This episode, entitled Are We Alone?, is the fourth part of the BBC documentary series Space, narrated by Sam Neill. If you missed the previous episodes, you can find them in the following links: first (Star Stuff), second (Staying Alive) and third (Black Holes). Once again, the graphics and the visual quality are excellent.

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I purposely try to steer clear of political issues on this blog, but there are times when there’s so much absurdity in some political scandals that you just can’t fight it, and who better than Jon Stewart to put this whole Cheney secrecy bull into perspective and show him for the douche bag that he is?

The video below is hilarious. Imagine being the number Zero; how much would that suck?

This is the first part (of three) of the classic documentary The Elegant Universe, hosted by Brian Greene and based on his book, also entitled The Elegant Universe. I was first introduced to this book and series a few years ago when I took an awesome course in college with the ominous title “Metaphysical Necessity and the Final Laws of Physics”; if that name is not both intimidating and enticing, I don’t know what is…

This first episode sets up the stage: it explains the history of the quest for unification, starting with Newton’s theory of gravity, and moves to the limits of science, where each attempt made at unification has hitherto broken down, whether this be based on Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, Einstein’s gravitational theory of relativity or Neils Bohr’s quantum mechanics.

Although Greene himself is a bit cheesy at times (you can’t fault the guy, though… he’s a physicist), he does a great job of explaining the intellectual history and the intellectual problems posed by each attempt at unification, explaining also how these difficulties can be resolved by different ways of testing (except for string theory, for good reason).

Finally, some important authorities in the scientific field are interviewed, such as Edward Witten, Sheldon Lee Glashow, James Gates, Jr., and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg. As the first episode winds down, the question of whether string theory (which in some instances seems to be untestable, even in principle) can be considered science or metaphysics is raised…

For those of you who got tattoos when you were cool, young, sexy, skinny and rebellious, here is the solution to that inevitable sagging problem that eventually haunts you when you lose the coolness, sexiness, rebelliousness and so on…

Some people may think this speech, in which V introduces himself to Eve, is exaggerated, presumptuous, overtly verbose, whatever… but I just love it, and the movie kicks ass too…

This is for whenever you need a smile clear across your face… See if you can guess what’s going to happen with this little hamster before watching the video and leave a comment with your guess (which you can do after you watch it). I’ll rely on your honesty to see what kind of interesting guesses people come up with.

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This is the first installment of a cool three-part documentary about life in the South Pole, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Yep, many goodies here: whales, king penguins, seals, albatrosses, krill… oh, and tons of ice and cold!!!

(Don’t mind the “video processing” sign below… it does work right away)

In this presentation, philosopher Daniel Dennett takes issue with some of the ideas presented by Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. Warren talks about how great God is, how faith is a good thing, blah blah blah… (you can watch his presentation by placing your mouse over this bubble for a second or two).

It strikes me as interesting that Warren is so concerned with how others perceive him, whether the others be God or other people. Why he gets his sense of self-worth from the outside I don’t quite get: why should your life be meaningful only if someone else thinks it’s meaningful? Sounds like a case of co-dependence and lack of self-respect, but that’s just me.

Anyway, Dennett is candid about the things he appreciates about the book, but explains how religion, rather than having some kind of transcendent origin, is itself a product of evolutionary processes like natural and artificial selection, with constant pressure to be designed and redesigned, and has a biological basis just like the evolution of any anatomical feature.

In attempting to be consistent with the principles of a democratic society, Dennett proposes that every child in public and private school ought to be educated about the facts of all the major world religions, even if they are eventually indoctrinated in the particular religion of their parents. This, he believes, is maximum tolerance for religious freedom and should not be seen as a threat to any one religion. Dennett makes the nice argument that democracy depends on an informed citizenship, and that teaching people about other religions and allowing them to make their own choice concerning what religion to follow, if any, is a way of treating people with dignity and respect as responsible adults.

He also makes the interesting case that religion can be thought of as a memetic parasite that gets into its host and makes it/him/her do certain things that might not be in the individual’s self-interest, but which would be in the interest of the parasite (like drive airplanes into buildings, for instance). In other words, rather than argue that there is some sort of benefit people get from belonging to a group glued together by a shared set of religious beliefs, Dennett thinks that religion is a cultural unit of selection (a meme) whose structure allows it to successfully spread itself horizontally and vertically throughout a population. You can see an instance of this type of phenomenon (a gordian worm chemically brainwashing a cricket into jumping into water and killing itself so that the worm can find a mate) in this bubble.

Finally, Dennett argues that faith discourages people from pursuing scientific understanding, that it makes them complacent rather than active, and that the problems of the world require action rather than contemplation… and this is coming from a philosopher!

Here is the full-length latest documentary by Michael Moore: Sicko. This documentary is not about the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, it’s about the 250 million Americans who do have health insurance and have little to nothing to show for it. Moore travels around to other industrialized and not-so-industrialized countries and explores the differences between their health systems and ours, and how they beat us hands down…