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William Ayliffe: Why We See What We Do

The visual system has developed to allow us to navigate in a complex and dangerous world in order to find food and to avoid danger. This survival system works by building a complex three-dimensional model based on two-dimensional data from the retina. This model is tested against “reality” and checked with information from other senses and updated if needed. The brain suppresses the complexity of this processing and we believe that vision is instantaneous, real and effortless. But is seeing just an illusion?

Charlie Brooker: How TV Ruined Your Life

BBC: How TV Ruined Your Life

How TV Ruined Your Life is 6-part comedy series by the BBC in which Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television

CBC: To Sell A War

To Sell A War is a documentary of the CBC programme The Fifth Estate. It exposes the Citizens for a Free Kuwait campaign as public relations spin to gain public opinion support for the Gulf War, and it reveals that Nurse Nayirah was in fact Nijirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, coached by Hill & Knowlton to forge her infamous, widely reported, and repeated, testimony about Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators.

The Tenth Level: A Milgram Movie

Via Advances in the History of Psychology, a 70s TV movie curiosity called The Tenth Level, starring William Shatner, that fictionalizes the (in)famous Milgram experiment. It’s bad, yet interesting.

Richard Feynman: The Character of Physical Law

The Character of Physical Law are a series of seven lectures by physicist Richard Feynman concerning the nature of the laws of physics. The talks were delivered by Feynman in 1964 at Cornell University, as part of the Messenger Lectures series.

Thelonious Monk: Straight , No Chaser

A documentary film about the life of pianist and jazz great Thelonious Monk. Features live performances by Monk and his band, and interviews with friends and family about the offbeat genius.

BBC: Dangerous Knowledge

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

PJ Harvey – The Glorious Land (Live on Later? with Jools Holland)

Music video by PJ Harvey performing The Glorious Land from her 2011 album Let England Shake on the BBC show Later? with Jools Holland.