Decipher SciFi

Isolated BS: VR breakthroughs, space clouds, and earthworm jerky Nov 17, 2020

Spaaaaace

Clouds in space…? Microsoft Azure Space and Azure Orbital. Making space cheaper and more accessible with satcomm as a service.

VR

The new Oculus Quest. Past predictions. Pulling the VR market in the direction of affordability? Pandemic winter VR. Hating Facebook while embracing their VR product. Getting better at not getting sick. Experiences of unreality.

Conferencing

Virtual chewing noises. Missing irl conference-going. It’s like a vacation for adult nerds!

Food

Food preservation. Preserved dairy variations by latitude. Jerky! Appreciating controlled rot. Earthworm jerky. Roasted grasshoppers!

About Chapulines: Wikipedia
Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube

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Her: sad foreheads, augmented audio presence, and friendly AI takeoff scenarios Nov 10, 2020

AI everything

Creating a thinking, feeling artificial intelligence to do really important things for humanity like… sorting through your e-mail. N-dimensional AI chess. Rapid takeoff scenarios.

Personal Assistants

Natural language processing developments. The rise of proactive digital personal assistants. Predictive local, personal information.

Digital relationship

Virtual aural closeness. Presence and audio AR. Developments in form factor, interface, and functionality. Understanding the acoustics of spaces, materials, and your biology. Room mapping. Love, infinite attention, and generosity.

The Forehead

Feeling the heartbreak, right in the forehead.

Her forehead scene: YouTube

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An unexplained absence Nov 03, 2020

You may be wondering where we went for a minute there 😬

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The Core: Flying bricks, pacemakers, and quantum avian eyeballs Oct 06, 2020

Forgetability

The valley of forgetability (The Core) between science-respecting sci-fi (e.g. Arrival) and totally bonkers nonsense (e.g. Jupiter Ascending).

Space shuttle

Landing the “flying brick.”

Bird navigation

Magnetite beaks. The possibility of quantum eyeball magnetic navigation HUDs. Corvid appreciation. Why birds don’t all fly into our windows and our eyeballs.

Pacemakers

Keeping your heart on-rhythm. Not as immediate a death sentence as portrayed.

Earth’s outer core

The absurd energies in the spinning of Earth’s core - a ball of iron the size of Mars, spinning a thousand miles an hour

That’s a whole lot of energy. If it doesn’t sound like much, let’s convert it to megatons: it’s the equivalent energy of five trillion one megaton bombs going off. Phil Plait on the spinning outer core

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Review of The Core: BadAstronomy.com

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Stank waffles, VR development, and Venusian cloud datacenters Sep 22, 2020

Clouds in episode image from “Storm Clouds” by Albert Bierstadt/The White House Historical Association CC-O @ Wikipedia

Waffles Belgian Waffle formula

Tasty waffles! Stank waffles! With lots of syrup! Solving food problems with casseroles. Gravy!

VR

Marveling at the Oculus Quest two 25% price drop from the last generation. Hating Facebook. Realizing the separateness of AR and VR development, even within companies working on both at the same time (Facebook). Can/will AR and VR converge and become ubiquitous?

WFH

Working from home. Surprisingly long hikes and arachnid attacks. Tiny child legs and tiny child wills.

Venus

Life on venus? The dense, deep, permanent nature of the Venusian cloud layer. The possible effect on drake equation. Looking forward to balloon probes in the Venusian atmosphere.

Ocean data

Ocean-floor data centers. The cost of infrastructure and cooling vs the cost of real estate. The value of removing humans from the environment because we’re so loud and clumsy and moist.

Review: We do not recommend the $299 Oculus Quest 2 as your next VR system: Ars Technica
Oculus Quest 2: Oculus.com
Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus: Nature Astronomy
Chemical that shouldn’t be there spotted in Venus’ atmosphere: Ars Technica
Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success: Ars Technica

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Raised by Wolves: exoplanets, eating rats, and fake-karate floaty physics Sep 15, 2020

Happy 5-year anniversary whoooooo

🥳🎉

Subluminal interstellar travel

Accelerating for half of the ride, and braking for the other half. The advantage of avoiding squishy human cargo for high acceleration. The difference between the Alucard and the Alcubierre drive technologies (hint: a miserable pile of secrets). Special floaty physics, magnets on your feet, and fake karate.

Exoplanets

Exploring the growing options for Earth-like life in the solar-system. Kepler 22b. Where did the megafauna go? Exogestation - growing babies on alien soil.

Meat stuff

Sourcing and preparing rat meat. Snails. Face/Off and changing your identity.

Exoplanet Exploration - Planets Beyond our Solar System: NASA

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Isolated BS: nuclear bananas, unreal simulations, and buttplug archaeology w/ Josh Sep 08, 2020

“Banana” image used in featured image with our brains by nicubunu CC-0

Josh, recently

Made a strong showing on the recent Saving Private Ryan episode over at LSG Media. Real human stuff in between the dick and fart jokes.

Teledildonics

Tales of coupled internet-connected sex toys are way up! Hooray for free and open source teledildonics at buttplug.io.

Nuclear things

Making long-lived diamond nuclear batteries from spent nuclear fuel. The banana equivalent dose of radiation. The trouble with battery-tech press releases. Eating enough grapes to give you superpowers. Buttplug archaeology. Tongue twisters. Forever-vibrating mummies and the Silurian hypothesis.

Simulations

The major leap in tech in the new MS Flight Simulator. Taking the fun out of games by making them rigorous simulations. The value of process simulations when the real thing is expensive or dangerous. Going all Ender’s Game on actual military simulations with Close Combat. Buying military might with lots of money.

Tabletop RPGs

Missing the humans-at-a-table element during the pandemic. Appreciating how much fun we had with Liam in our Mirror RPG playthrough (parts I, II, and III). And catching Josh 100% on the hook to GM for the podcast again in the future! Hooray!

Saving Private Ryan w/ Josh: LSG Media
The X-Files Podcast /w Josh: LSG Media
Buttplug: an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware: Buttplug.io
Strapped Into A Sinking Helicopter (with U.S. Marines) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube

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On Decipher History - Titanic! rich people, bad luck, and ever-increasing hugeness w/ Joe Sep 01, 2020

Production

Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general.

Classism

First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth.

Technology

The pace of technological development in industries, especially intercontinental travel by steamship. Comparing the early 1900s to other periods of technological progress like the 1980s and 1990. Noting the nature of the automobiles in the film: literally the design of a “horseless carriage.” The cutting-edge wireless technology aboard the ship.

The ship

Three engines! Of two varieties. Steam-driven piston engines and steam-driven a turbine. Note: you cannot reverse a turbine. Peak power: 46,000 horsepower. 600 tons of coal daily. An anecdote about Mr. Diesel.

A collection of small problems

The nature of many disasters, probably including Titanic: a series of small problems, adding up to a catastrophic failure under the rigt (wrong) circumstances. Rich people hogging the Marconi wireless. Out of date lifeboat regulations. Loading lifeboats (badly). The reality of “women and children first.” Avoiding chaos until it’s too late.

Judgements

The inquiries from shortly after the event, and the great surprise you may experience when realizing that the company men consistently pushed blame back up the chain of command. Modern evidence changing our conception over time. Actually ultimately coming to the consensus that this particular ship on this particular voyage was mostly operated in a way that was totally normal in almost all respects and simply got very unlucky.

All told, it does seem that Titanic was really really well-engineered and did remarkably well under the circumstances.

[4K,60Fps,Colorized] Titanic, First and Last Voyage, April 1912 AI Recovery, added sound: YouTube
RMS Titanic Survivors True Accounts of The Sinking: YouTube
RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts by the Engingeering Guy: YouTube
Titanic - Alternate Ending: YouTube

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Proactive prostheses, facial recognition, and correlating diarrhea Aug 18, 2020

Fawkes mask in post image Multipainkiller Studio CC-BY

Prosthetics

Proactive prostheses in our future? Recognizing that we routinely do this with major joints, and with for a full cyberpunk limb-improvement future.

Big brother etc

Machine learning facial recognition. Fawkes machine learning facial image “cloaking.” The possible value of poisoned data sets. Placing individual bricks in the wall that is our ability be private and protect our data. Google correlating diarrhea.

Emulation

Finding a use for an old PlayStation Portable. RetroArch. The difficulty of old games and the power of limiting your options.

Our website

Our first outside code contribution! And just thanks to Elad Avron and Hugh Fisher 😄!

Fawkes Image 'Cloaking' for Personal Privacy: Chicago.edu
Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models (USENIX Security 2020): YouTube

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X-Men First Class: nuclear panic, destructive resonance, and woolly mammoth piñatas Aug 11, 2020

Fear of mutation

Our recent X-Men. Irl post-war nuclear anxieties. More mutant panic and more mutant supremacy bad guys.

Irradiating Earth

Not enough to make superpowers, but we sure did irradiate a lot. The clear mark of human civilization in the geological record. Past discussions of the Silurian Hypothesis.

Neanderthal interactions

2010 Neanderthal DNA news and the possibility of this informing the film. Extincting things more by accident than on purpose in pre-agricultural times. Consistent neanderthal pronunciation consistency issues.

The plan(s)

Causing global nuclear war so you can… rule over the ashes? At least the Magneto version of the plan didn’t destroy infrastructure.

Powers

The energy levels required for useful destructive resonance as a superpower. Brown-noting your enemies in combat. Once more determining that functional immortality is the best power that w actually want.

Submarining

Fitting nuclear submarines in your megayacht. Ice floes vs icebergs vs glaciers. Where to get the best ice for your drinks.

How I Boarded a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
Boarding a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
What if We Nuke a City? by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube

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Isolated BS: 3D tracking, Doom on EVERYTHING, and game juice Aug 04, 2020

3D tracking

Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift.

Weather AI

Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning weather models. Hyper-local extrapolation and push notifications. Weather forecasting/reporting as a demonstration of probabilities.

Website search

We took the bullet for our website visitors and implemented a site search on DecipherMedia.tv in JavaScript! The result: we still do not enjoy JavaScript. But we do have search! Future functionality improvements. Here is our internal documentation. And a reminder that our whole site is open source and available on GitLab!

Doom on everything

Our continuing fascination in seeing Doom on more things. And the less it makes sense, the better! Doom on Windows 95 in Minecraft, because why not.

Game feel

Game feel the book. Creating a satisfying input/response loop when all you’re really doing is mashing buttons. Vlambeer on mobile game “juice.” The relative difficulty of providing good “feel” on mobile games with a uniformly smooth display as an input device. Putting overtime into the design of basic repetitive game mechanics, e.g. Mario or God of War. New frontiers in game feel.

Game programming for kids

A wonderful, simple, directly productive introduction to core concepts: Scratch! Proud parent moments.

Jesus news

Apparently The Passion is getting a sequel? The wackiness of ecclesiastical minutiae. Discovering more schisms in Christianity.

CamTrackAR: Apple App Store
DecipherMedia Site Search: DecipherMedia.tv
You Can Now Play DOOM on a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft: InterestingEngineering.com
Game Feel: GameFeel.com
Vlambeer - 'The art of screenshake': YouTube
Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks: YouTube
Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share: MIT.edu

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X-Men: superhero evolution, wolverines, and what lightning does to everything else Jul 28, 2020

Comic book movies

X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman.

Superhero physique Belgian Blue musclecow Roby GFDL

Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs

Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to. #hollywood

-@robmcelhenney

Mutation

Mutations: usually do nothing or are bad. But also sometimes are good! Exploring the high variance in mutations in the world of X-Men. Picking the best X-Men power: raw force production vs longevity.

Wolverines

The honey badger of the north!

What happens when everything else gets his by lightning

Lichtenberg figures. Making puberty even more awkward. New-mutant death rates. Norwegian reindeer mass lightning death.

How Lightning Can Kill 300 Reindeer With One Strike: Wired
The Ultimate Warrior Being Crazy: YouTube

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Isolated BS: social engineering, spotted dick, and proper beaver representation Jul 21, 2020

Hacking

The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media.

Free Software

Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration.

Unicode things hooray

Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji!

Tattoos

Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod.

RPGs

Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty.

Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura

Percent!

“Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them.

Spotted dick

A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty!

Attribution

“Six dice of various colours” used in episode image - by Diacritica CC-BY-SA-3.0
Decipher RPG Mirror illustration commissioned for Decipher Media by Amber Lee Jones

Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura: Kickstarter
Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein: Decipher SciFi
Splatmoji - Quickly look up and input emoji and/or emoticons/kaomoji on your GNU/Linux desktop via pop-up menu.: GitHub.com
Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1: Decipher SciFi
Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2: Decipher SciFi
Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!): Decipher SciFi
The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.: Slate

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Sonic: the console wars, allocoprophagy, and tiny blue Godzilla Jul 07, 2020

Cashing in

Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl.

Console wars

Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily.

Sega does what Nintendon’t

Sega, an intellectual

Sonic

Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude over decades and how to undo it all in your first draft of your movie. Don’t forget creepy-ass original movie sonic with his creepy human teeth. VFX responsibilities and character re-renderings. Tiny blue Godzilla.

Release the butthole cut!

-Christopher

Speed

Sonic’s smagic speed powers. Comic book power levels where they expand to fit the plot. The speed of sound and relationship with atmospheric density. Creating “frozen time” action scenes. Setting the bar at Quicksilver. Sometimes, you can only care about the science as much as the movie does. Supersonic vs hypersonic vs ultrasonic and the mixing of and Latin. Running loops.

Hedgehogs

A long-term human domestication collaborator. The lovable version of a porcupine. Spikey defense mechanisms. Covering yourself in other animals’ poop for fun and profit. Allocoprophagy.

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Animated Series Theme Song: YouTube
Human Loop the Loop with Damien Walters: YouTube
Console Wars by Blake J. Harris: Amazon iTunes
SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE ™: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: YouTube

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Isolated BS: art restoration, ahistorical viking grooming, and preposterone Jun 30, 2020

Millhouse isolation

Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery.

Masks

Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥).

