What Books, Movies, Music, Documentaries Best Represent Our Philosophy at ConCen?

[Frank2]

I was recommended the tv show dexter and got hooked into it.

After watching an interview with Michael C Hall, the actor in the lead role of "Dexter", where he said the greatest help to understand the character was reading the book..

MINDHUNTER

Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

by John Douglas

I went and bought the book

It is definitely worth reading if you are interested in listening to the story of an expert in psychological profiling hunting psychopathic killers.

It is pretty good but very dark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Douglas

[Watchdog]

"What Books, Movies, Music, Documentaries Best Represent Our Philosophy at ConCen?"

"Our Philosophy" makes the choice difficult, because who is "our"?

I guess I'll go for "our", being a mix of very different points of views, including the good, bad, ugly, preacher, troll, disinfor agents, tools, and so on...

So, what would best represent this lot of people?

Hmmmmm...

I would have to go with BOB on this one!!!

[Frank2]

WTF Watchgod? It isnt our fault Andre nosedived outlaw journalism, is it? A nazi started this site too but he wasn't such a dick as to crash it for everyone..guess some nazis are just better than others :\ At what point did you say to yourself that "our" also represented you now? and you have complaint already?? welcome to concen, glad you made it..

Maybe take it as a - what book or film you watching that's good at moment? thread, nowadays? Hope that's okay bro

You should check that book out, btw, if you don't know it. It's deep. NP YVW

[Frank2]

I'm am watching the documentary series "Wonders of Life" presented by Dr. Brian Cox, it is fascinating and well made. Here is a review of it:


The wonders of life are more than molecular

Brian Cox's Wonders of Life is a beautiful fusion of physics and biology, even if the molecular intricacies have to be glossed over

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A lion's eye showing a graphic of a peptide from the protein crystallin Seeing fragments only — the chemical structure of the peptide is not the whole story

There is much to love about the Wonders of Life, Professor Brian Cox's latest, lingering gaze at the world around him. Having considered both the universe and the solar system, he has narrowed his focus to our home planet, Earth, and the organisms that dwell there.

That is not to say that Wonders is simply a program about wildlife. Although David Attenborough says he would readily hand television's natural history baton to Cox, the viewer should be in no doubt that Wonders is a very different project. Looking beyond the habits and habitats of the planet's living creatures, it is a bold attempt to fuse physics with biology. For my money, Wonders is in many ways quite wonderful.

In part that is because the program's scientific mix reflects my own journey from a degree in physics to a research career in the life sciences. It is a commonplace among scientists that the disciplinary boundaries taught at school and university often melt away in the push for new knowledge. 'Whatever works', is the pragmatic mantra of the most imaginative scientists I know, who, through self-learning or collaboration, will turn to any technique that might illuminate the darker comers of their understanding with new ideas.

As Wonders of Life shows, what works in science can also pay dividends on television. The first three episodes have brought a new perspective to the story of the natural world, showing how physics and, to a lesser degree, chemistry, lie beneath the living world that biologists have been studying for centuries. We have seen how energy, in the beginning from thermal vents under the sea but now largely supplied by photosynthesis, is captured in proton gradients that are used to power the life of the cell; how the sights and sounds and smells of the world are transduced into chemical and electrical signals that are processed to extract information about position, shape, colour and motion, so that the hunter might eat rather than be eaten; how the balance between persistence and variation in DNA has permitted the adaptation of endless forms of life on Earth.

The format is less showy than Cox's earlier series; there is less grandstanding on mountain tops and more traipsing though the countryside. The series might still rove across the planet but each episode so far has stuck to one particular locale. Cox, a bag slung over his shoulder, looks more like a hitch-hiker than a jet-setting presenter. It is a televisual trick of course but works well. The tone seems more conversational than I remember from previous outings.

The casualness of Wonders is re-enforced by one of the shows more successful innovations: the jury-rigging of experiments on location. We see Cox isolating his own DNA in a roadside bar, or on a beach watching the colour change in a tube of rhodopsin as it is exposed to the rays of the afternoon sun, or — my favourite — cobbling together a cloud chamber on a hillside to reveal our constant bombardment by cosmic rays, one of the sources of mutation and variation in DNA. I can't quite put my finger on the appeal of this approach. Perhaps it is the sense that the close integration of experiment and nature makes the science seem less foreboding. Perhaps it is the way these demonstrations help to reveal the wonders of life that occur beneath our sight.

