Decipher SciFi

Latest Episodes:

Isolated BS part 3: ancient tattoos, zombie satellites, and running sandals May 19, 2020

Show notes

Prank’d!

Kids and aliens and not understanding how pranks work. Losing your arm to a racoon attack, but then turning into a cyborg so maybe it’s okay.

Zombie satellites!

Joe shared with us this recent development in zombie satellite communications. The long-term orbital stability og geosynchronous orbit, and ssedpace “ruins” as the longest landing mark of an expired humanity.

Joy items

Huaraches! Coffe tools and supplies. Colbert’s long lost dinosaur mug.

Running Sandals! CC-0 Ancient tattoos

Ancient tatoo princess art reconstruction. Mummification and skin art preservation.

Long-Lost U.S. Military Satellite Found By Amateur Radio Operator: NPR
The Wolrd Above Us - every active satellite orbiting Earth: QZ
Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos: The Siberian Times

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Picard Season 1: mortality, great filters, and synthetic life w/ Jolene Creighton May 12, 2020

Show notes

Nostalgia

Like all the things with Star Trek in them - feeling nostalgia for good Trek.

Prophecy/Not Prophecy

Conquering the Three Body Problem and moving on to the… eight body problem? Breaking your brain. Tidal forces and planetary ejection. Game theory: secret society, or open discussion?

Great filters

The great synthetic filter from beyond space and time.

If that’s the words, then that’s the words

Christopher Peterson

Synthetic life

Classifying the artificial intelligence of Trek’s synthetic life. Issues with anthropocentric terminology. Backing up synthetic “minds.” Finding out you’re a robot and also, somehow, simulation hypothesis.

Mortality

“To die is to be human” and other stupid nonsense. YOLO. “I’m gonna live forever ha-haaa. Wasting deaths in Star Trek.

Borg

Small-scale good-guy Borg. Dunbar limits and smaller collectives.

The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: YouTube

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Isolated BS part two, the mayonnaisening - volcano edition May 05, 2020

Show notes

Not just bread anymore..

But also mayonnaise! Definitively “The Best Sauce.” Coolio’s Ghettalian Garlic Bread. Japanese mayonnaise appreciation.

Miscellany

Dune set photos!. Sting’s codpiece. Manly housework. NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6R9NmZO80

Gaming and computing

Magic Leap disappointment and waiting for trickle-down from Enterprise. AR vs VR and chaning expectations. Oculus Quest sold-outness. Half-Life Alyx: game changer? Splatmoji. Programming your way into a Bash-hole.

Volcanoes

Volcanoes! Krakatoa exploded while we were all over here trying to figure out face masks. Remebering our Dracula episode w/ Joe Ruppel where Krakatoa brought on the “year without a summer.”

Rom Decomps

Super Mario 64 Decompilation. Decades later, the smoke fix. Figuring out why game decompilation is interesting. Appreciating harcore nerds.

Splatmoji by Christopher Peterson: GitHub
NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: YouTube
Avatarify: GitHub

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The Three Body Problem: mathy math math and first contact game theory w/ Adrian Apr 21, 2020

Show notes

Books!

A larger time investment, generally… but high idea-load! That one time we did a book in the past. And that next one we’ll probably do in the future.

Context

Chinese science fiction. This book as the first Asian Hugo Award-winner. The difficulty of translating highly technical, crunchy hard scifi. Translation footnotes or the lack thereof in the audiobook. Prior movie adaptation from the same author on Decipher SciFi: The Wandering Earth. Adaptions, failed or otherwise. Minecraft engine magic.

Alien Communications

Inverse square law and power and focus difficulties. Reaching out way above our stellar paygrade and reaping the consequences. Scale-accurate “first contact” scenarios.

DO NOT REPLY

-An alien

The Three Body Problem

The frustation of having no closed-form solution to your planet’s gravitational situtation. The value of the scientific method. Recognizing that there is always a model. The complexity of a model may not be veyr connected with the complexity of the results it yields.

