I am hoooooooked to this TV series called Penn & Teller: Bullshit! It ain't a new show and is currently past its fourth season but I only came across it a few weeks ago and I absolutely love the show.

Penn & Teller are famous magicians. I've loved their weird magic acts ever since magic became my hobby long time ago. They've brought their weird, eccentric touch to the TV world with a show that applies critical thinking to various misconceptions. Their objective is to debunk the various myths we hold individually, socially and even globally. In each show they investigate the selected topic and present alternative, more reasonable, logical and more scientific explanations and attempt to demonstrate how people are just err bullshitting with certain things. They've tackled a variety of interesting topics so far: global warming, the bible, drugs, cryogenics, creationism, circumcision, ESP, alien abduction etc...

The show isn't on any of the TV channels other than the American channel Sho but the DVDs are out and as usual, the episodes are floating around the net. It's a highly entertaining and informative show. I recommend watching it!

Check out these wicked episodes found on Google Video:
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit! War on Drugs
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Circumcision
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit! End of the World
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Environmental Hysteria

I've been feeding my curiosity in Quantum Computation with works from the great pioneer in the field - Prof. David Deutsch. It is not that I like computers but because that the ideas behind quantum computation are so fundamentally profound and far-reaching that I just can't not keep an eye on it! Read up David Deutsch's paper Physics, Philosophy and Quantum Computation for a synopsis of the promises of quantum computation and the implications of quantum constructor theory. There are a couple of other interesting papers available on his site.

If you are all-excited and orgasmic about it and can't wait to bite your teeth into it then check out the "Introduction to Quantum Computation" lectures by David Deutsch. As the page says, you should be able to follow it easily if you understand what a vector space is and what eigenvalues of a matrix are.

Fancy listening to a bunch of scientists and philosophers discourse on science and religion? Check out the video recordings of the Beyond Belief 2006 gathering where some of the top scientists in cognition, behavioral/social sciences, biology etc talked about varying aspects of religion and God. They highlight on some of the (ir)rational thoughts that lead to people believing in all sorts of weird things and several express concerns over the current state of the world - where religion inspired disparity, intolerance and delusional superiority of self is creating discord and destruction on an alarming scale.

The videos are downloadable from their site while smaller clips are on YouTube. I found this particular chunk pretty amusing - check it out!

PS: If you are offended by these sort of discussions then better shoo off to feed that rampant voyeuristic urges along with the Celestial Teapot in hand...

Time travel is one of those sci-fi fantasies that had fascinated me since I was a very young kid. I reckon most people are fascinated by the idea as well but reject it as being impossible or utterly crazy. However, I for one, have always kept a hold on to the idea that time travel may indeed be possible sooner than never...

I found the link on Digg today to a documentary by the BBC titled "The World's First Time Machine". It follows research by Prof. Ronald Mallet on his quest to build the world's first working time machine - to attempt and succeed at the feat. He thinks that building and testing this machine would pave the way for solutions and answers to the puzzles and complexities involving time travel, including exploring the practical truths of the Grandfather Paradox.

- View the video at Google Video
- Download the video in AVI format

Prof. Mallet's paper "Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser" is a good read on the principles by which his time machine operates and the theory that goes with it.

I have no idea as to the validity of his claims but I would eagerly watch this quest for time travel. Let us hope there comes a message from the future when the machine is turned on, an event which is suggested in the documentary as being possible!

Enjoy.