If the answer is yes…Have I got a site for you!
www.freedocumentaries.org
You can (legally) watch acclaimed, full length documentaries on this site. There are many, many documentaries on this site and I’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of seeing them.
Here are two documentaries that I absolutely loved:
Bowling for Columbine – A Michael Moore film that explores America’s love of guns and violence
Bowling for Columbine is a controversial documentary film written, directed, produced by, and starring Michael Moore. The film opened on October 11, 2002 and brought Moore international attention.The film explores what Moore suggests are the causes for the Columbine High School massacre and other acts of violence with guns. Moore focuses on the background and environment in which the massacre took place, and some common public opinions and assumptions about related issues. The film looks into the nature of violence in the United States, focusing on guns as a symbol of both American freedom and its self-destruction.
In Moore’s discussions with various people, including South Park co-creator Matt Stone, the National Rifle Association’s then-president Charlton Heston, and musician Marilyn Manson, he seeks to explain why the Columbine massacre occurred and why the United States has a higher number of violent crimes, especially crimes involving guns and charges that the occurrence of violent crimes in the U.S. is relatively higher than other developed nations.
[text taken from here]
Link to page where you can watch the whole film
Inside Iran by Rageh Omar – BBC News
Rageh Omaar embarks on a unique journey inside what he describes as one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, looking at the country through the eyes of people rarely heard – ordinary Iranians.
It took a year of wrangling to get permission to film inside Iran but the result is an amazing portrayal of an energetic and vibrant country that is completely different to the usual images seen in the media.
[text taken from here]
Link to the page where you can watch the film
This is a story of how the impossible became possible. How, for centuries, scientists were absolutely sure that solids (as well as decorative patterns like tiling and quilts) could only have certain symmetries – such as square, hexagonal and triangular – and that most symmetries, including five-fold symmetry in the plane and icosahedral symmetry in three dimensions (the symmetry of a soccer ball), were strictly forbidden. Then, about twenty years ago, a new kind of pattern, known as a “quasicrystal,” was envisaged that shatters the symmetry restrictions and allows for an infinite number of new patterns and structures that had never been seen before, suggesting a whole new class of materials. By chance, solids with five-fold symmetry were discovered in the laboratory at about the same time. Even so, for nearly twenty years, many scientists continued to believe true quasicrystals were impossible because, they argued, such a pattern could only be formed with complex and physically unrealistic inter-atomic forces.
Impossible Crystals is an abstract but ultimately satisfying video lecture by Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Princeton University. The presentation is targeted at the layman but realistically, some background in solid state physics/symmetry is necessary to appreciate what Steinhardt is saying. You don’t need a high speed internet connection: you can simply download the PDF and listen to the MP3 of the presentation. There are many other public lectures available for download at Perimeter (see link that follows).
Link to the presentation (look for Impossible Crystals)
Wikipedia entry for Quasicrystal
Wikipedia entry for Aperiodic Tiling
Another teaser image
You may know about del.ici.ous the social bookmarking site that allows you bookmark, tag and share your favorite sites.
Along the same lines there is CiteULike. Conceptually its like del.ici.ous but its much more than that. CiteUlike is targeted at the research community. Citeulike allows you to:
- Simply specify the URL of a research paper (on Science, Nature, PRL etc.). CiteULike will automatically pick up the details like abstract, authors, DOI link etc.
- Tag your papers so you can search for them later
- Upload your papers so you can build a online repository of your favorite scientific papers
- Become members of user groups with similar research interests as yours and share papers with them. This way you will never miss out on any important papers
- Other cool features like rating a paper on how important it is to you. You can prioritize your reading time by using this feature.
CiteULike is an amazing tool and I use it to organize all the research papers I’m interested in.
Interested? Here is the FAQ for CiteULike.
I’m very excited to talk about an open source mathematics system: SAGE.
SAGE aims to be an open source replacement for MATLAB/Mathematica/Maple. Whats amazing about Sage is the great functionality it gets by working nicely with already available open source math software (Maxima, Numpy etc). Its cute slogan “Building the car instead of reinventing the wheel” summarizes its software reuse philosophy. Because SAGE incorporates many different software projects, its quite complete (though it may never be as consistent or clean like a Mathematica or MATLAB). SAGE uses Python which possibly makes it the only computer algebra system that uses a mainstream computer programming language. The use of Python gives SAGE tremendous flexibility and power.
