Free Documentaries

Documentary-Film.net is a network that distributes documentaries for free. Most of them seem to be professional looking, that isn't to say the information is accurate or impartial in all of them, there is a good selection.

StarCraft: World Cyber Games 2005 (National Geographic documentary)

I missed this when it was first aired, but it is a very good documentary on the Korean StarCraft scene.

The Cove

A while ago I did a post called People Don't Need (Disturbing, NSFW) where I liked to some animal cruelty videos. The Dolphin ma secure video to this date is still the most disturbing that I have seen. Now there is documentary being shown at festivals on the matter. I am looking forward to seeing it even with the subject matter being so disturbing.


[ Official Site ]

Why A Good Specification Is Important

The US Militery hired a few companies to help them complete the invasion of Iraq. To do this they setup service agreements with those companies so the Military became a paying customer to those companies, but it looks like they forgot to agree any levels of quality. The US Militery wanted warter, they got warter, but it wasn't safe to drink. Let this be a lessen to you if you ever setup a SLA (Service Level Agreement) with anybody because unless you specify what quality standard you need the work doing too, it won't be done to any quality standard.

And on the video they mention Cost-Plus, which is effectively the government telling the contractor to just bill them whatever the cost is. This is common is situations where price comparison or price negotiation isn't worth doing, but silly things happen when you give someone your credit card and tell them to buy whatever they want.

BBC's Battle of the Brains

In kind of a follow on post from my last one, the BBC showed a documentary last Tuesday called Battle of the Brains which is a documentary about how we measure intelligence. It is very interesting and I suggest you watch it fullscreen through This Link.



I thought it was funny how the Academics dismissed the idea of multiple intelligences without explanatory reasoning. But anyway it seems obvious to me that measuring intelligence on a single linear scale is silly as it ignores the distinction between natural ability and learned intelligence.

Opportunistic Documentaries

There seems to be somekind of growing trend amongst new documentary makers to not research their facts and when presented with facts, reinterpret them to fit their sensationalist viewpoint.

The first one of these I seen was Loose Change (you can watch it from this page) which does the whole Bush ordered the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York thing. Certainly if you are someone that believes Georg Orwell's 1984 vision of the future will come true, then you will find complementing viewpoints in this documentary.

The truth of 9/11 is that terrorists hijacked some planes and in acts of Jihad gave their lives to their hatred of America and possibly the west in general. If they hadn't done that America probably wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq and Bush probably probably wouldn't have been re-elected.

The second false sensationalist documentary that I knowingly seen was in February this year on Channel 4. It was called called The Global Warming Swindle which states that global warming is a natural phenomena and that Humans are not effecting the earth's climate in any significant way.

The Independent and then The Times where the first to call this one BS and I am now wondering why Channel 4 allowed it to be shown as charts in the documentary have been altered and people have been misquoted (film enough footage of someone speaking and you can do that). The truth is that the earth is getting much warmer and we are causing it. This can be reversed by using low energy compact florescent lightbulbs, by ridding ourselves of our dependency on oil and not protesting politicians that are doing the right thing. Until then the climate is just going to keep getting worse, probably won't mean the end of humanity, but enough people will suffer before it is over to warrant immediate action.

On a side note, nobody ever talks about the success of the Montreal Protocol which was the international effort to save the Ozone Layer. Now Ozone Layer should be repairing itself over time (the first detectable signs will possibly be in 2024), but the replacement gasses we now use instead of CFCs are still greenhouse gasses and so contribute to our current crisis, global warming.