Kester Brewin

Just got back from a couple of weeks holiday where I took a proper break from posting. Space to think about other stuff really, and ‘Devon’ and ‘Wireless Network’ are not immediately at home in the same sentence yet. This weekend I’ll be off to Greenbelt, where I’m doing two talks expanding on some of [...]

London is continually fascinating. As humans we are always quick to project personalities onto our creations; London the person is complex, darkly funny, steeped in history, welcoming all but criticising many, intelligent, crafty… a heavy drinker who enjoys the night. ‘London Nights‘ looks like a brilliant series of 10 radio programmes, looking at the city [...]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] | Emerging/Retreating [3] In the comments on the previous post Acetate Monkey asked ‘How did Vaux wind up?’ Resisting the temptation to explain all the ways that Vaux wound people up, I thought I’d post the section of the book that deals a little with that… with another encouragement to [...]

Had a great time at Apple 5 on Wednesday – good crowd of people out to hear Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum talking about The Quantum Cathedral – how the collaborative efforts that went into building the Large Hadron Collider are paralleled only by the immense achievements of the construction of the medieval cathedrals. I’ll be [...]

An excellent article in the New York Times the other day – ‘Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price‘ – which explores the mental and relational cost of screen-addiction, plotting the story of one family who are all, in their own way, too hooked on gadgets: Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects [...]

Just back from a great week on Iona, and very much looking forward to ‘Other‘ being released on Monday. Get your local bookseller to order it and support them if you can. Amazon have already dispatched any pre-ordered copies, and it’d be great if people could make some noise and get the word out there if [...]

I’m off to Iona for a week now, so will not be posting much. While I’m away, have a browse of the utterly fabulous ‘60 Awesome Christian Music Album Covers.‘ My two particular favourites: Have a great week. And don’t forget: ‘Other‘ is released next week, and there’s going to be a free-for-all launch do [...]

Really pleased to announce that we’ve sorted out three new dates for Apple events over the next couple of months. The idea behind Apple is to get people thinking more reflectively about technology – whether that be digital culture or tool-use. Humans are tool-makers, and the technologies we use form us, just as we form [...]

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 [...]

[Cartoon by Dave Walker.] In the last couple of posts I’ve been thinking about what the form of texts add to their meaning, springboarding from a book reviewing experiment in The Believer in which the reviewer was given a novel to read which had been stripped of its cover and all meta-data about the author. [...]