Viking grooming

That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical understanding of Viking grooming standards, and how that very much differs from out contemporary depictions. BUT! The contemporary depictions are really fun so it’s ok. 👌

Corvids

The problem-solvingest birds. Ravens and other corvids and their respective quality as tattoo-subject candidates. Planning ravens on the chest/shoulders. Maybe a jackdaw sleeve?

Nazis

For real, fuck those guys. Cultural appropriation.

Butt stuff

Welcome to the Decipher Media colorectal new update. Christopher’s incoming bidet. Fiber supplmentation and chasing the ghost poop dragon. Young men living on Mountain Dew and waffles.

Demodex never poop and then explode with poop and die

Christopher

Fitness

Testosterone levels over time. Testosterone replacement therapy. Dancing - fun for the whole family! Strength nostalgia.

VR Gaming

Again with the motion sickness.

Our website

The site is now open source! Go take a look if you’re into Jekyll or Ruby or Gitlab or generally just podcasting the hard way.

Art restoration

The unqalified Spanish art resotrers are at it again! And don’t forget the OG: [Monkey Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja%29). Hanlon’s razor.

Upcoming

As per our Colossus Roundtable: watch Person of Interest!

Masking For a Friend: 99pi.org
Our open source website code: Gitlab.com
The Life and Times of Mr C by Andy P and Emily RG: Batch25Comics

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Watchmen - Tulsa, nostalgia, and victorian spacesuits Jun 23, 2020

Tulsa Massacre

The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar.

Ozymandias

Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity.

Dr Manhattan

Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr Manhattan formula from human to complete lack of concern for humanity.

Nostalgia

Chemical VR. An alternative route to Alzheimer’s treatment.

Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable by kaptainkristian: YouTube
Watchmen (2009 Film): iTunes Prime Video

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Isolated BS: tasty Pi, robot vacuums, and our saddest failure Jun 16, 2020

Computing

Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs.

Raspberry Pi4 model B Michael Henzler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0 YouTube

Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription.

Memeseeks

The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.”

The original Memeseeks Box logo art Nicholas Lowe, used with permission Robot vacuums

Both a cleaning tool and a defense against madness in the presence of eldritch horrors. “Because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.” Using the Roomba as a parenting tool. Deebot Ozmo.

Plastic Rain

It’s everywhere. Referring to our Wall-E episode with heaping portions of appreciation and concern for plastics.

Big tech

Withholding the sale of facial recognition tech from police. Bezos the nigh-trillionaire being able to afford his own ISS.

“Cartoon Room House” used in episode image background, by mixrobastudio/pixabay/CC-0

Old Glory Robot Insurance by SNL: YouTube
Frinkiac - The Simpsons Meme Engine: Frinkiac.com
Master of All Science - The Rick and Morty Meme Engine: MasterOfAllScience.com
Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain: Wired

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Upload: living forever, digital personhood, and hacking your own reality Jun 09, 2020

Self-driving cars

Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles.

Economics

Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy.

Brain scanning

Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural scanning. Do we even have any other options for mapping our brain structure? Brain damage and resuscitation.

Digital personhood

Creating immortal and infinite digital slaves. Multiple instantiation of persons. Hormonal simulation. Physical, mental, and emotional growth when your life is “virtual.” Living longer and learning not to be the horrible old racist grandpa. Sense of self over time when uploaded. What virtual conditions could be so bad that it’s not worth “living” anymore? Waiting for democratized afforable versions of necessary technologies. “ROM hacking” your reality.

VR

Sharding (not sharting) your virtual worlds. Manipulating and filtering memories into re-experience. VR suit options: piezoelectric, pneumatic, and TENS.

The Teslasuit literally shocked me by CNET: YouTube

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Isolated BS: hip thrusts, Dragons, and linguistic POV Jun 04, 2020

Fitness

Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands.

Gaming

Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe.

John Carmack

Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia.

Dragon mission

Yay! Space! Dramatically lowering the cost of space travel. Fancy new flight suits. Are touch screens a good idea? Space travel automation expectations.

Language and POV

Enjoying the early fight and chase scenes in Extraction. The use of language and subtitles for storytelling. Video.

The Hunt For Red October - Learning to Love the Soviets by Patrick Willems: YouTube
Masters of Doom by David Kushner: Amazon iTunes
Upload - for the next episode!: Prime Video
Weekly Free Games: Epic Games Store
Starting Strength by Makr Rippetoe: Amazon

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Underwater: deep drilling, nitrogen narcosis, and astronaut helium voice May 26, 2020

Deep water drilling

It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench.

The ocean: scarier than space

Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting spaced out of an airlock. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled was barely deeper than Challenger Deep is under the surface of the ocean.

Living deep undersea

Nitrogen narcosis: it’s bad for you! Atmospheric mixture issues under pressure. Sealab I, II, and III. Aquanatical research. Sperm whales get the bends. Oh no your suit some kind of exploded. Monsters of the deep. Deep sea gigantism.

Construction

Engineering against 16,000 psi and freezing temperatures. Concrete strengths and saltwater issues.

Misc

Exothermic implosions - they’re like explosions, but backwards! Pistol shrimp. Long-range radio communications through water. ELF. Past discussions on the matter. Dumb infrared.

Astronaut Scott Carpenter Speaks to President Johnson from a Helium-Atmosphere Decompression Chamber: YouTube
Mom's Spaghetti by Eminem: YouTube
Underwater Alternate Ending: YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: JHU.edu
Why new diseases keep appearing in China by Vox: YouTube
Medlife Crisis: YouTube
Planet Money Podcast: NPR.org
The Indicator from Planet Money: NPR.org
Self-experimentation in medicine: Wikipedia

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On Decipher History: Alexander Mar 10, 2020

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Ryan Stitt of the History of Ancient Greece Podcast 🔱

Alexander: succession, “The Great,” and sooo many Alexandrias w/ Ryan Stitt

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Altered Carbon Season 2: memory, facial recognition, and xenoarchaeology Feb 25, 2020

A review

We don’t normally do this, but…

Memory

Priming. Retrieval cues. Memory encoding, sotrage, and retrieval. Context-dependent memory. Getting drunk and finding your keys. Digital memory retrieval Facial recognition heuristics. Recognition vs reproduction.

Xenoarchaeology

Living amongst the runes. More AI! Deciphering alien technology.

Altered Carbon: Zoltan Istvan on transplant immortality, identity, and consciousness uploading: Decipher Scifi

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Evolution: panspermia space rocks, periodic tables, and sooo much poison Feb 18, 2020

Asteroids etc

Revisiting: asteroids vs meteors vs meteoroids vs meteorites vs who knows. Still confusing! How much space stuff hits Earth? Like, not just dust but things big enough to be impressed by. Who gets claim to Earth-impacting space rocks?

Panspermia

The idea that life can spread between worlds. Or maybe even stars (maybe not.)? The “soft hypothesis” of panspermia and the utility of primoridla ooze. The possibility of panspermia bringing life to primordial Earth. Cowboy scientists just leaving alien goo everywhere.

Periodic table of the elements

Chemical relationships via the periodic table. Actually-useful alternative periodic tables. Selenium toxicity, testosterone, and Brazil nuts. Arsenic. Marveling at 19th centtury arsenic popularity.

Matcha! It's so tasty.: Wikipedia

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Picard: the moral center of Trek, supernovae, and Romulan stormtroopers Feb 11, 2020

In which we discuss the first three episodes

Picard

We missed you Jean-Luc! Picard as the moral center of Star Trek, and the greatest of its captains.

Romulan supernova

Romulans. How to tell a Vulkan from a Romulan? Exploding stars. Detecting supernovae. The death cycle of a red supergiant. The reliability of physics across timelines/universes. The dangers of cleaving planets.

Federation Economics

“Post scarcity” with holodecks and replicators, and the realization that there is still a limited resource: energy. Star Trek Kardashev levels.

Synthetic life

Data. Lore. Data’s “daughter” from that one time on TNG. Bio-synthetic intelligent life. How important is embodiment?

Star Trek Beyond: drone swarms, teleporters, and decompression w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
Star Trek First Contact: transhumanism technology and ant behavior w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
Star Trek IV – The Journey Home: whale margarine, transparent aluminum, and time travel: Decipher SciFi
Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators: Decipher SciFi
Galaxy Quest: the best Star Trek movie: Decipher SciFi
Star Trek TNG: Netflix
The Picard Song by DarkMateria: YouTube

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Halo: first contact, power armor, and how does master chief poop? w/ Daniel Barker Feb 04, 2020

Importance

Nostalgia: wow Halo has really been around for a minute. Hundreds of hours of that one level of local multiplayer but never playing the story. Turning an RTS into a TPS and then an FPS and then getting that Microsoft money.

Figuring out the importance of Halo CE in the history of gaming. PC gaming master race. Tank-controlled console FPS games. Unseating Goldeneye. Establishing a timeline of FPS quality on consoles and PC.

First Contact

Humanity honing its warfare skills by just being jerks to other humans. Settling 800+ planets! “Glassing” enemy alien planets.

Put a ring on it

Ringworlds! But less a ring “world” and more a ring “weapons platofrm that also is fairly liveable.” The Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox through the lens of Halo.

Armor

Master Chief vs Doom Guy. Measuring Hell energy. Mjolnir armor - a half ton and costs as much as a destroyer to produce. “Smart” and “dumb” AI delineations. Neural exoskeleton integration. PRedictive algorithms. Relating Master Chief to Upgrade. What about just putting an AI and some batteries inside of the Mjolnir armor? Falling from space.

Halo Foward Unto Dawn: Amazon
Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com

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The Secret of the Ooze: turtles, pizza, and irl toxic sludge Jan 28, 2020

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

An incredible indie success story.

Pizza

Pizza popularity in the US post-WWII. Pizza classification arguments. Bread sauce cheese vs bread cheese sauce and the DRASTIC difference between the two. NYC Pizza ftw.

Wtf is a turtle

Turtles, tortoises, terrapins, and the difficulty with colloquial names. Putting them in the water to see which ones drows. Telescoping vs hinging necks.

Toxic ooze

Realizing the horrifying reason “toxic sludge” was in all of our childhood media. Joe’s story about that one superfund site that I can’t spell. Creating better ooze monsters. Honey badger? Mantis shrimp?

Nuclear waste

Short term nuclear waste storage and the problem with active maintenance. Long-term nuclear waste storage and keeping things safe after humanity. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages. The limits of language and pictograms. Designing for “bad vibes.”

This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

TMNT decayed costume nightmare fuel: Twitter
Why danger symbols can’t last forever by Vox & 99pi: YouTube
10 Thousand Years: 99% Invisible

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The Thirteenth Floor: Yo dawg I heard you liked the simulation hypothesis Jan 21, 2020

This movie

Yo dog, I heard you liked simulations. Server-room LAN rave parties. choosing your simulated period for fun, profit, and lack of complications.

Simulation

Plato’s shadows on a cave wall. Maybe shadows all the way down, and turtles all the way up! The simulatability of our perceived reality.

The argument

The simulation argument made distinct from the simulation hypothesis. Considering possible “great filters” that could prevent technological progress reaching the point where a reality simulation is possible.

Difficulties

The possible impossibility of simulating a whole universe in what may itself be a finite universe. Video game engine-corner cutting analogies for the reality sim. Kardashev scales and simulation ability.

Reality

But is it “real” and does it even matter? “I think therefore I am.” Mind uploading and downloading and VR “death.

Inception: iTunes Amazon
The Matrix: iTunes Amazon YouTube
The Matrix - green phosphors, neuroplasticity, and rejecting utopia w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi
The Truman Show - objects visible from space, dome megastructues, and reality testing: Decipher Scifi

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Highlander 2: time travel, aliens, and complete and utter nonsense w/ Joe Ruppel Jan 14, 2020

Mythology

Taking a simple mysterious mythology and explaining it for fun and profit*.

Meta

The original Highlander’s original, surprising success story. Deciding to make a sequel. Budgets and revenues and how did we get here, really?

Versions

Aliens vs time travel. The clincher: neither actually makes any more sense than the other.

People

Not only Connnor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, but ALSO his best friend who totally just died in the last movie. but hey, lol jk it’s a kind of magic. Ol’ Ironsides hamming it up and honestly stealing the show. Recasting Highlander 2 with characters from The Room. The 80s/90s: when bad guys were really bad guys and just didn’t need a reason.

The ozone layer

The actual environmental problem that the world actually got together amd potentially resolved! Fixing the ozone layer. The “shield” in the film and blocking all of the visible light in addition to the UV.

Scenes

Some scenes from this film were truly mind-boggling and/or amazing and it’s hard to tell which were which. Ironsides ham. The car scene, OR sacrificing Yoshi to make the jump. Sean Connery being rogueish/trash on a plane. Scottish fan-death. Offscreen sword-switching antics.

* not really very much profit tbh

Highlander 2 Fairytale Ending: YouTube
Highlander 2 BTS Interviews: YouTube
Sean Connery The Musical by legolambs: YouTube

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Decade in Review: privacy, computing everything, and torture toilets Jan 07, 2020

No spoilers this week! Just looking at all the scientific discoveries of the past decade and how that has or hasn’t played into the scifi we’ve covered.

1. Privacy & Cyberpunk

… and the illusion thereof. Snowden and the shattering of the illusion of privacy in the digital age. The world becoming the less awesome-looking irl version of cyberpunk. Workers as a resources. Torture toilets.

2. Machine learning

The biggest huge development in the pats decade which underlies every other things. Wowzers. Realizing the importance of the data going in, so you don’t get racist policing or image recognition. The availability of open tools, compute time, and learning resources.

3. Genetic editing

CRISPR! What will eventually result from this one?

4. Space

Water on Mars! So much more water than we thought. Greater accuracy in portrayals of space settlement. Increasing private industry in space.

5. Physics

Hey, an update on Einstein: still correct! Also… Gravity waves! Higgs-Boson! Imaging a black hole. The contributions of computing and storage technologies.

39. Human history

Confirmation of Sapiens and Neanderthal interbreeding in remaining modern humans. Discovering more extinct human varieties.

53. Technology

What happened to AR glasses!? The state of wearables. Recognizing that there are senses to augment other than our visual system.

