Kester Brewin

Amazon now allow anyone to publish to their store using ‘Kindle Direct Publishing‘ so I’ve uploaded a short story called ‘Into Great Science’ which I wrote last year. “Fumbling, floating, he found the hammer, and headed for the window…” In lean times NASA has gone into partnership with the Catholic Church, launching a ‘Voyager’-style probe [...]

This month’s Believer documents a strange case from Hungary of audio-kinetic synaesthesia. The subject, whenever he hears certain words, ‘sees’ them as discrete and definite actions or gestures. Colour synaesthesia is more common: sounds or numbers are seen as distinct colours, and some estimates reckon that around 1 in 23 experience it. And I just [...]

I finally got round to watching ‘Reverend Death’, Jon Ronson’s documentary about George Exoo, a Unitarian minister who has performed around 100 ‘assisted suicides’, mainly for those who have been turned down by other organisations practising legally in places/states where it is carefully controlled because they do not have terminal illnesses. Most of the people [...]

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning – a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called ‘saviour siblings’: human beings created for the [...]

[Update: following extraordinary scenes where the US contingent were booed by the rest of the delegates when it was announced they would reject the compromised plan, they performed a dramatic U-turn and have agreed to adopt the 'road-map' (wouldn't 'path way' be greener?!). A huge relief. Now we just need some non-automobile metaphors :-] Gore [...]

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, [...]

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn’t find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people’s houses, had a great time dipping into some books. The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics*. It’s an eccentric volume itself, but [...]

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It’s stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded – in a way Gore never quite [...]

Out of the same stable as The Believer, Wholphin is a short-story mag for short films. They mailed me today about a great-looking film, showing on IFC this Monday at 9pm EDT. (I’d love someone to record it for me The spiel goes: Back in 2000, western pharmaceutical companies began a massive marketing campaign to [...]

It’s obviously rich of me talking about this, flying as I am to LA on Monday, but it’s an often over-looked fact that the net runs on servers, and servers draw power. Nic mentioned the other day that a simple calculation of the server power-draw for Second Life, divided by the average number of users [...]