [...]

I’ve enjoyed seeing Avatar – most recently at a very late night showing at the BFI Imax cinema. It’s not brilliantly plotted or scripted, but a great spectacle nonetheless. However, I found myself focusing on a problem that 3D cinema has compounded – especially in the immersive environment of Imax. Because the screen is so [...]

This is just amazing. An AS-Level Art project. 2100 pages of flick-book. He got full marks, obviously. In conclusion: life is violent. Always has been. Ouch. HT Martin Wroe.

Thanks for the comments on the post about happiness the other day. I’ve been mulling over the idea of happiness, and why we are perhaps the most unhappy society ever, and linking it to a new direction my thinking seems to be being drawn in. As I’ve written before, I’m really interested in the charred [...]

Interesting video with Bill Nighy talking about the ‘Robin Hood Tax‘ that would see 50p raked off all financial transactions that didn’t include members of the public. This would raise around £200bn globally each year which could be put into projects helping the poor: Obviously raising money to help the poor is a wonderful idea, [...]

Interesting piece in The Times yesterday about the meeting of two of the happiest men in the world. Well, one of them – the monk Matthieu Ricard -  is apparently the happiest (on average, surely – I doubt he’s ever been happier than me when United won the Champions League in the last minute of [...]

Interesting piece of research out today from Pew Internet and The American Life Project which shows that longer forms of online writing are giving way to micro-blogging and status updates: Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for Pew and the lead author of the study, told the Associated Press that the ability to do status updates [...]

Craft: Kraft: Enough said.

Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album. The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the [...]