One of SAGE’s most amazing features…which is actually the main point of the blog…is that you can use it online!! This is really cool because you can do this from a browser anywhere on the Internet. In the future, if you are stuck on a computer which does not have MATLAB/Mathematica, despair not for you can use SAGE.
The SAGE online interpreter is available here. The style of SAGE is a bit like Mathematica. You enter an expression into Notebooks and type Shift+Enter to evaluate it. You can do all kinds of nifty things like collaborate with others and publish your notebook on the web.
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Nice introductory video on SAGE. Guaranteed to get you all excited…
SAGE according to Wikipedia
Another screenshot
SAGE Logo
Technologies in SAGE
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Reform in India is still not dead
[Click on image for a larger version]
The “Reform and End the Forms” images made by me are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Today, Maharastra (India’s richest state) repealed an archaic land law, the Urban Land Ceiling Act (ULCRA), 1976. ULCRA was enacted to decrease the concentration of land holdings in cities. If you owned more than the “permissible” amount of urban land in Maharastra, it could be forcibly taken away from you and redistributed to the “needy.” Compensation for your land was a pittance.
The ostensible purpose of ULCRA was to provide low cost housing in cities. But as we all know, these socialist legislations can have very perverse effects. Instead of an urban socialist utopia where the government was going to build low cost housing with hospitals, roads and other urban amenities we have slums and virtual garbage dumps around our cities. Instead of decreasing land prices we have the third highest land prices in the world in Mumbai. The reasons are simple:
(1) As the government tried to forcibly overtake land in the city, thousands of landlords filed cases in the courts. We all know the speed of the Indian Judicial system. Land that could have been privately developed got locked up in court battles. One could argue that that the fault lies in the Indian Judicial system and if the cases were resolved faster this would not have happened. I have two counterpoints to that:
(2) A whole new bureaucracy sprang up that put its dirty hands in every land deal. Clearances of all kinds were required and “exemptions” an “No objection certificates” (NOC) needed. These bureaucrats essentially became, in the language of economics, rent-seekers.
(3) Land that was successfully acquired under the act was hardly developed because of the general lethargy of government departments. The quality of urban governance is so abysmal in India that one can not even be sure that deserving recipients would get housing in these acquired lands. Many of these lands fell in a legal limbo or were encroached upon by squatters or politicians.
Until a few years ago, almost all Indian states had UCLRA in place. One by one they have repealed it. Today Maharashtra, AP and West Bengal are the three major states where UCLRA is still operative. Andhra Pradesh is a very progressive state and I believe it will be ultimately repealed there too.
Bengal is the only major state where the politicians are ideologically committed to the objectives of the law. And its no surprise because these rent control and land ceiling laws are showcase legislations for the left parties in India. I hope West Bengal climbs down from its fundamentalist viewpoint and repeals these anti-development and corruption inducing legislations. Calcutta and Mumbai, our most majestic cities have become shantytowns partly because of these cancerous laws.
To the left parties who support these laws I would request them to see the real ground level effects of these laws. Lets recognize human nature and motivation and then frame laws. Communism failed because it was a fundamentally flawed ideology. Many people say that communism failed because it was not “implemented properly” or failed due to a western conspiracy. My view is that it failed because it could not be implemented properly. Any system that denied humans fundamental freedoms like the freedom to trade, to choose a profession, to choose how to live, to choose beliefs and concentrated control in an unelected, all powerful bureaucracy was doomed to failure.
“What does it matter if the cat is black or white as long as it kills rats?” is a very famous quote by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Our leftist leaders must realize this and repeal all legislations that have failed in the past decades. Most often these leftist “leaders” have some vested interests (a union to run, a government department to lord over, bribes to collect) so they hold back these reform moves. Whatever the reasons for holding back reform, whether ideology or vested interest, Indian citizens should put pressure on our elected representatives to overturn these archaic legislations that are holding our country back.