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The Rise of Skywalker: the force, fan service, and blade-based wayfinding Dec 31, 2019

Whoops, a movie review

So the movie didn’t put in any cool science things and the only thing left to do is review it and talk about… feelings? Different viewing experiences between opening night and subsequent viewings.

Franchises

Fan service. Coherent extended story arcs. Reconsidering the prequel triloges in light of the new one. Indie IP ownership with one person in charge vs Disney. Realizing what a truly satisfying job disney did with Marvel. What made Star Wars different?

Oy vey

Bending over backwards to justify fantasy events, and how movies can deserve this treatment. Bringing in The Emperor at the end. Bringing back Leia with scraps of cut scenes and lots of over-the-shoulder conversation shots.

Exagol

How to hide a planet. How to hide a planet engaging in major empire-level engineering and construction projects. Hiding your Sith shipyard.

Tech

Technological stagnation. Miniaturization. Bad ways to encode spatial information. Knife-based wayfinding.

People

C3PO software limitations and an argument in favor of Free Software. Probably maybe lobotomizing your long-time companion without deliveration. The sith ecclesiastical cult language. Pointless characters. The writer explains how Rose got mostly cut from the film.

The Force

Force diads. Beavis and Butthead candy sale force-healing math. Adam Driver doing all the acting.

The Saga - Star Wars with Tommy Wiseau - The full story: YouTube

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No episode this week - happy holidays! Dec 24, 2019

In this Christmas story, Christopher gets very ill and then we are forced to push back our new Star Wars episode.

Sorry! Happy holidays!

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Ad Astra: nuclear spaceships, the edge of the solar system, and space monkeys Dec 17, 2019

Science…?!

Some things are more art than science sometimes.

Structures anchored to geostationary orbit

“Space antennas” but what kind of signal would benefit from this design? X-Rays? Why would this not be better off in orbit? The structure sure looks a lot like a space elevator. Space elevators and geostationary orbital masses.

Falling from space

It’s hard to steer without sufficient atmospheric density. Felix Baumgartner’s jump “from space.”

High energy blasting

Antimatter nonsense. Our increasing fragility in the face of an unlucky coronal mass ejection. Protecting infrastructure both inside and increasingly outside our atmosphere.

Moon settlement

Moon surface settlements vs moon gateways vs embarking to The Moon from low Earth orbit. Awesome moon buggy chases. Pirates!

Mars settlement

Communicating with and from Mars. Interplanetary distance and comms speed. Building settlements within Martian or Lunar lava tubes.

The heliopause

Finding the “edge” of our star system. Difference in concentration of high energy particles.

SETI

Looking for signs of life around other stars. Taking pictures of black holes. Planet-sized telescopes. The absurd distances from Earth to other stars. Vegemite in Australia. Absent of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Nuclear spaceships

Project Orion. Blowing up your spaceship because it doesn’t have a nuclear bomb-ready push plate.

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Spider-Man Far From Home: Venice, burying forests, and microphone proliferation Dec 10, 2019

VPNs

MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube.

Venice

How to build a whole city on mud. Transplanting alder forests from on some ground to under some other ground. Hard clay is worse than bedrock. Measuring a sinking city’s rate of subsidence with space-based radar and GPS. Climate change sure isn’t helping any. What value should we place on artifacts of human civilization? Losing UNESCO world heritage sites. The MOSE project. Climate change and rising sea levels. What will the world do?

VFX

Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes.

Smart glasses

Inward and outward-facing smart glass technologies. Wearable ubiquity. Evolution of “smart glasses” from Google Glass to Echo Frames. Magic Leap? Bone conduction and having discrete interactions with your personal assistant.

This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN by Tom Scott: YouTube
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magnetic monopolies w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi

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Thor Dark World: Finnish-ish, amphetamines, and weaponized gravity Dec 03, 2019

Background

Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella.

Language

Thor knowing All-Tongue, emitting pheromones, and doing the bee dance. The difficutly of universal language or language understanding. Finnishish conlanging. The cultural and linguistic juxtaposition between Scandinavia and Finland.

Alignment of worlds

Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.”

“Magic”

Our difficulties with magical realism. Asgardian “Smagic.” Apparent technology levels and technology so advanced it looks like magic. Bringing swords and shields to a lasergun fight.

Battle stimulation

Dosing for war. Uppers are very popular. The Finnish soldier who was the “first documented case of a soldier over overdosing on methamphetamines during combat.”

Black holes etc

“Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes.

Vikings

“Viking burials” but not like you thought. Tumuli/barrows/kurgans. Horned helmets.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Decipher SciFi
Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Decipher SciFi
Avengers Infinity War: Decipher SciFi
Black Panther: Decipher SciFi
Avengers Endgame: Decipher SciFi

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The Mandalorian: modern mythology, space toilets, and hairy rhinos Nov 26, 2019

Western

The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal.

“Real filmmaking”

Werner Herzog’s surprising(?) praise. “Real filmmaking” in the wake of the prequel trilogies. Wooden green-screen acting vs sweet puppets and actual human beings. Unreal Engine LED walls and volumetric projection and camera tracking.

Our new mythology

Star Wars as our new shared cultural mythology the world over. Concern about disney’s stewardship and the private ownership of our cultural heritage. Streamboat Willie entering The Commons.

Mandalorians

Some past famous Mandalorians, this particular Mandalorian, and martial prowess. Mandalorian history and why the Mandalorians are the only ones who figured out how to fight the space wizards for some reason?

Poop!

Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds.

Freezing in carbonite

Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze”

Robo slavery

Taking the most depressing angle on droid consciousness and freedom (or lack thereof). And then to make it worse: DRM!

Baby Yoda

Extra-long postnatal development. Big brains and incomplete gestation. Cuteness. Animatronics.

Hairy rhinos!

Elasmotherium. Whooly rhinos. Hiary…. eggs? Historical rhinos. Rhino evolution. Balut.

Elasmotherium prehistoric rhino Boris Dimitrov CC-BY-SA-3.0 Rhino sizes evolution chart DagdaMor CC-BY-3.0

The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk: Decipher SciFi
Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi

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Venom: comets, Von Neumann goo, and the alien brown note Nov 19, 2019

Decontamination protocols

NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight.

Comets

Some of the oldest things in our solar system and maybe the oldest things that we can reach. Leftovers from early solar system formation. The possibility of finding the precursors of life. Delineating between comets and asteroids. Fuzzy definitions. “Extinct” comets. Scales & tails.

Von Neumann Goo

Sending out of infected ice-balls and hoping someone notices. Like a tree! Just send your reproductive material everywhere and who cares who it lands on or gives allergies to.

Evil Jeff Bezos

Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity.

Sound

And magnets! The frequencies in which MRI machines are loudest, and the way that doesn’t line up with Venom’s sonic sensitivities. Resonance frequencies and alien “brown notes.”

Symbiosis

Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions that is symbiosis and its subcategories.

parasitism
commensalism
mutualism (Venom, but perhaps not his compatriots)

Bronson: iTunes Amazon
Locke: iTunes Amazon
Peaky Blinders: iTunes Amazon Netflix
Warrior: iTunes Amazon
The Dark Knight Rises: iTunes Amazon

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Terminator Dark Fate: surprises, developing humanity, and CORAL puns w/ Joe Ruppel Nov 12, 2019

Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun!

Meta

Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always.

Opener

No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines.

Human upgrades

Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts.

Robots taking our jobs

Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us.

Terminators, revisited

New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise.

Legion

Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms.

Humanity

Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative.

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Men in Black International: Eiffel, backfilling memory, space hacking Nov 05, 2019

Eiffel

LPT: you can get pommes frites in Europe. Could Eiffel have been an agent? The history of the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower’s science history. Cosmic rays. Wireless telepraphy (radio). Outliving its intended lifespan.

Aliens

Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO.

Space tracking

Increasing ability to track nearby space objects. Tracking objects in our solar system’s plane. The difficulty of tracking interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.”

A Danzig tale

justin: dude

Danzig lives next door to me in l.a.

down the street

and he is the worst neighbor ever

justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard

and the house looks like an evil pixar house

so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.”

and danzig was pissed

so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig

and finally one day

i see danzig outside

in his front yard

and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!”

Just super loud

to no one in particular

for two hours

it was amazing

like, i couldn’t even think about other things

because it was so amazing

me: oh my god

this is amazing

justin: dude

it blew my mind

because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner

Space security

Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes.

Stars!

Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales.

Memory

The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really.

Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam Ginty: Decipher SciFi
Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators Oct 29, 2019

Setup

Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!?

Species

The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons?

Water

The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants.

Voyager

Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover.

Replicators and teleporters

The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%?

Scales

Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe.

The Orville: iTunes Amazon Hulu

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On Decipher History: The Patriot Oct 22, 2019

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring some over-the-top colonial heroism, etc

The Patriot: heroism, invisible slavery, and cutting-edge chair technology

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Godzilla King of the Monsters: acoustic wildlife-tracking and moth superiority Oct 15, 2019

Titans

Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound.

Pre-civilization civilizations

The Silurian hypothesis thought experiment, especially as part of our Atlantis coverage. The increasing disappearability of the details of civilization as they raise their technological level.

Moths

Moths: way better than butterflies! Echolocation defense mechanisms. Corresponding bat appreciation in our A Quiet Place episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths.

Creature combos

Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art.

Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org
Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb: Decipher SciFi

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Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel Oct 08, 2019

The curse of the Terminator

Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies?

VFX

Twelve months to make a fake Arnold.

Time travel

Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything.

Skynet

Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again.

Terminators

A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was?

Kyle Reese

Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath.

Who wants to go do my mom

John Connor

Arnold

build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various messy strategies for re-encasing your robot arm in flesh.

Mortal Kombat 11 Kombat Pack – Official Terminator T-800 Gameplay Trailer: YouTube
Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys by Red Letter Media: YouTube

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On Decipher History: Gangs of New York Oct 01, 2019

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring gangs fights in 19th century New York, etc.

On Decipher History: Gangs of New York: history of The Five Points, immigration, and archaic criminal lingo

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Terminator Salvation: body donation, realistic time travel, and the legal shmegal defense w/ Joe Ruppel Sep 24, 2019

Is this a sequel? A prequel? Our progress in covering the entire Terminator series. The possibility of the future war trilogy, dashed.

Body donation

Donating your body to science. Body donation vs organ donation. Size and BMI standards. Medical education via cadaver. “Body brokers.” Why do blast testing on bodies? Are we learning to cure “acute dynamitism?”

Lethal injection

How to make a body unsuitable for whole-body donation. Donating to Terminator-science. Executions as disincentive. The role of the medieval executioner. How the guillotine was an early example of the robots taking our jerbs. Execution showmanship. The Ultimate Warrior was nuts.

Time travel

The only sorta realistic time travel in the whole Terminator series: pausing your exiistence and turning back on in the future! The nature of self, and the “legal schmegal” defense.

Terminators

The most human Terminator yet? Robocop vs Wolverine? Head transplant or body transplant? Terminator production volume and just-in-time delivery. The first T800. A T600 review. Austrian bodybuilders always make good Terminators.

Skynet

Technological anxieties over time through the Terminator series…. but not really in this one? Or are just jumping straight through to concern with AI takeoff? The Skynet-iest movie in the Terminator series, so far. Personifying Skynet. Explaining the human prisoner project with the design of the T800.

Madness

Amazing alternate endings that Chris is sad didn’t happen! Skinning John Connor, for fun and profit.

Terminator Salvation the Machinima Series: YouTube

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Species: alien bio-containment, the Arecibo message, and Von Neumann trolls Sep 17, 2019

Species

Wow there some really good movies in 1995! Geiger alien designs. Not “Alien,” but “alien.” This time, with nipples.

Ptosis

Forrest Whitaker. Chris’s history of eyelid laziness variability. Being either a dolphin or a flamingo. Eye farts?

The Arecibo Message

The limited utility of sending messages to aliens 25,000 light years away. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 toward the M13 globular cluster. A cluster containiner millions of stars. 1679 bits: not a lot of bits!

A colorized visualization of the 'Arecibo Message' sent in 1974 Arne Nordmann CC-BY-3.0 Bio-executable Von Neumann machines

Von Neumann trolls. Self-assembling bootstrapping biological systems. What if DNA is very common across life in the universe?

Containment

How to combine biological containment and prisoner containment. Lots of “fire” buttons. Biocontainment protocols. Integrating what we’ve learned from prison-escape movies. Considering the Magneto-vault.

Cocoons

Vulvic wall-pods. What the hell even is up with cocoons anyway? Cocoons are basically alien material already. The “soup method” of metamorphosis.

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Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines: hacking cars and supercomputing Skynet FLOPS w/ Joe Ruppel Sep 10, 2019

Meta

James Cameron blank checks and record-breaking budgets and payouts.

Arnold

Getting re-jacked to your original shape at 56 years old. Screening your movie at Saddam’s palace.

Terminators

The broadness of the term “nanotechnology.” Upgrading your liquid-metal nanotechss32 robots.

Data Collection

Placing this movie in the data collection timeline: after the dawn of big data digital government spying, but before smartphones when we willingly began to give up all the data. But there’s a Terminator movie for that too!

Hacking cars

Direct linkages in car systems. Driving by-wire. Hacking automobile computer systems. Wired hacking and modern wireless car hacks.

Technology progression

Finally, a Terminator in the age of the ubiquitous cell phone! Still not smartphones yet, but it’s a start! Hydrogen fuel cell failure modes and the danger of tiny hydrogen bombs. MRI dangers.

Skynet

AI escape scenarios. Supercomputing at “60 teraFLOPS” and wth is a “teraFLOPS” anyway? Computing power measurement and FLOP precisions. Recognizing the actual utility of supercomputers only becoms apparent with very paralellizable tasks.

Decipher History: Decipher Media
Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on a Highway by WIRED: YouTube

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On Decipher History: The Last Samurai w/ Isaac Meyer Sep 03, 2019

A small taste of our new episode of Decipher History to remind you to subscribe to the new show. This week featuring our new friend Isaac Meyer from The History of Japan Podcast!

