Saturday, November 3, 2007

Crazy Rulers of the World - Funny Torture



Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence. With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Jon Ronson examines the extraordinary - and plain bizarre - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's war on terror.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Dangerous Knowledge - Full Documentary





In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan. Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Godel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Why Darwin put forward the theory of evolution?






The twentieth century was one of the darkest and most deadly in all of human history. Vast amounts of blood were spilled and people subjected to the most terrible fear and oppression. Not generally realized, however, is the nature of the ideological foundation that propelled the 20th century towards such disruption, chaos, war and conflict, and gave rise to such hatred and enmity. The groundwork of this ideological foundation was laid by the British economist Thomas Malthus. This twisted concept, widely accepted by people far removed from religious moral values, was further strengthened by another Briton, the sociologist Herbert Spencer, and disseminated by the theory of evolution put forward by yet another Englishman, Charles Darwin.

Monday, October 29, 2007

BBC Time series part 4: Cosmic Time




We've always structured our lives based on an unchanging past and a predictable and ordered future. But atomic and cosmic discoveries have changed all that. What is time itself? And will it ever end?

Sunday, October 28, 2007

BBC Horizon The Death Star




Out in deepest space lurks a force of almost unimaginable power. Explosions of extraordinary violence, are blasting through the Universe every day. If one ever struck our Solar System it would destroy our Sun and all the planets.



For years no one could work out what was causing these awesome explosions. Now scientists think they have identified the culprit. It's the most extreme object ever found in the Universe; they have christened it a 'hypernova'.