Kester Brewin

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too. I don’t want to talk much about the [...]

Brilliant weekend away over the Bank Holiday, with loads of surfing, go-karting and some great evening conversations with a bright and challenging bunch of friends. One of the most interesting areas we talked about was around privacy in future technologies, and, when I outlined my major concerns about Google Glass-type devices I was quite surprised [...]

Tech writer Paul Miller’s contentious experiment to log-off from internet devices for a whole year is coming to an end in two weeks (HT Maggi Dawn for the story, which she flagged on facebook this morning), and in a very frank and illuminating article (sent in by post, no doubt – he has had no [...]

‘History’ Living life online constantly searching and browsing and yes, having been so long an Internet Explorer, I now find myself occasionally crashing and stalling pressing back, lamenting that life isn’t Chrome smooth or one nice long Safari, thinking I could make all things well if I could click back through life munching cookies selectively [...]

Interesting piece here exploring the fact that today ‘Please Please Me’ – the hit that really made the band famous – has gone into the public domain, as its 50 year copyright period has expired. The article takes the view that this is a tragedy, one that leaves The Beatles’ music open to exploitation. Anything [...]

  Some complex ideas in this post, but I think rich rewards if you’re willing to persevere… Catching up on some old episodes of Radiolab (a brilliant podcast, if you’re not already on it) I came across the above section in the programme about loops. In it, the presenters discuss the idea of statements that [...]

Dimmer All this time spent on small swipes and hand gestures miniscule thumb movements small digits knitting together such thin threads in hope of warm touch. A life, dim lit in cars, alone and on trains with blue teeth chattering into the elsewhere, wondering, in the small part of somewhere how friendship became…this. (c) KB [...]

Interesting story (thanks @KevinThow for the link) about Julia Schramm – a leading member of the German Pirate Party, who signed a very lucrative book deal for her book ‘Click Me‘ – more than $130k – and then proceeded to go after the very pirates who she lauds in her work. One of the key [...]

In what could amount to one of the most significant announcements regarding education in England (and perhaps Wales) in many years, yesterday Michael Gove set out his vision for the English Baccalaureate. I’ve got a number of concerns about this, including the huge expense that this is going to incur, much of which will fall [...]

Tweeted about this piece earlier today, but wanted to flag up and reflect further on Henry Marsh’s piece in Granta, detailing his neurosurgical work operating on a tumour in a pineal gland. The pineal gland is buried deep within the brain, and is thus only reached after a perilous journey through the physical matter that [...]