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Roundtable: Colossus The Forbin Project w/ Chris Noessel, Damien Williams, and Jonathon Korman Aug 27, 2019

Weirdly prescient and quietly influential

AI portrayal in film. Recognizing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Command and control. Unintended consequences. Personal movie connections and impact decades before Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Game of Thrones??? 70s scifi cynicism.

Benevolent AI dictator

The Cold War and looming climate catastrophe. What are Colossus’ goals? What goals does it think it has?

AI Portrayal

Period conceptions of computing as centralized and institutional. Computing in the era of the first moon landing. The “big board.” Computer scientists a la Mad Men. Colossus as a Golem story. How to take over the world with no subterfuge or tact. Gendering AI.

Realism

Portrayal of telecommunications literally before the invention of networking. Packet switching was first implemented after the novel was written and only just before the film! Computer communication syntax. Computing language. Computer interfaces and code checking.

Getting weird

The books get weird. And weirder! How sometimes books are accidentally way better than their author is capable of.

Paperclip maximization

Colossus as utilitarian “peace maximizer.” Showing the monkeys the gun to get your point across.

Works by Madeline Ashby: Amazon
Person of Interest: iTunes Amazon Netflix

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Terminator 2: advanced puppetry, Skynet, and liquid nitrogen handling w/ Joe Ruppel Aug 20, 2019

People

Love and appreciation for the humans involved. James Cameron is amazing. Arnold, always our favorite. Linda Hamilton playing one of the most iconic characters in film. Robert Patrick doing the robot. James Cameron doing everything himself.

VFX

VFX and CG and the high shot counts for the time. The expense of CG and the appropriate use thereof. Budgets. Incredible animatronix! The value of high-quality practical FX from the 90s and how they hold up.

Ict hot stuntaz

Motorcycle jumping. Harley’s Fat Boy. Jumping into helicopters.

Technology

The Terminator series as a window into our concerns over technology in different decades. Computing miniaturization. Quantum stuff. Read-only Terminator modes, IRQ switching, and ro cassettes.

Terminators

Terminator models and designs. Possible Billy Idol T-1000, or Kyle Reese-bots. T-1000 shiny grey goo nanite flow robot.

Liquid Nitrogen

Pork chop sandwiches! Inert gas asphyxiation. Steam barriers, sugar work, and dipping your hand into hot lead.

T2 Stunt Trailer by Peter Kent: YouTube
The Forgotten Art of Blockbuster Cinema by Mike Hill: YouTube

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Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magnetic monopolies w/ Adrian Falcone Aug 13, 2019

Colliders

Particle collider scales. Increasing energies. Finding the Higgs Boson. Different ways of smashing things. Straight colliders, ring colliders, and rings so large they kinda seem straight at a certain scale. Adrian’s new area of expertise. “Natural experiments” in particle physics. Imagining future colliders and subsequent discoveries. Confirmation of supersymmetry. Probing the edges of the standard model.

Collider danger

Stragelets and black holes and other things that won’t happen. Anatoli Burgorski taking a load in the eye. Magnetic monopoles and winning “Magnetic Monopoly.”

Art!

OMG the art. Chromatic aberration. Offset printing errors. Smearing vs motion blur. Animating on “twos” or “threes” and the use of fluidity as a storytelling tool.

Spider-ones

Favorite Spiderman movie?

Exhalation by Ted Chiang: iTunes Amazon

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The Terminator: bootstrapping, machine uprising, and time traveling meatballs w/ Joe Ruppel Aug 06, 2019

People

James Cameron’s first film! And Arnold is amazing! The possibility of casting O.J. Simpson as the T-100. Harlan Ellison lawsuit.

Robots

The thawing of the AI winter of the 70s. Robots finally showing up in our lives and in the workplace. Terminator bootstrapping. Robotics and machine learning.

Skynet

The possibility of AI becoming “self-aware” or “conscious” and whether we even know what those things really mean. Big data feeding skynet.

Terminators

Jacked-up and oiled beefcake “infiltration” models. Franco Columbu. Robotic Ahhhhhnold blending in. The “rule of cool.” Feeding and maintaining a terminator’s “living tissue.”

Persistence of information

The persistence of human knowledge after the nuclear apocalypse. The fragility of magnetic storage media. Storing your data under a mountain. The weakness of encryption over time.

Time travel

How to not sound crazy when telling people in the past that you’re from the future. Meatball time travel. Using the “living tissue” time travel rule to transport large weapons into the past. Stuffing a whale or elephant. Realizing that maybe (probably), no one (not even SkyNet) has the slightest clue what they are doing with the time travel.

Harlan Ellison and the Terminator: YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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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Apocalypto: sacrificial practices, temples, and Mayan writing and math May 21, 2019

Criticisms and controversy

So yeah, Mel Gibson is bad. But then the movies are… really good? Trying to get past his framing. The tug of war between historical accuracy and entertainment. Anthropological criticism.

Deciphering history

The problem with burning nearly the entire written history of a people. Deciphering scant ancient texts. The remaining resources: art, stelae. Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

Periods

The Maya pre-classic, classic, and post-cassic periods. The scale of the height of Mayan civilization. The abruptness of its fall. The period in which the film takes place and the ways in which it is not actually entirely apparent. Classic-period pyramids in the post-classic era.

Science and math

The mixing of astronomy and astrology in the Mayan tracking of the heavenly bodies for religious purposes. The Mayan written mathematical system. “Inventing” zero. Extensive calendaring and that whole 2012 kerfuffle.

Civilizational decline

The factors that may have contributed to the Mayan collapse. Plaster and mortar production. Deforestation for fuel.

Aztec/Maya

The possibility for cultural confusion in the film. Aztec and Maya sacrificial practices.

The Case Study of Apocalypto by Richard D Hansen: ResearchGate
Apocalypto by History Buffs: YouTube

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Game of Thrones: medieval weaponry, variable winters, and final-season anxiety May 14, 2019

In which we discuss Game of Thrones right before the finale

The books

Appreciating GRRM. And appreciating him double and triple as the show goes on.

The setting

The middle ages. The “dark ages” and how much is that a misnomer? Magic and dragons stagnating technological progress. Volcanoes beat dragons in rock-paper-scissors. Air force exclusivity. Ancient artillery. Ballistae and Scorpions and the peak of human weaponry until the weaponization of gunpowder.

Winter is coming

Figuring out ways to make the seasons less predictable. Unsatisfying suggestions in axial precession and funny orbits. The possibility of the interplay of biology with climatological processes.

Disappointment and Predictons

Trying to understand, as we reach the conclusion, why the show feels so unsatisfying now. Why every turn of events feels so unearned. Predicting who will get the throne as of “The Last of the Starks.”

Game of Fuckin' Thrones by Anamanaguchi: YouTube
Nightflyers (SciFi!) & Other Stories by GRRM: iTunes Amazon

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Questions & Addenda #5: fermenting your pee, cute aggression, and centricities May 07, 2019

We got so much feedback over time from supporter Jeremy that we’re dedicating a whole Questions & Addenda episode to covering them. Just like that one time.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi [episode page]

Guerilla space warfare. The Star Wars Geneva Convention. Chinese gun powder weaponization. Resources and impoetus in the development of killing technologies.

Ready Player One [episode page]

Speed-of-light internet latency. EVE online strategies for fun and profit. “Sharding” as first-named in Ultima as a technical and storytelling solution.

Wall-E [episode page]

Wasting potable water. Saltwater pipe corrosion. Graywater toilets. Fermenting your pee and eating rotten shark that smells like pee.

Upgrade [episode page]

Automation in combat. “Cute aggression.” The “call of the void,” and the fear of the call of the void.

Doom [episode page]

Could you really spoil Doom, though? Navigating by the ecliptic in space. Playing Descent.

The Predator [episode page]

Savantism before the invention and eventual ubiquity of writing.

2036 Origin Unknown [episode page]

The wonder of centricities and the Greek pantheon. Using the wrong words for things. ASCII vs Unicode.

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz: Amazon
Media used: Heavy Metal Riff by tgfcoder: CC-BY
Media used:Retro Robot Thinking Sound by orginaljun: FreeSound CC-BY

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Avengers Endgame: Appreciating the enormity of the MCU Apr 30, 2019

A review

Spoiler alert: we liked this movie

Phase 1

Appreciating the establishment of the characters of Iron Man and Captain America. That grenade scene. Joss Whedon writing and directing teams of characters learning to work together. Realizing the first movie in the MCU came out in 2008. Realizing just how long ago 2008 was.

Phase 2

James Gunn appreciation (ps Super was really really good!). Guardians introducing a new level of comedy into the MCU.

Phase 3

Guardians dad feels. Our favorite MCU movies. Appreciating Spiderverse even though it doesn’t count.

Money and The Mouse

The huge money-making power of this franchise. A review of budgets and revenue in the MCU. Feeling conflicted about enjoying these otherwise-impossible projects while Disney slowly buys up the entirety of western media.

Time travel quantum gobbledlygook

Time travel. Single-timeline time travel vs branching-timelines. The classic scientific “Loki-Hypercube paradox.” Timeline diagram for Avengers: Endgame. Avoiding the Novikov self-consistency principle for paradox avoidance. The “Deutsch proposition.” Robbing Peter in one timeline to pay Paul in another. Playing the time travel genie to wish for more wishes.

Characters

Character growth. Going over Cap, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, etc. Observing how these characters have grown over time.

Past Coverage

Avengers: Endgame timeline diagram: imgur
Marvel movie budgets and box office revenue: Reddit
"The Limitations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe" by Patrick Willems Part 1: YouTube
"The Limitations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe" by Patrick Willems Part 2: YouTube

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After Earth: pheromones, murder-birds, and language evolution Apr 23, 2019

This movie

Not well reviewed. Will Smith’s “painful failure.” The real twist is the lack of explanation for things. Jaden Smith wisdom.

Accent and language

The future “language” in the film. The difference between accent and dialect. how languages change over time, by example. Trying to understand original spoken Shakespeare and generally succeeding. Trying to understand original spoken Beowulf and completely failing. The mutual intelligibility of Old Norse and Old English.

Creatures

Surprise! There are aliens and they want to kill us. Engineered animal-weapons (the “Ursa”). Improving the Ursa design: giving guns to blind animals for fun and profit. Komodo dragon-mode leeches. Evolving from parasite to hunter. The combat techniques of butt-spiking murderbirds (shrikes).

Pheromones

“Smelly handshakes.” Mammary pheromone response in human infants. Getting used to stinky things. Tales of accidental moth pheromone pranks.

Quarantine earth

Surprising evolutionary directions in the absence of humanity. Even a thousand years later, baboons still don’t appreciate getting hit with rocks.

Atmosphere

The dangers of low atmospheric oxygen. Using the top of Everest as marker for O2 danger. Climbing Everest in shorts.

Lion scent-marking with non-scientific audio: YouTube
Eddie Izzard "Babies on spikes" bit without any context: YouTube
"Butchering Bird" (the shrike): YouTube
In Our Time - Pheromones: BBC

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Back to the Future Part II: time travel options, retro futurism, and hip thrust combat w/ Daniel Barker Apr 16, 2019

Likenesses

The legal precedent set by Crispin Glover’s lawsuit against the production; folks are more careful these days as a result. “Grandma Tarkin.”

Rick & Morty

Rick & Morty’s original short lampooning Doc & Marty.

The future

The fun, friendly future where the alleyways are safer than the streets. Worrying about your future children and feeling disgusted by your teenage self. Pelvic thrusting fight technique.

Daniel Barker, former scene kid Time travel technique

Buying The almanac. Varieties of time travel: mutable, immutable, and branching. The way BTTF mixes these options at its leisure. The butterfly effect. Coping with the scale of possibilities. Strategic infanticide and Godwin’s Law.

Spacetime travel

Taking into account frames of reference. Appearing suddenly in near-vacuum if you don’t properly calibrate your time machine to also account for space travel. The importance of accurate time measurement e.g. Doctor Who The Movie. Destroying “the universe” but only the local area as causality here could not affect far away galaxies due to expansion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rational Optimism

Dan’s message welcoming Marty McFly to the future. Recognizing the overarching improvements in the wellbeing of humanity in the face of the negative newscycle.

Future things!

Bricking your self-lacing shoes. Keeping your shoes from joining a botnet. Self-smoking shirts. The periodic nature of futurism where “the future” always looks basically like now but with neato accessories. Hoverboard hoaxes and disappointments.

VFXcool: Back to the Future Trilogy by Captain Disillusion Part 1: YouTube
VFXcool: Back to the Future Trilogy by Captain Disillusion Part 2: YouTube
Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com
Welcome, Marty: Uncertainty Principle @ Soundclod

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Them!: nuclear optimism, amateur myrmecology, and Wilhelm-screaming w/ Joe Ruppel Apr 09, 2019

Rise of the nuclear monsters

The era of nuclear nervousness and the nuclear monsters in cinema. “Take an object, and biggify it.” Nuclear power in the 1950s. The possibility of “unmetered” energy. White Sands, gypsum, and the Trinity test.

Nuclear optimism

The nuclear success hit list and the optimism of the early 50s. Recognizing downsides. Converting hydrogen into helium, but like really violently. Eclipses, occlusion, and we didn’t realize it at the time but Joe was right to use “occultation.” Las Vegas atomic bomb parties.

Nuclear fallout

The fallout from southern Nevada testing traveling directly as far as northeast Utah. The bitter, metallic taste of nuclear fallout. When Kodak accidentally discovered a-bomb testing.

A sense of scale

The scale of nuclear weapons since the first atom bombs. Considering the time when “duck and cover” made sense. Using NUKEMAP for a sense of scale.

Ants

Issues with upscaling. Myrmecology. Antennae and wayfinding. Evolutoniary history and their waspy ancestors. Ants as superorganism. Formic acid attack spray.

Wargames: computers in the 80s, weapons to end all wars, and dinosaurs w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
Superman IV: Superman hair materials science, denuclearization, and pushing the moon w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
NUKEMAP: NuclearSecrecy.com

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Aquaman: cetaceans, riding sea animals, and the bends Apr 02, 2019

DCEU

Aquaman as a sign of possibility the of interesting things going forward in the DC Extended Universe. Sexy Jason Mamoa. Underwater Superman.

