Decipher SciFi

Latest Episodes:

Lockout: plagiarism, space shuttle design, and how to skydive... from space! Jul 30, 2019

Show notes

Plagiarism

John Carpenter, this movie, and Escape from New York plagiarism. Metal Gear Solid also as an Escape ripoff. Running popular media through a “Hideo Kojima filter” to see what comes out.

Space Shuttles

Side-mounting your spacecraft. Flying a brick. Deorbiting and landing in the space shuttle’s “orbiter.” Wiggle-worm descent. Having only one chance because all of your fuel was spent getting out of orbit. Returning to shuttle-like designs with mag-lev mountain-ramps.

Inert gas asphyxiation

Nitrogen! Biologically inactive gas asphyxia vs potentially-toxic: CO2, CO, etc. Hypoxia.

Falling out of space

The slim odds of hitting the ISS when accidentally de-orbiting. Space is… small? Understanding what “orbit” really means. HALO/HAHO jumping, Baumgartner’s Stratos jump, and the incredible difficulty of jumping out of orbit ffs. Copyrighting all of the “totally radical” stunts.

Breaking the sound barrier

The difference in the “speed of sound” at different atmospheric densities. Terminal velocity at high altitudes. Air is more “sticky” than you might expect. Why didn’t Felix Baumgartner “burn up” on reentry?

Orbital decay

“Jumping down” from a space station and how that is not sufficient for deorbiting. Megaconstellations and space junk.

How to Land the Space Shuttle... from Space by Bret Copeland: YouTube
Escape From New York: ultralight aircraft, escape pods, and fusion reactors: Decipher SciFi

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Rocky IV: sports science, brain injury, and horsepower punches Jul 23, 2019

Show notes

Forces

Height and reach advantage and impossible momentary punching force. Punching with horsepower vs just straight up hitting people with horses.

‘Murrica

James Brown and showboat Apollo. The Khaleesi naming scheme.

Sports Science

The rising tide of money in sports. The “big bang of body types.” Steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

Brain Injury

The particular badness of boxing for brain damage. The possible safety increase in taking off the gloves in MMA. Just about any sports injury is better than brain damage. The brain compared to Jello. The extra danger of rotational brain injury. Cumulative microconcussions.

Robots!

Surprisingly not a cynical product placement.

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First Man: moon rocks, moon lasers, and the edge of space Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

One Small Step

Worrying the minimum amount about your speech. The difficulty of quoting noisy radio transmissions.

Because it is haaaahd

Recognizing the small temporal distance from the first powered flight to the first moon landing. The cutting edge of the early space program. Test piloting. Gemini.

The edge of space

Defining the edge of space. The “Karman Line”: transition from atmospheric lift to orbital velocity. Complications and redefinition of where “space” begins. Geopolitics, ruining everything since forever.

The “right stuff”

Badass engineer pilots. Moving fast and breaking things. Selection testing. Giving prospective astronauts ice-water wet willies. The importance of simulation in the early space program and the difficulty of simulating things we haven’t actually ever done or seen up close.How hard it really is to stay conscious under high-g stress.

Moon landing

Monocular depth cues. Light and shadow, unfamiliar objects, and depth perception. Equatorial noon on the equinox when stuff looks creepy: Lahaina Noon.

Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

Retroreflectors and really really powerful lasers. Tiny photonic returns: 1 out of every 10¹⁷ photons shot at the moon mirror make it back for our detection. Multi-mile laser beams. Confirming relativity ftw.

ROCKS

… from the moon! And some regolith to boot. Vacuum transport for moon samples and how we work with them on Earth’s surface without contaminating. The difficulty of maintaining a a very strong vacuum vs nonreactive gasses. Detecting the provenance of proposed moon rocks. NASA’s moon-rock cataloguing system.

Moon-landing video

Viewership numbers. NASA’s custom video encoding and the incredibly analog conversion methods employed to bring it to television.

What if

What if it didn’t work out? The Nixon speach made ready just in case. “In Event of Moon Disaster.”

What now

Why we have no rockets now to match the power of the Saturn V. Loss of engine-production expertise. Looking at near-future Moon and Mars missions.

Where does NASA keep the Moon Rocks? by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
Apollo Television by Bill Wood: NASA

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Alita Battle Angel: cybernetic cyborgs, photorealistic cg, and sports plus immortality Jul 09, 2019

Show notes

Alita

“The movie with the cyborgs and the kicking and the punching.” There are two kinds of film: people in a room talking and people in a room kicking and punching. Robert Rodriguez lands firmly within only one of these groups. Accidentally fitting Alita into the Robocop universe. Shooting and punching people in their robo-bits.