Civilizational advancement

Targeting the loci of technological advancement. Figuring out how to prevent that advancement in opposing far-away civilizations.

Math!

What if math… didn’t work anymore? Adrian’s initial frustration with this book. How totally exciting it is to discover math is broken when you’re not being tortured by aliens.

I am the best mathematician that has ever existed. There is no one better. Put my name on a mountain! I did it.

Adrian Falcone

The Wandering Earth: altered goldilocks zones, Earth's heat budget, and smuggling pickles in your pants: Decipher SciFi
Three Body Problem the Minecraft animated series: Season 2 @ YouTube Season 3 @ YouTube
Division by Zero by Ted Chiang: Fantastic Metropolis

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Bloodshot: overdoing nanotech, comics bubbles, and flour bombs Apr 14, 2020

Show notes

What if Memento, but with nanites?

Movies post pandemic

Everything is either postponed or straight-to-streaming now. What do we expect the film industry to do after this debacle?

Comics!

The 1990s comics bubble. Chromium gimmick covers (Bloodshot was the first?).

Nano!

The difference between the magic of “nanotechnology” in 1993 and now. Being spoiled by Hollywood nanotech superpowers. Being impressed by self-mending t-shirts. Brute force superhero combat - no tactics whatsoever!

Flour

Just a heads-up, flour burns when spear in the air: Exploding Flour @ YouTube.

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Isolated BS: coping with copious amounts of bread Apr 07, 2020

Show notes

Just a conversation in isolation!

Things

“Free time” for parents working from home with children. Catching up on movies and video games. Stress. Running marathons with bikes.

Remote learning, remote work, and video meetings. Bunnies and allergies in springtime. Skyrim! And immunotherapy and poisons.

Bread

Making bread while locked down! Peanut butter and jelly (jam!). Sourdough cultures. Making bread from actual ancient Egyptian yeast!

Seamus Blackley bakes actual Ancient Egyptian bread: Twitter

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Another Life: visible rogue planets, visible dark matter, and other smart stuff Mar 31, 2020

Show notes

First contact

Aliens. Alien intelligence. Alien vessel shapes and what it says about the show you are about to watch. Moebius ships?

CETI

Crystalline FTL space antennae. The realities of lightspeed communication and why The SETI Institute doesn’t do “Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.” Unexplained FTL comms.

Fumbling about space

When your crew is this good, you really should just send a ship without the humans on it instead. MapQuest in spaaaaaace being confounded by gravitational lensing. Dark matter… blocks your view sometimes? Rogue planets and how very very very dark it is in between star systems. Robinson Crusoe oxygen rocks (or crystals).

Battlestar Galactica: iTunes Amazon
Battlestar Galactica: curse words linguistics, formal code verification, and robo Jesus: Decipher SciFi

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On Decipher History: 1917 w/ Josh! Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Josh 💪😉

1917: trenches, trench rats, and modern war w/ Josh

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Contagion: epidemiology, snake oil, and curve-flattening Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

Current events

Our world is on the brink of some possibly extreme unpleasantness. Known unknowns threats to civilization. Humanity is bad at planning for statistically-likely-but-not-definite disaster.

Bullshit

The anti-scientific garbage that starts to overflow in the face of a public health crisis. Goop. Alex Jones. Snake oil. Homeopathy. Price gouging. Levels of understanding and respect for the severity of the current pandemic across age groups.

Epidemiology

R0, or basic reproduction number. Vulnerable sub-populations. Prisons. Social distancing. Hoarding toilet paper and… meat? The nipah virus.

Human behaviour

Social distancing. Hoarding steak and toilet paper.

Epidemiology

Historical pandemics. Rate of spead and pandemic reach in the premodern and modern worlds. Propaganda and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. Wildlife as natural disease reservoirs. Wildlife farming and infectious disease overflow. Disease-spread mitigation. Getting germs in your holes Wash your hands!