Atlantis

Unlimited power when everyone else thought the world was flat. Appreciating the innovation that was realizing the Earth was mostly spherical. Ancient Greek steam turbans. Eating raw fish and seaweed. the origins of sushi. The careful application of lava for removing parasites.

Sea mammals

Underwater echolocation. Communication by sound. The possibility of cetacean languages. Torpedo-shaped body plans and efficient insulation. Breathing fluids (but not sea water!).

Deep diving

Decompression sickness. Why you really don’t want bubbles in your fluids. The differing breath-holding techniques of whales at different depths. Whales that get decompression sickness.

Domesticating sea animals

The list of traits that make for good domesticatiion: “Friendly, feedable, fecund, and family-friendly” and how hard it might be to find the full set of traits in the ocean. The ultimate futility of trying to domesticate sharks.

Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube

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The Matrix: green phosphors, neuroplasticity, and rejecting utopia w/ Adrian Falcone Mar 26, 2019

This movie is awesome

It is! And also we’re old. But honestly this is still unironically the best thing. The legacy of the Matrix. Falling back in love with the Wachowskis. Addressing the sequels.

Cyberpunk

The Matrix as cyberpunk. Comparing against other touchstones. Philip K Dick. William Gibson’s review from the time.

When I began to write NEUROMANCER, there was no “cyberpunk”. THE MATRIX is arguably the ultimate “cyberpunk” artifact. Or will be, if the sequels don’t blow. I hope they don’t, and somehow have a hunch they won’t, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to worry about it.

-William Gibson, lol

Old school computing

Damn kids and their pixels. CRT displays and low/high persistence phosphorus and how we wound up irl with the bright glowing green text aesthetic that informed The Matrix. Eye fatigue back in the day. Computer-touchers. Staring at people at work for fun and profit. The Solarized color schemes.

The Matrix

Taking the red pill. How easy it actually really is to explain what The Matrix is. Neo is a giant, slimy baby. The inefficiencies of using humans as batteries when you have fusion power. Grass, tastes bad.

Benevolent AI Dictators

But WHAT IF The Matrix actually has humanity’s best interests in mind? The possibility that they really tried to give us our utopia.

Virtual worlds

Plasticity and your brain’s willingness to accept new input schemes. Designing The Matrix with a “failsafe” so the humans are unadapted to their physical bodies irl. Acquired synaesthesia. Supernumerary limbs and phallic cartwheels. Upside down goggles and adaptation to a new “up.” Permanence in sensory adaptations.

Hacking The Matrix

Bendable physics. The difficulty with bending or breaking the rules of computing hardware.

The Backwards Brain Bicycle by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
The Animatrix: iTunes Amazon YouTube
The Pizza Matrix (it's terrible): YouTube

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Atlantis: the Silurian hypothesis, ancient language, and updating the drake equation Mar 19, 2019

Myth and history

Getting past the nonsense. The reasonable idea that civilizations have in fact existed and then fallen, without notice by modern study. Rocking Like a Hurricane in the B.C. era.

Human history irl

Humanity circa 10,000 years ago. The beginnings of civilization. Early agriculture. Making beer and eventually bread. How not to make bread by putting beer in the oven. More Rocking Like a Hurricane. Just invent pants, beer, and bread and you’re off to a really solid start. “Why are pants, different than shirts?”

The Silurian Hypothesis

The Silurian Hypothesis. Imagining the difference in civilizational detectibility over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Thinking like ze dolphin. Plastic permanence. Climate impacts written into geology. Radiological evidence.

Proto Indo European

The “Atlantean” conlang. Marc Okrand and Klingon. Language before language was written down. How we figure out anything about a language from 6500 years ago that is no longer spoken and was never written down.

Links

Atlantis: iTunes | Amazon Prime Video The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?: arXiv.org

The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?: arXiv.org

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Prospect: sleep rhythm, amputation, and meat-sack organic gemstones Mar 12, 2019

Indie scifi

Impressive shoestring productions. Remembering Moon. Lived-in duct-tape science fiction.

Sleep cycles

Circadian rhythms. Setting our clocks by light exposure. Light exposure and activity levels. Wearing your sunglasses at night. Different varieties of blindness and sleep rhythms. Retinal sensitivity to light.

Space prospectin’

Alien meat-testicle gems. Personal testicular security systems. Organic gemstones. Pearl production. How attractive our kidney stones might be to alien speculators. “Real” utility vs perceived value.

Wound handling

Wound sealing. Stopping bleeding in an emergency with caulking foam. Packing a wound full of tiny tampons. Failed experiments in would sealing with: beads, marbles, beans, etc. Amputation history. Ancient Greek amputation practices and efficiency records in the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars.

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Superman IV: Superman hair materials science, denuclearization, and pushing the moon w/ Jolene Creighton Mar 05, 2019

A review

This was the best worst thing we’ve ever seen. I’m sorry. You’re welcome?

Space tricks

Leaving whole rocket stages to just kinda be in orbit and hit stuff. Talking in space by providing your own atmosphere thanks to your incredible, super lung capacity. Also, how that doesn’t work and Superman needs to be a close talker and hold conversations by vibrating his mouth directly on someone else’s spacesuit helmet.

Superman bodily materials

The hair that can hold at least a half ton. How does Superman cut his hair? Introducing weird gnarly alternate Superman with really long hair and uncut fingernails. Donating Superman’s bits to materials science. Making things out of hair. Totally realistic space elevator musings. Superman as a launch platform. Dissecting the Man of Steel for fun and profit. Using Superman for “free energy” (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal).

Super-denuclearization

Superman’s built-in orbital mechanics skills. The tiny bit of nothing that would be all of 1987’s nuclear world arsenal against the power of the sun. The relative tiny-ness of the only nuclear weapons ever used in war. Proposals for nuclear de-proliferation. Going Dr Manhattan on the problem.

A bunch of stuff oh god this movie was silly

Nuclear Man’s totally fab nails. The golden crotch-trim on his super suit. Plugging a volcano. Superman’s “brick vision.” Slowing things down, because the moon has “less gravity.” It’s obvious, really. The actual disasters that await us if Superman pushed the Moon away.

Nukemap: Nuclear Secrecy
Superman IV deleted scene "Nuclear Man 1": YouTube
Jolene @ FoL: Future of Life

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The Wandering Earth: altered goldilocks zones, Earth's heat budget, and smuggling pickles in your pants Feb 26, 2019

Life and death of a star

A hundred years to uninhabitability is a little bit quicker than we thought. Timelines here to red dwarf and all the unpleasantness in between.

Probing your star

The surprising difficulty of actually reaching the sun. The Parker Solar Probe. Taking a close peek at the corona and the young solar wind. Close as in millions of miles.

Moving Earth

Shifting circumstellar habitability zones. Moving the planet out nearer Jupiter as our sun expands. Throwing moderation to the wind and ditching the solar system. Tidal forces.

Planetary travel in deep space

Relativistic impact vulnerability. Appreciating Earth’s protected position within the heliosphere, blocked from impactors by two gas giants and its own moon.

Earth’s new home

Traveling across deep space with no sun. If you dig deep enough, mayyyyyyybe Kelvin’s “secular cooling” would keep everybody warm for the trip. Signing up for some eye shine. The three-body problem.

Going deep

Living underground. Shielding from the radiation and frigid cold of deep space with kilometers and kilometers of Earth. Learning to eat lots of algae, crickets, and fungus. Taking advantage of geothermal energy at depth. Dealing with Earthquakes while being under some of them. The safety of tunnels.

Space station

Smuggling pickles in your pants into space. And maybe some vodka or cognac. “Who wants a warm pickle?”

The AMAZING Design of the Parker Solar Probe by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin: iTunes Amazon
The Wandering Earth (book) by Liu Cixin: Amazon

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Q&A #4: Answering your questions and appreciating our friends Feb 19, 2019

You folks asked us a bunch of questions. And we gave a bunch of answers!

I’ll leave the actual Questions and Answers to be listened to in the episode, but we did mention some resources etc which I’ll link below…

Past History coverage

To whet your appetite if you’re as excited as us about the possibility of Decipher History:

Outlander with Lee from Viking Age Podcast
The Mummy and Stargate with Dominic Perry from History of Egypt Podcast
And a bunch of things like Conan the Barbarian Hidden Figures The Time Machine War of the Worlds and a bunch more with Joe Ruppel

Podcasting advice

“Just make stuff!” But then for technical details for other Linux podcasters, my dotfiles (application configurations) are shared openly on Github. Files and scripts relevant specifically to our podcasting are probably all mentioned here.

Free software and licenses

Creative Commons and free software and making the world better by helping more people make their stuff.

Episode image made using: A Nice Cartoon Guy Filming A Live Marketing Video by Free Clip Art, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Fake Studio by Josh Hallett, CC-BY 2.0

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The Expanse Season 3: low-g gardening, high-g deceleration, and more poop potatoes w/ Fraser Cain Feb 12, 2019

Past coverage

We like this show lots! Thus, our continuing coverage:

Difficulties

The oft-overlooked actual difficulties of space settlement. Not technology and logistics, but like, how hard it will likely be for the humans doing the job at first. And second. And then for a while after, too.

Plants in spaaaaaaaace

Growing fresh food in space habitats. Poop-potatoes. Wide-spectrum LEDs. Self-contained hydroponics/aeroponics.

Low-g situations

People in spaaaaaaaaace. Dealing with microgravity. Bro, do you even lift in space? Eyeball un-squishing. Figuring out how to burp. Fluid-pooling and major injury.

High-g situations.

Turning people into jelly. Differing human sensitivity to sustained g-forces in different directions. The wonderful engineering concept of the ship with omnidirectional seating that reconfigures on-the-fly for optimal g-resistance (The Razorback).

High-speed space impact

Turning into jelly and then having your jelly explode your ship, because physics. Relativistic baseballs. Long-haul space-racing and how to be your own butt-wiping pit crew.

Kinetic weapon diplomacy

Nuclear non-proliferation treaties in space. Orbital kinetic weapons and cloaked nuke-ships playing the role of the submarine as deterrent.

Interstellar highway program

Minimum viable star system bootstrap answering machine. The Fermi paradox. The odds that most of the signs of alien civilization that we might discover would be past.

The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Viewing The Cosmos: Everything You Need to Know to Become an Amateur Astronomer by David Dickinson & Fraser Cain: Amazon
The Expanse Season 3: Amazon
Guide to Space by Fraser Cain: YouTube

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Total Recall - top-notch Arnold, muscle memory, and how not to settle Mars w/ Josh Feb 05, 2019

Man meat

Ahhhhnold! Your average Joe, working construction just like any other regular guy who is a giant bodybuilding monster-person. We really missed this in our coverage of Total Recall 2012.

Memory

Memory “insertion” and memory “deletion” or “blocking” in mouse studies. The great distance from where we are now to trivial memory “vacations” a la Recall. Semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and muscle memory.

Tracking devices

Ideal tracking-implantation locations. The incredible utility of the anus for tracker storage, weighed against the small time window.

Mars

Building Martian settlements with as much radiation exposure as possible: glass! glass everywhere! Radiation exposure on the Martian surface. Burying your dead on Mars: a tasteful resource-wasting mausoleum indoors, a giant pile of bleached-out mummies outside the door, or arrange them in awesome poses?

Space Resources

Natural resources in space. Calculating mining cost vs cost to get it where it will be useful. Mining and transporting Helium-3 for fusion energy. Harvesting oxygen from frozen water and getting rocket fuel as a bonus. NASA’s Moxie and inventing trees for spaaaaace. Making your Martian habitat smell like a dirty fish tank, for science.

The X-Files Podcast (featuring Josh always): LSG Media
Science Fiction Film Podcast (featuring Josh sometimes): LSG Media

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They Shall Not Grow Old: film restoration, persistance of vision, and vfx Jan 29, 2019

Review

Well, we don’t normally do this sorta thing, but oh man this was so good! What the film is about, how it is about, and why it was so special. Appreciating those who do the best work of making history relatable (cough Dan Carlin cough).

Restoration

Film degradation. Scratching, exposure, shrinkage, physical tearing. The crapshoot that is video frame rates in early 20th century film footage. Crank cameras and gearing and compressed-air constant-framerate cameras. Correcting for all of this and the challenge of bringing it all up to a standard 24 fps.

Film is an illusion

The optical illusion that we perceive as movement on a screen. Persistence of vision. Video framerates and the “refresh rate” of the human eye. Motion interpolation as an offense against art and all things good. Tom Cruise fighting the good fight. Motion interpolation as a really neato technology which is actually really cool when not on by default on new televisions. Motion interpolation in VR or video games.

Academic controversy

Historian types and objections to the “enhancements” introduced by the filmmakers. Art vs education and the importance of relatability. Modernizing history. Colorization. 3d-ification. Finding it hard to complain about digital enhancement and remastering which leaves the original materials untouched.

"YOU WONT BELIEVE YOUR EYES!" by Smarter Every Day: YouTube

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2036 Origin Unknown: ion propulsion, dust storms, and how to speak Greek in orbit Jan 22, 2019

Ion Drive

Compounding acceleration in the relative vacuum of space. Incredible efficiencies versus chemical rockets, and the very low force produced making it only appropriate once spaceborn. The differing problems solved by chemical rockets and ion drives. The benefit of ion drive once out of Earth’s gravity well and going far away. Earth’s tectonic plates, slowly building up to escape velocity. That beautiful blue glow. “Ionic wind” aircraft in-atmosphere: a completely silent aircraft motor with no moving parts!

Landing in spaaaaace

Methods of landing on Mars: Aeroshells, parachutes, rockets, and balloons. Past examples. Different bodies in space and their particular atmospheric densities, atmospheric conditions, and gravitational acceleration.

Nuclear power solutions

Nuclear power vs solar cells. People’s presumption of full-on nuclear reactors rather than the smaller and less-efficient radioisotope thermoelectric generators like on Curiosity. Wondering why we don’t use tiny nuclear robots to blow the dust off of the solar robots. NASA, call us for more great ideas.