Cyborgs

Robots arms everywhere. But maybe not just for show? Cyborg arms as the cyborg future cliche. Replacing your limbs proactively for fun and profit. Replacing all of your joints, but not just with hinges. Defining “cyborg” more precisely in consideration of the definition of “cybernetics.”

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities.

-Wikipedia

“Real” cyborgs

We are already cyborgs, we just don’t ourselves enough credit. Cyborgification as performance. Designing a new hearing aid to help us talk to bats.Imagining all the ways in which implanted and attached technologies would help improve the human experience. And what do we get? Always super-strong robot arms. Realizing you would need the whole-system upgrade to support the forces exerted upon/by your super-arm.

Doing it right

Don’t be a cyborg bicep bro. Taking the short route to functional cyborg limbs by using existing neuromuscular wiring. The difficulty of inventing new appendages or body formats.

Photorealistic CG humans

Wow dude this was actually pretty great. Sidestepping the uncanny valley slightly by going with anime eyes. Aperture and catching more light. Legolas with dinner-plate eyeballs. Neoteny.

Nonsensical murder sports

Future cybersports: more violent spectacle, less athleticism. Sports and functional immortality.

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Reign of Fire: types of dragons, animals that hibernate, and the Purkinje effect Jul 02, 2019

Show notes

‘Murrica

Jacked Christian Bale, Scottish Gerard Butler, and brash American hero Matthew McConaughey. Fighting a dragon with an axe. Appreciating the brash American caricature.

Dragons

Dragon VFX. Drawing the line from here to Game of Thrones. Animals that use a spray attack (or defense). Skunks, ants, horned lizard, snakes, even bombardier beetles and their boiling butt juices. Dragon classification (vs wyverns, etc).

Fire etc

Actual napalm is a hell of a thing. Remember the Anarchist’s Cookbook and how innacurate and unsafe everything was. Practical fire FX in the movie and how well it holds up. Hundreds of gallons of propane per dragon blast. Burninating all the food on a planet.

“Hibernation”

Hibernation vs other states. Dormancy Torpor. Estivation. Endotherm and ectotherm dormancy. Classical and modern ideas of what counts as “hibernation.” EXTREEEEEEME dormancies. Water bears/tardigrades.

Eyesight

Vision difficulties at twilight. The Purkinje effect. Shifting spectral sensitivities based on brightness. Progression through photopic, mesopic, and scotopic vision. Appreciating the idiosyncratic nature of our vision and understanding why emulating what we see is so difficult with a camera lens.

Twilight, my only weakness. How did you know?

-A Dragon

Castles

Buying up castles in the Romanian countryside. Castles come in different sizes but no matter how you measure that’s a really big dragon.

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Battlestar Galactica: curse words linguistics, formal code verification, and robo Jesus Jun 25, 2019

Show notes

Review

Battlestar was so good! The importance of Ronald D Moore’s work on Deep Space Nine. The genesis of the “gritty” scifi drama juxtaposed against Star Trek’s utopia. Judging the best scifi captains: Adama? Picard?

Frak!

The difficulties with “frak.” “Fraking” vs “fracking.” Changes of spelling. Designing the curse words of scifi futures. Appreciating Nick Farmer’s “Belter.” The nature of “swear words.” Comparing the sounds of made-up brand names to test linguistic form/function clustering.

Anti-AI security

Computers are good at computers. Fully securing your “hello world” program. Code testing and integration. Formal verification to mathematically guarantee computer code, and the incredible expense thereof.

Robo Jesus

Creatures coming into sapience in a world with the scientific method and body of knowledge and still turning to “God.”

Diaspora, The Free BSG Space-Sim based on Freespace 2: Hard-Light.net
Caprica: iTunes Amazon

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Black Mirror Season 5: dishwashers, sex stuff, and brain image reconstruction Jun 18, 2019

Show notes

Striking Vipers Human sexuality

The bright and exciting future of who does what with whom and how. Polar bears. How we might have handles this VR technology as teenagers.

Colbert is the bear Gaming

Nostalgia for days-long gaming binges with Doritos and Easy Cheese. Ubiquitous full-spectrum VR experience. Neural mapping. Popular physics plugins , game engines, and the possibility that McCallister and Striking Vipers etc run on the same software.

Bodily bacteria

Dirt subscription boxes. Maintaining your skin microbiome. Showring? Soap vs detergent. Probiotic yogurt: “one for me, one for the undercarriage.”

Dishwashers

Knife-down safety is actually important(!). Dish detergents and plate dirtiness. Clever dirtiness-measurement technologies.