I can't be sure, because Wonders of Life was not made for the likes of me — a working scientist. But while I applaud Cox for peeling back the surface of nature to consider the underlying complexity and physical principles, something has been niggling at me. Where are the molecules?

There is plenty of mention of the atomic and molecular composition of living things. The iconic, twisting ladder of DNA makes a couple of brief appearances but talk of proteins is accompanied only by graphics showing the chemical structure of short chains of the amino acids from which they are made. The graphics reveal the critical dependence on carbon — an important link to our stellar origins — but give no idea of the intricacies of the form or functions of the protein molecules on which life is so reliant.
FoF1 ATP synthase - the giant molecular machine that produces the chemical energy of the cell FoF1-ATP synthase — the molecular machine that converts proton gradients into chemical fuel for living cells. Try the movie.

For all the talk of proton gradients in episode one there was not a single glimpse of the FoF1-ATP synthase, a magnificent assembly of proteins that serves as a power station to harnesses the flow of protons down those gradients to make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the near-universal chemical currency of the cell. The architecture of Nature's nanomachine was revealed in Nobel-prize-winning work led by John Walker, but this molecular wonder of life remains hidden from the viewers of BBC2.

Cox is not shy of a bit of complexity — "I want to confuse people a little so that they go away and read a book" he told the Daily Telegraph — so my guess is the omission of molecular visuals was a deliberate editorial decision. But I am curious to know the reasoning.

Of course a show that runs for an hour on a Sunday night cannot hope to show everything, but are atoms and molecules such a hard sell? I am beginning to think they might be. They are too far outside our everyday experience to feel credible. The tracks in Cox's makeshift cloud chamber provide unimpeachable evidence that the world is being pelted with sub-atomic particles but as soon as you look away, they disappear from your mind. It is the same with molecules. The visible world soon floods our vision, snuffing out the microscopic layers of reality.

Is it also that there is also something alien about molecules? I wondered this as I watched Secret universe: Hidden life of the cell a few months ago, a well-made documentary on the molecular processes that occur within a cell while it is under attack from viruses. As a structural biologist who has spent the last twenty-five years investigating the structures of protein molecules involved in virus infection, it ought to have been my ultimate cup of tea. But although the computer animation was state-of-the-art and pretty well grounded in science (I winced only a couple of times), the program as a whole seemed rather soulless.

I'm not even sure what I mean by that. It's hardly a scientific term. Despite having immersed myself in molecules for all of my professional life, seeing the secret life of the cell was somewhat disconcerting. I am not about to join the ranks of the vitalists but couldn't quite escape the thought: jiggling molecules, is that it?

The answer to that question is yes, of course; evolution points in no other direction. But it is not quite that simple: no is also an allowable response. The story of life is about so much more than atoms and molecules, though it is hard to make good films with just these components. Much as it is intriguing to observe the interactions between atoms and molecules — I am not about to forsake my day job — I recognise that the beating heart of their real story is how they work together, governed by the laws of physics, to produce living things. And I guess that is why we mostly see Cox among the lions, leopards, crabs and sharks — in these forms the animation of molecules is most wondrous and appealing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/occams-corner

[Frank2]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqJxOWzr8...sults_main

VIDEO PLAYLIST FOR ABOVE POST, cheers

[farley12]

The film network should sum it up nicely. Mad as hell, not going to take it anymore.

[crystal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEI9qBdVt5I

not sure this is in right place, but looks promising low budget apacalyptic movie. Just want to share.

[FastTadpole]

Despite the low IMDB score this really struck a chord with me, not to be taken literally but it hits it out of the park via its abstract metaphorical points

Branded (2012)
Set in a dystopian future where corporate brands have created a disillusioned population, one man's effort to unlock the truth behind the conspiracy will lead to an epic battle with hidden forces that control the world.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1368440/