Kester Brewin

Tag: Technology

  • Say no to Phorm ¦ Don’t Let Your ISP Stalk You

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    KB

    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…

  • Leaps of Faith | God Immensurable | ‘Life is a series of Estimates’

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    KB

    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…

  • Car Commercials | Fantasy

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    KB

    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 | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [5]

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    KB
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    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 | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [2]

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    KB
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    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?…

  • 2008 will be about…

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    KB
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    …action on climate change; governments will admit it will hurt …reaction against privacy breaches: overuse of CCTV / government data-loss …reaction against the classical liberal agenda: immigration caps / multiculturalism as a worthy but more-difficult-than-we-thought project / communitarianism …serious criticism of democracy as a way of getting things done …the collapse of the emerging church…