Kester Brewin

Two pieces followed one-another on the radio this morning: MPs voted last night to remove the clause that required IVF clinics to consider the need for a child to have a father and a mother – essentially opening the way for women to have the treatment without any father-figure being present in the prospective child’s [...]

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 [...]

At a recent education conference I was at, one of the big-wigs at Intel gave a keynote about the future of technology and education. He talked about Moore’s law, and some of the probable developments in educational tools, and also about the effect connectivity is having / will have on our lives. Holding up his [...]

Not content with starting a whole new business model for selling music, Radiohead have also now worked to subvert the remix business by making the stems of one of their tracks, Naked, available here. Nice touch. Release the DNA, see what evolves. See what people have grown, and vote, here. Technorati: Naked

Oh dear. The inevitable has happened: someone’s come up with a way for us to use our mobiles when on the plane. “I’M ON THE PLANE” Next up: ‘mobile free areas’ on planes, and stickers telling people to keep their voices down. I think it’s sad, to be honest. Planes were one of those places [...]

A piece on the BBC news caught my ear yesterday. To the disgust of Tim Berners-Lee British Telecom, Virgin and my ISP Talk Talk have all said that they are going to start using Phorm in the near future. Phorm tracks your internet use, and harvests data to create a profile which these companies will [...]

Friday 29th February. Another leap year, another ‘correction’ in our faulty estimate of 365 days in a year. We thought perhaps the Universe should have given us tidy integers, orbits that ran to exact days, but the closer we looked, the further away our measures got. The 4-yearly leap day is an attempt to get [...]

There’s a simple rule to follow if you want to make an ad about a car: make it total fantastical. Don’t mention traffic jams. Don’t mention the boredom of driving along motorways, the taxes and the emissions, the noise or anything else. Instead, make the car like a robot, or a dog. Make it jump [...]

Power Religion [1] | Power Religion [2] | Power Religion [3] | Power Religion [4] So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will [...]

Power Religion [1] You might be wondering what the hell the last post was about, and where I’m going with this. Join the club. In the previous post, I outlined Diamond’s basic thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, and retold the story of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa. But what is the significance? [...]