Dust storms

Martian dust storms. The low density and force of Martian dust storms, contrary to popular depictions. The visual impressiveness of huge Martian dust storms from space relative to actual effect. The (low) density of the Martian atmosphere and its make-up. How 60mph dust storms are are actually not that powerful: with low gravitational acceleration, static charge, it is very very easy it is to keep dust particles aloft.

Orbital centricity words

The revelation that “geocentric” and “geostationary” apply very specifically to only Earth and there are other words particular to the other major bodies in our solar system. All of the other centricity classifications, including Arecentric for Mars as in the film (though they don’t use it).

Hypoxia

Hypoxia and inability to give detailed instructions to your AI on how to disperse the spirit of humanity into the universe.

How Do Ion Engines Work? The Most Efficient Propulsion System Out There by Fraser Cain: YouTube
Why You Should Put YOUR MASK On First (My Brain Without Oxygen) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube

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Total Recall 2012: falling through the planet, 3d scanning, and lasers in your eyes Jan 15, 2019

Philip K Dick

Giving’em the old Philip K Dick joint. Cyberpunk. Adaptation fidelity.

Even though it looks like it’s the future…

Luminescent tattoos! Bioluminescence, electroluminescence, phosphorescence, and maybe some other -escences too! A world with three boobs. Well, maybe more than that in the whole world. Hand phones. Ubiquitous smart glass. Neck-mounted face-replacing direct-eye laser projectors. Memory manipulation and deletion.

“The Fall”

Digging a hole through the Earth. Trying to find hard things to do when building a space elevator is too easy. Adding unnecessary rockets to your earth-faller to reach a seventeen minute trip time. Digging deep in the Earth and heat issues. Finding impenetrable hot rock stew even without piercing the crust. Atmospheric pressure in the center of the Earth. Making it work by vacuum tube. The one easy straight line through the Earth that avoids the Coriolis effect, and the actually useful curved lines between land areas.

3d space-scanning

Camera rocket grenades that explode into camera bullets. Like a camera, but more messy. IR scanning. Two-dimensional room-mapping by Roomba. Photogrammetry. Playing VR hentai sex games in your room, in your room.

FACE SWAP by David Gidali: Vimeo

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The Predator: glistening biceps, savant syndrome, and first contact w/ Josh Jan 08, 2019

Action heroes

Glistening, rippling man-meat. Sweaty pecs. Aggressive handshakes with biceps the size of coconuts. Longing for the good old days. Feeling unjustified disappointment when our heroes aren’t giant walking meat monsters. The inapplicability of the bodybuilder physique to actually getting hero stuff done. Bodylifting.

Savantism

“Savant syndrome is a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average” -Wiki. As opposed to someone just simply being awesome at something. Josh’s recent related coverage from The X-Files Podcast @ LSG Media. Acquired savantism. Aptitude for… alien user interfaces? Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation.

Nerddom

Chess club vs computer club. Afterschool D&D. Duke Nukem and Team Fortress LAN parties at school.

Predator

Predator vs prey. Linguistically, should they be called “predator” if they hunt mainly for sport? “Predator” as a label for a biological relationship in which one creatures hunts and eats another for sustenance. The deadliest cat in the world. Humans as top “predator.” How to judge top predator when the line is not so clear cut.

Alien contact

Survey of movie alien contact scenarios and what they reveal about us. Energy required for interstellar travel and the likelihood anyone will happen by by accident. Government secrecy. Zip tie budgets and how to keep an alien captive. irl tranquilizer dart use and the inherent dangers. Why not to shoot yourself with an alien tranquilizer dose.

Building the megapredator

Selecting desirable traits from around the cosmos. Leave enough room for my stomach. Spinal juice collection. Gene manipulation. Selecting for intellectual traits: competitive science. Interpretive flex-dancing to enable armor modes.

Predator-killer

Reasonable solutions to the predator problem. The fix for climate change (fusion?). Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Terminator integrated with The Predator, Aliens, and Blade Runner. How awesome was the original predator?

The X-Files Podcast: LSG Media
Meet the Deadliest Cat on the Planet: YouTube

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Doctor Who: the Y2K scare, supernumerary hearts, and the utility of atomic clocks Dec 31, 2018

Doctor Who

Not a lot of Doctor Who experience at the table here. Recognition of the Moffat era. Finding a single, self-contained Who unit to use as an entrée. James McAvoy.

Millenium

Pedantic note: the millenium wouldn’t really start until 2001. Colbert gets to be the jerk for once.

Y2K

Numeronyms. Alternate terms: CDC, FADL. How we got here (there, then?). Limits on data storage and memory over time that make two-digit date storage actually seem kinda reasonable. Y2K38, aka the Unix millnium bug. The horrors of datetime in software and can you imagine the pain of writing this code for time travel. Standard datetime epochs: unix epoch, planet epoch, and time-since-the-big-bang epoch. We’re gonna need a lot more memory.

Multiple hearts

Doctor Who has got a lot of heart. But also he has literally two hearts. Animals irl on Earth with multiple “hearts.” Octopus (3), hagfish (4). The role of auxiliary “hearts” in these animals. Human heart grafting in heterotopic aka “piggy-back” heart transplants.

Atomic clocks

The history of time-measurement accuracy. From sundials to Hugens’ pendulum to modern atomic clocks. Appreciating GPS and understanding how atomic clocks are integral to their function.

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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Dolphin communication, the babelfish, and bad AI Dec 24, 2018

Adaptations

Appreciating the book(s). Bigtime. Adapting Douglas Adams. Remembering the text adventure video game exists.

Dolphins

Dolphin intelligence. It’s not about how smart they are, it’s about how they’re smart. Mammalian sameness as an avenue into better understanding life in the sea. Dolphin communication. Dolphin “language” and the possibility of translation. The Dolphin C.H.A.T. interface.

Betelgeuse

Big star! Red supergiant, 9th brightest in our sky. “Brightness” outside the visible spectrum. Dying stars gnoshing on their planets before going off.

Life form dominance

Metal boxes, taking over the planet and slowly digesting the soft squishy things inside them. Street Fighter-style car-breaking. How to judge the “top” species of a world.

Babel fish

Universal translators. A visit from Nick Farmer from the past, when we asked him about universal translators in our Q&A #2.

Space is big

Mind-bogglingly big! The bigness of space and the difficulty in finding a sense of scale from a human perspective.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

-Douglas Adams

AI

Doors deriving sexual pleasure from providing their service. Polar opposite extreme AI demeanors. Deep Thought and AI constraints.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Game: BBC Radio 4
DRONE Solar System Model by Mark Rober: YouTube
VFX Artist Reveals the True Scale of the Universe by Corridor Digital: YouTube

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Akira: mind bullets, evolution, and odd horsepower calculations w/ Jolene Creighton Dec 18, 2018

Akira

Hey this movie was really important! Time and place. Budgets. Omg so pretty.

Subtitles

Subtitling adult anime for the west. Translation vs localization. Different industries and approaches to localization. Software localization in comparison to film localization. Fansubs online before the likes of Crunchyroll.

Motorcycles

Horsepower! Sweet motorcycles. High-speed motorcycle attacks. Turning people into “mushwater.”

Funiculars

giant slidey freight elevators. Also mountainside trams. Related words:

Funicular is Latin for cord
Funiculus is Latin for umbilical cord
Umbilicus is Latin for navel

Waterways

Underwater or otherwise. Rivers vs sewers. The Tokyo sewer and transport overhaul preceding the 1964 Olympics. The inefficiency of poop-sucking truck fleets. Traveling in sewers and dysentery avoidance.

Psi powers

Creepy, wrinkly children. Psi floaty chairs, the escalator of chairs! When operational, their ares a floaty chair. When they fail, they are… a comfortable chair.

Mind bullets

Obvious thing to do: government research into mind-bullets. Surprising thing: when it works. Even more surprising: when it works so well it blows up Tokyo and starts World War III.

The future of humanity

Evolutionary milestones. Latent abilities. Guided evolution. Atavism.

Laser guns

Laser rifles! Conventions against blinding weapons. Tricking the enemy into rout with elaborate eyepatches. Recognizing the obvious advantages of space lasers. Space-based light concentrators. The difficulties of penetrating atmosphere with space-based lasers. Space lasers for space junk cleanup (Kurtzgesagt).

Blobby guy

Overloading on mind bullets and turning into a big blobby guy before going all mini-singularity. Crushing your girlfriend in your fleshy bits.

Decipher SciFi animated scifi posters: Twitter
AKIRA: How To Animate Light by Nerdwriter1: YouTube

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Close Encounters: alien contact, debunking, and music communication Dec 11, 2018

Contact

“Levels” of alien contact. Converting anal probes and sex bases to contact “levels.”

First kind: visual contact
Second kind: evidence of contact
Third kind: in-person contact

The Devil’s Tower

How to pronounce butte. Convention vs personal preference. The awesome nature of structures like The Devil’s Tower, jutting up all inaccessible as they are. Translation errors for fun and profit. Thinking back to Schiaparelli’s canals. Geological origins: igneous intrusions and volcanic butte plugs.

“Sunburn”

Ultraviolet effects on body tissues. What is a sunburn? Arc welding and ultraviolet exposure: “arc eye.”

Debunking things

Shying away from debunking. Appreciating folks who cross boundaries and make deeply interesting informative generally-useful critical thinking-training material, like Captain Disillusion. Credulity and our personal predispositions.

SETI

Appreciating a scientific, rigorous approach to finding intelligent life in the cosmos.

Communicating with aliens

Randomness in space signals. Encoded information, decipherable to latitude and longitude. Past sightings of alien information encoding on Decipher SciFi: Arrival (part 1, part 2), Contact. Math! alien tonal communication.

Music! The Tones!

Music as math. Considering the tiny slice of reality in which we operate. Considering the universality in physics of the mathematical relationships between vibrations. Caelum Rale’s mathematical musical perspective. Making sense of the noise of the universe and demonstrating intelligence across vast distances.

Captain Disillusion: YouTube
Escherian Stairwell Deconstruction by Captain Disillusion: YouTube

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The Titan: adapting vs terraforming Titan, individual adaptations Dec 04, 2018

Titan

The most interesting moon ‘round Saturn! Viewing the moon Titan by eye or by telescope. Protip: bincolulars are actually just two tiny telescopes.

Saturn

The Saturnian hexagonal storm vs the larger Jovian storm. Latitudinal wind gradients.

Adaptation

Adapting the world to our needs. The possibility of adapting ourselves to a world. Inhospitality. Ethiopian, Tibetan, and Andean elevation adaptation. Andean vampires?

Titan Habitability

Atmosphere. Temperature. Breathability. Tidal locking and avoiding tidal locking with Jupiter. Frozen and liquid water! Methane oceans. No shortage of atmospheres in our solar system, but we’re short on good ones.

Probing titan

The Huygens probe. Proposed future Titan exploration projects.Drones, submarines, floatydrones, sinkydrones, etc.

Weather

Titanian weather gets bigs! Large methane rainstorms, but really only after decaded or centuries of drought. Energy availability so far from the sun.

Hominoforming

Who needs oxygen? Apnea training irl. Suck-tubes. Eventually breathing methane. Cat eyes vs shark eyes and which is best for a flying lizardman.

Evil scientist

Space Moreau, or Space Mengele? Space Merengele? Individual plasticity. Creating the ultimate MMA alien creature thing. Modeling after Bas Rutten. The final mutation hogdepodge. Bat-lats. Human flight on Titan.

What About a Mission to Titan? It's Time to Explore Saturn's Largest Moon by Fraser Cain: YouTube

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Blade: blood, colloidal silver aposematism, and scoville testing Nov 27, 2018

Blade

Enthusiasm!

Silver

Weaponizing silver. Colloidal silver. Papa Smurf. Blue anti-vampire aposematism. Agyria a la Paul Karason aka Papa smurf.

Spray defense

Pepper spray. Garlic spray. The difference between bear spray and self-defense pepper spray. The positives and negatives of fog-mode sprays in vampire club fighting. Johnny Knoxville pain ratings.

Scoville units

Laboratory capsaicin measurement by high-performance liquid chromatography vs the organoleptic method. The obvious unreliability of the original organoleptic (tasting) method.

Blood

Blooooood. Blood drinking. Hemoglobin deficiencies. Heme. Porphyria and the vampire legend. Blood doping.

Sun block

Vampires and ultraviolet sensitivity. “Chemical” and “physical” UV sunblocks.

Decipherment

Decipherment vs translation. Ancient manuscripts. Multispectral imaging. Machine learning supremacy. Making random noise until you know how to play Mario.

The World in UV by Veritassium: YouTube
Sunscreen in UV by Physics Girl: YouTube
Red Bull Crashed Ice 2012 Uphill Race: YouTube

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I Origins: rationality, eyeballs, and biometric ID w/ Daniel Barker Nov 20, 2018

Eyeball anatomy

All the important parts, wherever they are! Who really cares anyway we’re only here for two in particular: the iris and the retina. The retinal blind spot.

Creationism

And intelligent design. Are wrong. Reaching conclusions and working backwards for fun and profit. Young Earth creationism. Dan’s religious upbringing. Irreducible complexity. Faulty reasoning.

The evolution of the modern vertebrate eyeball

Fish and their goofy eyeball arrangements. The crazy Charlie eyeball progress chart. Light sensitive flat patches, pits, enclosures, open pinhole eyeballs, lenses, and flexing your sphincters. Dan’s episode on Three-D Vision. Pepe Silvia eyeball evolution.

Comparative eyeball studies

Human eyes are pretty sweet! But there other ones that do other things (at their own local summits on Mount Improbable) and are also really good at stuff! Goats, sharks, snakes (sorta), bees. Removing your lenses for fun and profit. Monet’s lens removal and ultraviolet perception.

Eyeball shortcomings

Common “colorblindness” is a misnomer, but “color discernment syndrome” doesn’t flow as well. Retinal wiring and the “blind spot.” Saccades. “Chronostasis” or “the stopped clock illusion” and the tight coupling of our eyes and our brains.

Bio-identification

Selecting scanning sites for statistical uniqueness and natural resistance to hacking. The insufficiency of fingerprints. Iris scans. Retinal scans. Bio-identification security. Ease of use.