Smithereens Driver Rating

“2 stars, car was clean”

Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too Virtual performance

Virtualizing irl performers. Pepper’s Ghost. Lifelike real-time rendering technology. Real-time raytracing. Motion capture cost and complexity drops.

Brains etc

Machine learning vocal production. FMRI vs EEG vs whatever awesome thing they have in Black Mirror. Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity.

Head Like a Hole by Devo: YouTube
Human brain mapping and brain decoding by Jack Gallant: YouTube
Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity: PLOS

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300: professional soldiers, the Spartan Mirage, and expert poking w/ Josh Jun 11, 2019

Show notes

This film

Zach Snyder’s strengths in creating comic book panels on film. Slo-mo blood spatter. Abs and glistening man-meat.

Western civilization

Ancient Greece and “western civilization.” The birth of “democracy” in nearby Athens. Juxtaposing your historical culture with the “other.” Like George Washington crossing the Delaware but with way less man-meat. And 100% less codpieces.

Sparta

The dawn on the Spartan state. The nature of the Helot slave class. “Land-bonded” slavery vs chattel. Ancient Greek and Spartan combat methods. Heavy infantry. Training by doing crunches all.day.long. Ancient combat analogues with early UFC.

The Persian Invasions

Greece as a poor backwater on the edge of the Persian Empire. The Ionian Revolt, The Battle of Marathon, The Battle of Thermopylae, Battle of Plataea.

Professional soldiering

The incredible change that was the development of the professional standing army. Modern soldiers and modern combat compared and contrasted with ancient. Dying gloriously. Army sizes at Thermopylae as recorded closer to the time vs modern estimates.

Modern understanding of Sparta

Ancient sources and the lack of writing from the actual place and time. “The Spartan Mirage,” and the crafting of the Spartan image. Any training as a unit is better than none.

Phalanx

The universality of shield walls and spear hedges, aka the “spiky steamroller.” Strategically busting out in individual slow motion. Spear-length evolution. Learning whether “dragoons” are at all related to dragons.

Josh's show's on LSG Media: The X-Files Podcast (always)Science Fiction Film Podcast (sometimes)
Hardcore History - King of Kings, by Dan Carlin: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield: iTunes Amazon

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Automata: desertification, solar storms, and messing with Asimov Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

Robot laws

Asimov’s laws as a storytelling device and what you get when you alter the formula. “Humans are the true robots.”

Automata

The difference between “automata” and “robots.” Ancient Greek, Arab, and medieval church automata. Automata and robots making humans realize we need to explain what makes us special. Realizing that, on the whole, we probably aren’t really. Cartesian dualism as a stop-gap measure. Moral progress. Appreciating that we stopped seeing other animals as automatons and vivisecting them.

Modern automata

NASA getting into the automata game for difficult environments. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments. Mixing electronic and (mostly) mechanical components for robustness against horrible, deadly, no good, very bad atmospheres. Sending data back home from limited electronic or even completely mechanical systems.

Solar storms

Various phenomena caused by disturbances in the sun. The Carrington Event. Imagining the losses in the trillions from a Carrington-strength event in the modern day. Civilizational collapse with worldwide disturbance/destruction of telecommunications infrastructure.

World population

Realizing that several billion humans on Earth is actually like a real real lot of people. Very many. So many that even a 97% reduction leaves millions. Oy.

Desertification

Defining deserts by rainfall. Defining desertification by a land’s inability to hold water.

Automata by In Our Time: BBC
Ghost in the Machine by Radio Lab: WNYC

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Star Trek IV - The Journey Home: whale margarine, transparent aluminum, and time travel May 28, 2019

Show notes

Star Trek

Best Star Trek movies. Liking things because they are familiar. The odd-even Star Trek movie rule. Mathematical proofs. Dismissing the reboots.

Cosmic horror

Giant cylinders and plumbuses. Finding out you are as an ant in the universe. Spreading across space and building giant robot suits to fight the larger incomprehensible creatures.

Time travel

Using time travel to solve problems despite the consequences. Time travel anachronism stories. Bad time-travel sales pitches. The Mooreeffoc Effect. Would you go to the future? Only going forward because medicine in the past is always so bad. Time travel vaccinations.

Whales

The possibility of cetacean “language.” “Save the whales” in the 80s. Whale oil being supplanted by kerosene as industrial fuel. Stinky whale candles. The Napoleonic origins of margarine and the economics of fuel and margarine. Industrialized whaling. “Factory ships.” Realizing we are running out of whales. Continued industrial whaling, namely by Japan and some of the Nordic countries.

Whaling: Wikipedia
Whale Oil: Wikipedia
Margarine: Wikipedia
Moby Dick by Herman Melville: iTunes Amazon

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