Kester Brewin

Tag: Science

  • New Poem: The Transit of Venus

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    The Transit of Venus Mute rocks and burning suns fall, unknowing, from their blind orbits into dumb alignment. Through dark glasses we gaze up and wonder in wonder at these far symmetries, projecting onto heaven’s canopy untold desires for order amid the spinning choas. Venus, we call her, is in her transit. In our blindspots…

  • Direct to Kindle: ‘Into Great Science’ available now

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    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…

  • Soul Synaesthesia

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    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…

  • Life after Life ¦ Christianity and Euthanasia ¦ Reverend Death

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    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…

  • Saviour Sibling?

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    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…

  • The World Can’t Wait For You, USA

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    [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…