Religulous Film Review

Religion is very complicated. There are a lot of connections between the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Isam), both historical and geographical and Bill Maher’s Religulous looks into some of these issues.

In this documentary, Maher goes around the world, visiting various places in Europe, America and the Middle East (He doesn’t touch on Asia or Africa). Maher is known for his angry/cynical comedy, but in this movie, he is in search of answers, usually “why?”.

Going into this film, I was concerned that he would be spending the entire movie making fun most aspects of religion. I was glad to be wrong in the end though, this film was HILARIOUS. The only people that Maher makes fun of throughout the film are people who genuinely seemed deserving of being made fun of, but I think that only ended up being 2-4 specific people, he did make fun of aspects of different religions though (ex: Mormonism’s magical underwear). He spends most of the film though going around to different groups of people of a variety of faiths, asking them questions about what he feels is the absurdity of the underpinnings of their faith.

I think the most important aspect of this film is that Maher points out that 16% of the American public tells pollsters that they are athiests/agnostic/non-religious, making them an extremely large minority that is vastly underrepresented in politics and public life today. Being a member of this group myself, I didn’t realize just how large a group this is in the USA.

He doesn’t make too many friends during this journey and if you’re a religious person, you might not enjoy it when he starts poking holes in your beliefs, but I enjoyed this film, especially his interviews of the Vatican Astronomer and Vatican Priest (which I was not expecting in the slightest). I felt that these two people had the most answers to give Maher and were his intelectual equal, if not superior. If I could re-edit this film, I would have downplayed things like the Truck Stop Church and the Amsterdam pot smoking believer and added in more from the two Vatican interviews.

Thanks to Meet in the Lobby for the above pic.

Dany

Sky from Horizon to Horizon

Check out the high quality version of this extreme panorama of the sky taken from horizon to horizon, the view is amazing.

Thanks to APOD for the above pic.

Dany

The Future of Money: Is QUID Quap?

Now that we have completely solved world hunger, achieved world peace and are all healthy, wealthy and wise, UK researchers at the University of Leicester have moved on to much more pressing issues: space spending! More info can be found here.

Even though Virgin Galactic isn’t going to be sending up any commercial space flights until at least 2009, ever since John Glenn orbited the Earth over 45 years ago, he (as well as every astronaut since) has complained about not being able to shop at the Space Mall because of flaws with our current currency in space, all those pesky space vendors just won’t accept our money! Space BASTARDS!!! How dare they leave us in the cold like that.

Well, those researchers have created an innovative solution: SPACE MONEY! They wouldn’t dare be so bold as to call it that though, they decided on Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination or QUID.

Didn’t you wish your money looked more like a candy colored yo-yo? It’s perfect, create a currency that consists of gigantic discs that are solid and are unfoldable!

I bet you’re asking how much this new money will cost you… well, it can all be your at the low low price of £6.25, 12.5 dollars or 8.68 Euros, who wouldn’t want to pass that up?

Thanks to Geekologie for their story as well as Engadget for their post.

Dany

Free HD Content Via Podcast

If you are looking for more high def content, especially of the free variety, check out HubbleCast HD. This is a joint venture between NASA and ESA, which shows some of the most cutting edge astronomical findings in beautifully presented HD. Mind you, you WILL need oodles of hard drive space to satisfy your HD earges though, their files have exceeded half a gig at times, but the video content they are providing is absolutely STUNNING!

If you want to subscribe though iTunes, just click here, otherwise click here for the regular HD version (720p) and here for the FULL HD VERSION (1080p)!

Enjoy

Dany

Astronomically Amazing

This is just one picture from an amazing series of NASA shots from space as the astronauts were out spacewalking. The NASA gallery can be found here.

Thanks to Dvorak.org/blog for the post.

Dany

Volcano of the Stars

This is a tremendous new pic provided by the great people at APOD, which is from Patrick Taschler. It looks like the only thing between the stars and the erupting mountain is a dome of mist, it is such a beautiful shot.

Enjoy

Dany

Untethered spacewalker FTW over HAL9000?

Who will reign supreme? Will it be astronaut Bruce McCandless or HAL9000? Remember HAL already tossed one astronaut into the bowels of empty space, but McCandless has 1984 technology on his side!

Thanks to APOD for the above picture! taken from NASA during the WESTAR-VI (STS-41B) mission

Dany

Hot Astonomical Action

The pic above is from a great website (Copyright Martin Pugh) which features a new cool astronomy picture daily, oddly enough called Astronomy Picture of the Day.

There are also two FREE programs you can download if you want to experience some sweet sweet astronomical action.

First is the classic Google Earth… “But I thought Google Earth was just for, well, looking at, uhh, THE EARTH!” Google Earth used to be just for Earth watching, now with version 4.2, you can do a bit of stargazing as well. The other big update is the new flight simulator that was a nice easter egg for v4.2 (hit Ctrl + Alt + A to unearth this interface), here is a nice page with a list of controls for the flight sim.

Now, for you open source fans out there, give Stellarium a try. It has a nice feature where you can input your location and it will reveal the constellations you would be able to see in the sky if it was dark enough. This can be fun for us city dwellers, all too used to only seeing a star or two at most due to all the ambient light still shining from buildings in a big city.

Enjoy

Dany