Kester Brewin

[ Lock In [1] ]
In the previous post I raised the idea of technological developments giving rise to ‘lock in.’ Gadgets do not evolve in the organic sense ‘free’ that we might imagine: because of protocols and standardisation (think USB / railway gauges / HTML / Lego) their evolution is guided along particular lines. Other [...]

One of my favourite podcasts is Material World – a science review from the BBC. In a recent episode, Jaron Lanier discussed his recently published manifesto: You Are Not A Gadget. I’ve ordered it, but not read it yet, but was very much taken by one line of thought he introduced in the interview – [...]

Alongside the piece on Alan Turing, I also have another short article in Third Way this month as part of their ‘icon of the month’ series. Following the much-feted launch of the iPad, it’s about Apple.
Apple are an increasingly intriguing company. They are a huge multinational – bigger than Sony or Samsung – yet constantly [...]

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? [...]

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 millions [...]

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 remains [...]

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 [...]

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 had [...]

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 Moon’ [...]

[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.
I’ve also [...]