Rationality

Rationalism/spiritualism/etc. The rational scientific worldview and self-correction. The absolution of new knowledge.

Richard Dawkins demonstrates the evolution of the eye: YouTube
Daniel James Barker's Podcast: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
Welcome, Marty - a special short episode: Uncertainty Principle The Podcast

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The Meg: claspers, megalodon teeth, and shark proponency w/ Melissa Marquez Nov 13, 2018

Sharks

A sharky public service message/pro-shark propaganda. Sharks get a bad wrap in the media. Eating weird stuff. The importance of sharks in the ocean and their roles in their particular ecosystems.

Shark behaviour

Biting the internet. Alternative shark species name suggestions. “Exploratory” biting. Claspers! The Megalodon’s likely “biiiiiiiiiig” penis. Shark skin with dermal denticles, aka “teeth paper.” Shark intelligence and how you might measure it.

The Megalodon

Irl best estimates of megalodon size vs the creatures of the film. Limited fossil data and cartilaginous skeletons. Learning from paleoarchaeological study of ancient shark relatives with more calcified skeletal material. Working backward from the modern shark bodyform. Ancient buzzsaw-mouthed monsters. The importance of teeth.

Helicoprion ДиБгд CC-BY-SA-4.0 The Marianas Trench

Pressure and darkness at depth. Adaptations to pressure and darkness. Odd, squishy creatures. Blob fish as the gudetama of the sea.

Blob fishes, out of their element AFSC CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 Conservation

Shark public image management. Sharks with eyebrows.

Melissa's Chondrichthyan-promotion organization: The Fins United Initiative
Melissa's podcast: ConCiencia Azul

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Decipher SciFi State of the Union 2018 Nov 08, 2018

In which we look at your survey responses and reveal where we’re headed in the coming year

Listening habits
RPG experience
Nerd gatherings and meeting listeners irl
Creator support
LSG Media appreciation party
Guest co-hosts
Suggestion box
Future expansion recommendations (Decipher History!?)

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Sorry to Bother You: code switching, indie media, and the power of scifi w/ Eliot Peper Nov 06, 2018

This movie

It gets a bit weird! And we have a bit of a time summarizing it.

Storytelling

Adventure stories. Social allegory. The power of science fiction in particular to force you to reframe your perception by believably breaking your assumptions. HG Wells and Moreau. Science fiction tropes and the subversion thereof. Christopher is bad at human things.

Code Switching

Languages, dialect, and speaking to your audience. “Not having to think about it.”

Media

Mass media vs indie communities. The lowest common denominator. Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans.

Milk stuff

A lament for the concentration on cow’s milk. Mare milk. Fermented milk products from cows and horses.

Bandwidth by Eliot Peper: Amazon
Borderless by Eliot Peper: Amazon
Key & Peele Obama Meet & Greet: YouTube
Key & Peele on Code Switching: YouTube

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eXistenZ: reality testing, biocomputing, and gross stuff Oct 30, 2018

Cronenberg

Creepy body horror. Fingers in holes. This is kinda hot.

The video game industry

Gaming in film. Brainscan. The video game bubble. E.T. The Video Game landfill debacle. AAA Game budgets before people took the industry seriously. AAA Auteur creators of the past. Auteur creators in indie games now.

Meat guns

Wooden cannons! Wow! Harvesting ammunition from people’s mouths. Bio-based squirt guns as a reasonable alternative. Blood-squirting lizards.

Alternative computing

Biological computing: mechanical, electrical, and chemical. Quantum supremacy. Nipple interfaces and umbilicals.

Neural interfaces

Neural interface placements. Spinal connections and how to interact with the sensory loop. Bodily orifice security defenses. Sphincters vs meatuses.

Reality

But how do we tell what is real anyway!? The power of storytelling, even when you know it’s not real. Railroading. Milgram experiment the game.

War Stories by Ars Technica: YouTube
GDC Classic Game Postmortems: YouTube

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Pacific Rim Uprising: drone jamming, the aircraft boneyard, and cerebral organoids Oct 23, 2018

Robot police

Keeping the peace when independent operations can make their own giant robots. Staying somewhat prepared for returning existential threats.

Jaeger graveyard

Stowing expensive purpose-built machinery. Aircraft graveyards. The economics of storing and securing out-of-production technology for later use.

Robotics

Avoiding trouble with the square-cube law by building smaller robots. Boston Dynamics and the inevitable impression of the coming robot apocalypse. Parkour Atlas. Robot kumite.

Drones

Securing mobile war machines. EMPs. Resistance to signal-jamming. Broad attack surfaces.

Brain in a jar

IRL progress towards a brain in a jar: human brain organoids implanted on a mouse brain. Sensory apparatus and feeling pain. Getting (ethically) hairy.

Rare earth elements

Actually: not so rare! But a pain in the ass to extract. The Japanese rare earth ocean-bottom treasure trove and how it will be difficult to access. Mining rare earth elements from spaaaaaaaace and how we probably need a new colloquial name for these materials. Underwater volcanoes.

Jaeger blood rocket fuel

Magical Jaeger blood rocker fuel. Gravity gun space race. Keeping Earth as a farm for kaiju blood, fueling our expansion into the entire solar system. Throwing rocks at things for fun and profit.

Pacific Rim: square cube law, giant death robot, and Earth terraforming w/ Stephen Granade: Decipher SciFi
Atlas Parkour: YouTube
Rayguns and Robots (Curly Phil): Instagram
Batch 25 Comics (Andy P): Instagram

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Gravity: decompression sickness, orbital mechanics, and jet chairs Oct 16, 2018

Criticism

Sloppy orbital mechanics and the value of science-adjacent entertainment.

Ed Harris

Forever the voice of Mission Control.

Space is dangerous

Almost as scary as the ocean.

EVA jet chairs

NASA’s MMU. The new tiny one: SAFER! Giant rectal rectangle jet chairs?

Where and how things orbit

Earth-orbital distances. Where different kinds of man-made satellites operation and how they are not likely to run into each other roughly ever. The utility of geostationary orbits. Earth orbits.

Orbital impacts

Relative velocities. Could you dodge a sniper bullet? IRL ISS escape procedures. Soyuz escape plans.

Deadspin

Glowing blood and possible alien infections. Human sensitivity to positive and negative g-forces. Trying to push more blood to your head for mental superpowers.

Orbital transfer

And impromptu deorbiting. How to crash a probe into mars (by accident).

Pressurization

Chinese space stations, then and now. Station entrance and exit procedures. Finally the Star Trek balloon analogy comes in handy! Decompression sickness/the bends during EVA. Portable life support systems. Sokol and ACES, and their insufficiency for extra-vehicular activities.

Fire extinguishers

…in spaaaaaace. Carbon dioxide. Water. Super soakers. Fire emergency procedures.

EVA Suits

Past designs and modern designs. Future EVA suit developments. Constrictive suits directly against the skin rather than creating an atmosphere around the body: the biosuit. The NASA Z Suit that looks like Buzz Lightyear, and operating EVA suits at the same pressure as your space station.

Reentry

Soyuz reentry angles. Heat shielding. Trying to point in a particular direction.

Lifting

The complete obviousness that heavy compound weight lifting is the major solution to muscle and bone loss in space. Bro do you even lift? Vacuum-based space squat rack.

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Skyscraper: vertical cities, holodecks, and personal Dyson clouds Oct 09, 2018

Skyscrapers

History. The industrialization at scale of steel. The state of things. Future heights. Arcologies.

Vertical cities

Hong Kong’s real estate problem. Urban verticality and resource efficiency. Living in coffin pods and sharing utilities.

Holodeck

IRL holodeck technology. Projecting images for multiple . Your own personal Dyson display cloud. Frickin lasers directly in your eyes. CastAR.

Skyscraper materials technology

Sand as a rubbish base for huge buildings. Building deep foundations in the desert. Wooden skyscrapers!? Sand in concrete and sand shortages. Varieties of sand. Engineered sand.

Fire

Fire suppression! Overheated air and air pressure for aircraft.

Elevators

Elevator cable lengths and limits. Maglev elevators. High-speed elevators.

PORK CHOP SANDWICHES

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Doom: moons of Mars, space marines, and telefragging w/ Josh Effengee of LSG Media Oct 02, 2018

Doom

Doom! Nostalgia.

The Martian moons

Crappy moons that can barely form a potato. Phobos and Deimos. Delineating between moons, planets, and all the other stuff. The likely origin of the Martian moons.

Space marines

Corporate space settlement and operations. Space Force. Josh reviews space marines; again. Martian weaponry.

Settling mars

Where to build? The cost of scratch settlement construction. Caves and lava tubes. Teleporting resources changes the game.

Ancient aliens

The Prometheus Problem, again. Doom humans-on-mars hypotheses: aliens developed humans on Mars vs humans originated on Mars. Species resurrection. Gene therapy. Chromosomal addition and subtraction.

Martian miscellany

Nano walls! Water on Mars! Telefragging!

Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
The X-Files Podcast: LSG Media
Masters of Doom by David Kushner: iTunes Amazon

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Upgrade: biohacking, AI containment, and paralyzation workarounds Sep 25, 2018

Image enhancement

Naive vs machine-intelligent image enhancement. “Photorealistic hallucination” and honest technical names. Reconsidering the absurdity of fictional image enhancement in the age of clever neural nets. Creative, artistic “enhancement” vs rigor.

Paralyzation workarounds

Well, breaking your spinal chord sure seems to suck. Spinal breaks and the autonomic nervous system. Bodily control via brain-machine interface.

Transhumanism

Extension of human functionality by implanted technology! Increasing neural communication speed, or shortening signal distance. Gun arms. Gun arms! Vocal device command by subvocalization.

The AI “box test”

Self-serving artificial intelligence. Yudkowsky’s AI box test. Callback to Ex Machina. Additional stipulations. The true power of a goon with a wrench. How easy are humans to fool? Very.

Yudkowsky's AI box test: Yudkowski.net
Decipher RPG Pilot episode 1: Decipher SciFi
Decipher RPG Pilot episode 2: Decipher SciFi
Decipher RPG Pilot episode 3: Decipher SciFi

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Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!) Sep 19, 2018

Our heroes make a real mess of an airship or two, and FINALLY Bodyguard Chris manages to turn the tables and make something of his repeated failures. Emperor Colbert tries not to die before the end.

(This podcast is the finale of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty.

Previously: Part 1 & Part 2)

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Black Panther: rhino domestication, click languages, and Killmonger overheating Sep 18, 2018

Afrofuturism

Wishing there were more of this in popular media.

Invisible cities

A review of invisibility technology: spatial, temporal, and spectral light cloaking. Vibranium to the rescue.

Vibranium

Space impactors. Resource

Armor

Body armor, stationary armor. Avoiding concussive force. Reactive armor in tanks: shaped explosives that explode at the other thing that’s gonna explode! Molecular springs of carbon for storage of mechanical energy from kinetic. How not to turn into Black Panther jelly when the suit releases its energy (be superhuman).

Absolute monarchies

Bas Rutten for king. Right hoooook.

Scars and sweat

Killmonger’s scarification and scar damage to the dermis. Sweat patterns around scars.

Telepiloting

Remote vehicle control. Light-speed communications delays. AI-assisted remote human driving.

War Rhinos

Domestication vs trainability. Extinct war elephants and why we can’t have war rhinos. Dürer’s rhinoceros, drawn from notes on the first rhino seen in Europe since Roman times.

Dürer's Rhinoceros CC-0 Click language

Xhosa! Bantu languages. The possibility of a connection to the earliest human languages.

Decipher RPG part 1: Decipher SciFi
Decipher RPG part 2: Decipher SciFi

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Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2 Sep 12, 2018

Emperor Colbert dresses down and bodyguard Chris rediscovers the joy of the bidet and the German shelf toilet. Then: daring aerial maneuvers!

(This podcast is the second part of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Previously: Part 1)

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Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1 Sep 11, 2018

This podcast is the first of three episodes of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Here is part 2!

After some particular fun with character creation, Emperor Colbert’s coronation is interrupted by a sudden attack. With RPG-Colbert still entranced in his ceremonial mask, his bodyguard Chris rushes him to safety, but… airships!

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A-X-L: dogs as technology, domestication, and unpleasant sticky materials Sep 04, 2018

Doggo

Man’s best friend! And one of (many of?) our best technologies. The level to which we can handicap animals for aesthetics if we put our mind to it. Domesticated foxes.

Domestication

Domestication. Plants and animals. Bending chosen qualities to better human use.

Watermelon as of The Renaissance. Yay selective breeding! We win!

Warbot design

Implicit and explicit communication channels. Dog human body language-reading. Data connections and cloudy signal processing. Adaptation of dog body-design to robots. The small design effort required to get people to treat a robot animal like an animal.

Flamethrowers

The difference between industrial and military flamethrowers. An unpleasant, sticky material: napalm and napalm-like products!

Survey!

We have one of those. Pls help by hitting the link we gave in the episode!

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Rampage: gorilla sign language, classic gaming, and the square cube law Aug 28, 2018

Classic arcade gaming

Memories of the arcade and the Sega Game Gear. Introduction of Larry the Rat in the Atari Lynx port. How to pick from current social fears for your lazy game plot.

Zero-G research

Genetics research in spaaaaaace. CRISPR. Bremen Drop Tower.

Gorilla sign language

Koko the gorilla. Gorilla sign language. Credulity and confirmation bias. Impressive gorilla lexicons. Adventures in signing portmanteus. Yogurt aka “milkfruitcandy food.”

Animal fights

Comparing the gorilla to the grizzly bear. Relative animal size. Grizzly bears as killing machine. Gorilla conflict-avoidance techniques.

Scaling animals

The square-cube law! Relative scaling and the race between volume and surface area (volume always wins!). The creation of a bio antenna. The relatively low energy of radio waves.

Mutations, mutations, mutations

Gorilla turns into giant gorilla. Lizard turns into mega lizard. Wolf, though, turns into a wolf… with patagia and throwable quills! Possibly resembling the urticating hairs of a tarantula.

How to Make an Elephant Explode with Science by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube
Zero-G Experiments on Earth: The Bremen Drop Tower by Tom Scott: YouTube
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday by The Onion: YouTube

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Extinction: space stealth, leaving Earth, and the evolution of consciousness Aug 21, 2018

Spoiler alerts

Special conditions requiring primary and secondary warnings.

Robots

How to tell if you are a robot? New Study Finds Best Way To Determine If You Are Android Still Cutting Open Forearm To Reveal Circuitry Within. Self-delusion and mass self-delusion.

Earthvacuation

Earth is really well-tuned for our needs (or is it the other way around?), and humans should try to maintain this as a base of operations if at all possible.

Surviving outside of Earth

Key resources on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system (outside of Earth). Iron for bullets. Rocket fuel.

Stealth in space

There is no stealth in space. Trying to hide from Earth (on Mars). Difficulties in hiding propulsion, light-blocking, and infrared emission. Hiding “in” the sun.

Attacking Earth

Shock and awe vs the impossibility of stealth. Why a nuclear EMP attack might not be a great idea. Throw a rock at it.

Evolving consciousness

Evolved consciousness in Earth life. The possibility of consciousness emerging in “artificial” life. Attention Schema Theory. Central processing of separate signal enhancement.

What is Consciousness? by Vsauce: YouTube
Real Quick: LSG Media

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Aliens: hyperlseep, how to terraform, and Blade Runner reconciliation w/ Josh Effengee Aug 14, 2018

Love

Love! For James Cameron and Aliens. And the great utilitarian design of the spaceship interiors. Great world-building.

Hypersleep

Cryosleep? Ice sublimation and mummified Sigourney Weaver. Hibernation. How to shove pine cones up your butt, chug some Nyquil, and turn into a bear. Cryogenic specimen preservations: sperm! DIY fecal plugs for hibernation.

Private space industry

The rise of private space industry. Going dystopian.

Planetary operations

Planet? Moon? The delineation between planets and moons and looking forward to the future when we get confused again. Demoting Pluto to planetoid. Terraforming Mars. Sad news on Martian CO2 supplies for atmosphere creation. Crater settlements and whether or not you need a roof. Atmospheric density limits for human comfort and thriving.

Xenomorphs

But are they really called Xenomorphs? The throwaway line in Aliens that spawned decades of confusion.

Send the robots

Always send the robots. Unless you are an evil corporation with shady goals. Milk robots…?

Blade Runner connection

Blade Runner and Aliens are the same universe. The separate lines of technological development that yielded replicants and Aliens’ “synthetics.” Blade Runner 2049’s anime prequel and how that informs the universe crossover.

Jurassic World, Jurassic Values by Mike Hill: YouTube
Josh's escape room in Massachusetts: Mass Escape
Josh's shows on LSG Media: Science Fiction Film Podcast The X-Files Podcast

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Wall-E: biodegradable plastics, waste management, and space cattle Aug 07, 2018

Space settlement

The economics of leaving Earth. Settling the inner and outer solar system. The Expanse. Space cattle and other space resources (water, mineral).

Garbage - in spaaace!

Garbage in space aka space junk. Cleaning up space junk. Giant nets as a major cleanup strategy.

Garbage - on Eaaaarth!

Modern waste management. What to do with municipal solid waste. Leachate. The difference between dumps and landfills and the interesting energy-reclamation technology involved in cutting edge WTE facilities.

Plastic

Massive plastic appreciation. How plastics ushered in the modern world. A lament for wasteful use of “disposable” plastic products. Microplastics in the water. Biodegradable plastics. The discovery of plastic-eating bacteria. Speeding up nature to digest plastic now. The coming plague of plastic-eating bacteria.

“De-evolution”

This isn’t a thing! There’s no end point that is being retreated from - life just adapts to pressures, ongoing.

Handling failure

Revisiting our past failures. Combating cynicism by just kind of ignoring it.

The Water Fountain You Pee In: YouTube

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Ready Player One: virtual reality haptics, digital economies, and optical trickery Jul 31, 2018

Fandom

Identity according to interests. Fiction as personal and social mirror. Cultures and subcultures and super-niches.

The “Stacks”

Ad-hoc city large-scale construction. Kowloon Walled City.

Virtual Reality immersion technology

VR treadmills vs slippy-feet (Virtuix Omni). Looking silly. Scaling and translation from real-world input to virtual worlds. Manual and body haptics. Simulating moistness. Nard-stimulation for good and ill.

VR spatial awareness

Directional trickery in virtual reality. Tricking people into experiencing smaller real-world spaces as much larger in virtual reality. Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR.

Resolution of virtual worlds

Pixel densities and optical foci. Continuity of experience and detection of the difference between virtual and simulated worlds. Finding the clever “hacks” that will enable us to more deeply immerse ourselves in VR experiences.

Sharding

Virtual world scale and sharding vs mon-worlds.Virtu

Value systems

Real virtual economies and responsibility.

Ready Player One (the book) by Ernest Cline: iTunes Amazon
Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR: YouTube
A Real Life Haptic Glove (Ready Player One Technology Today) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
The Infinadeck Omnidirectional Treadmill by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
Kowloon Walled City interactive feature: WSJ
The Brookhaven Experiment: Steam

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Man From Earth Holocene: hunter gatherer nostalgia and trading intestines Jul 24, 2018

The Man From Earth

Our love for the original. Considering the sequel. People talking in a room.

Nostalgia

The coming-on of the bronze age. Grocking the rate of progress w/ Dominick Perry. “Free time” in hunter-gatherer societies. Nostalgia as a way to bridge from what was old and comfortable to what is new and scary.

Cro-magnon

Anatomically modern humans vs socially modern humans. The evolutionary advantage of controlled fire and beginning to cook food. Getting away from all-day mastication and looooooooong intestines in favor of the big brain on Brad.

Primitive Technology

Getting boy without modern technology. The earliest evidence for humans cooking with fire. Differentiating human-controlled fire from millennia ago from other sources (like iguanas, or wildfires).

Growing old

Life expectancies over time. Appreciation for antibiotics. Life expectancy vs life_span_. Evolving into a centauranarian.

Jesus

Less-than-generous portrayals of religious characters. Third-act surprises. Jesus vs the antichrist.

Resolutions

Resolutions?

Primitive Technology: YouTube
The Man From Earth: biological immortality, and what is a micromort w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi

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Predator : preposterone, light manipulation, and Aliens vs Predator vs Blade Jul 17, 2018

Testosterone

Preposterous amounts of testosterone. Preposterone. Ahhnold and Carl Weathers. The muscles from Brussels in spaaaaace.

Invisibility

Picking a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum to be invisible within.

Spatial light manipulation
Temporal light manipulation
Spectral light manipulation

Predator vision

Seeing in infrared! Interactions between optical camouflage and optical receivers. Why doesn’t all the life on Earth have heat vision? Heat-tracking evolution. Pit viper heat sensors. Human heat-tracking. Biology absorbing infrared. Seeing in greyscale. Wet clay camouflage and effectiveness over time. Mythbusting. Infrared-blocking materials.

Predator physiology

Aliens vs Predator for top monster. Ears…? Bleeding. The rainbow of different blood colors available on Earth. Green blood. Luminescent blood. Figuring out why only arthropods seems to have mandibles, and lamenting the lack of them in macro predators.

Shared Universe

Appreciating that Blade Runner is pretty much officially the same world as Predator now.

Self-destructing technology

Techno-scuttling. Destroying advanced technology to keep it out of enemy hands. Super-expanding polymers. Amazon delivery drone automatic “dispersal.”

If It Bleeds We Can Kill It - The Making of Predator: YouTube
If It Bleeds We Can Kill It - Predator the Musical by legolambs: YouTube

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Q&A #3: glacial surge, myth vs legend, and underground nukes Jul 10, 2018

A collection of responses to feedback and addenda from supporter Jeremy. Basically, a review of some things we missed in a few episodes and an expansion on others. :-)

Volcano

Fault types review. Flood basalts as hot spot lava spam. The Deccan Traps. Vulcanism as a possible explanation for dinsoaur extinction (Wargames).

The Last Jedi

Progress in millitary tactics. The triumph of guerrilla tactics. Politeness in chess. Mt St Helens sound waves. High-energy events.

Black Mirror Season 4 Part 1 - Arkangel

Implantable devices. API development.

Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams

Lojban. Constructed languages. Esperanto.

Transformers the Last Knight

Unfavorable reviews. Myth vs legend vs fable as given to us by an actual folklorist. Colonialism and the lens of cultural study. Swole Jesus. Zeus’s promiscuity. Anti-intellectualism.

Stargate

“Gopher nukes.” Tactical nuclear yields. Nuclear testing and Godzilla.

Men in Black

Alcohol! Low-alcohol beverages in history instead of water. A History of the World in Six Glasses, again.

Lost in Space

Climate change and glacial surges.

Annihilation The Color Out of Space - by HP Lovecraft: iTunes Amazon Tron

Programming languages, where to draw the line behind low and high level.

A Quiet Place

Sound localization without pitch. Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity.

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A Quiet Place: echolocation, cochlear implant vs hearing aid, and aliens Jul 03, 2018

Surviving without sound

Deafness. How loud is a fart? Cochlear implants. Alien defense engineering.

Cochlear implants

How cochlear implants differ from hearing aids. How a cochlear implant works. The difficulties of hearing loss.

Grain Entrapment

Ughhhhhhhhh. Compression and suffocation.

Echolocation

The strangeness of terrestrial echolocation. Frequency adaptations for different types of prey. Signal rate at different distances.

The creatures

Planetary orbit situations with extended periods of surface darkness. Extremophile armor development. Echolocation evolution. Space cat behaviour. Dinner Time ambulation.

Killing aliens

Feedback loops. Amplitude vs frequency and damaging the hearing apparatus.

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Echolocation: BBC
Shooting Down a Lost Drone and why Dogs Tilt their Heads - Smarter Every Day: YouTube

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Escape From New York: ultralight aircraft, escape pods, and fusion reactors Jun 26, 2018

Dystopia

New York city post WW3. Crime in the US in the early 80s.

Airplane failure recovery

The good old days when Presidents could be bald. Plane escape mechanisms. Parachutes vs ejection seats vs ejection pods.

Jet injectors

Vaccinations by high-pressure jet. Finding out these are real-life. Polio vs Hepatitis.

Gliders

Large wingspan, light body. The Twin Towers. Clever practical FX for wireframe nighttime navigation display. Comparing budgets with Tron.

Fusion

Time projections. Cold fusion and hot fusion. Taking the shortest route and simply building a Dyson sphere. Waste production and failure modes.

The Thing: antarctic explorers, extreme doctoring, and figuring out aliens w/ Cae & Ryan: Decipher SciFi

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Universal Soldier: face-kicking cyborg technologies and micro drone insects Jun 19, 2018

Cyborgification

Remote-controlled cockroaches. Engineering cyborg cats with tape and servos. Search and rescue rats. What counts as a cyborg? Insects with eyebrows.

Non-cyborgification

Whirring servos and motors. Wearable technology and where to draw the line on cyborgs. The cyborg olympics. Determining the limits of human performance.

Thermoregulation

Mammalian heat regulation. Humans are the best distance runners AND car-pushers.

Pain

Pain response and learning. Pain and athletic performance. A PSA about injecting things int your heart - you don’t want a hole there. The best places in your body to randomly put holes.

Cyborg naiveté

But what is a penis anyway? Memory inhibition. Competitive eating. Binging and stomach elasticity. Competitive eating training.

Supersoldier Programs

Was it a success? Drugs make you a superhero.

Universal Soldier alternate ending: YouTube

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Enemy Mine : space dogfights, alien wildlifem and interstellar slavery economics Jun 12, 2018

Old-school space dogfighting

Stealth and the economics of close-distance space combat. Ship designs for different combat settings. Space vs atmosphere travel. Underwater?

Alien planets

Hostile, but really lucky to have breathable air and drinkable water. Storms. Periodic heavy meteor showers. Comet tails vs close planetary bodies for meteor shower material.

Alien wildlife

Space horseshoe crabs. Sarlac antlions. Half-Life 2 interpretations. Antlion larvae.

Drac

The aliens as portrayed by Louis Gossett Jr. Alien physiology. Evolutionary body-heat dissipation adaptations. The spectrum of binocularity in Earth-life.

Space-faring civilization

Time scales for change on the technological curve.

Alien reproduction

Hermaphroditism? Asexuality? Parthenogenesis? This pregnancy is a weird situation. One man and an alien baby.

Interstellar enslavement economics

Transporting slaves to remote mining colonies. Where are the robots? Possible Dune connections.

Space Warfare by Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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Tron : 70s computing, object digitization, and death-frisbees Jun 05, 2018

Production

Early 80s VFX. So much rotoscoping. The dawn of computer generated graphics. Disney and art assets. Computational limitations creating art styles.

Late-70s computing

Hard drives! Huge ones.Huge mainframes. Pre-internet networks.

Anthropomorphised computing

Sentient computer antagonists. Legal protections for artificial life. Chess as the soon-to-be-obliterated pinnacle of artificial intelligence.

AI Takeovers

Master Control program.Skynets. Conflicting interests between man and machine. AI villainy is different from human villainy. Good AI to compete with the bad ones.

Maybe the only way to stop a bad A.I. with a nuclear arsenal is a good A.I. with a nuclear arsenal

Death-frisbees

Chakram! Old-school sharpened frisbee weapons of south Asia.

Accidental godliness

Accidentally creating cargo cults. Self-aware life in servitude. Responsibilities when creating intelligences.

Digitization

Digitizing three-dimensional objects. Destructive and non-destructive methods. How we scan books. Brain uploading. Human Connectome Project.

mcp:~ $ cat /dev/jeff_bridges > /dev/null

Mainframes and the Unix Revolution by Computerphile: YouTube

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Superman (1978) : Episode 144 May 29, 2018

Krypton

Where did the Superman “S” as family symbol come from? Kryptonian Planetary OSHA. Retroreflective materials. Planet-‘sploding backstories. Shifting orbits. Tidal forces. Planetary superstructures.

Space baby

Intergalactic space travel. Time dilation. Launching an intergalactic spaceship from your living room.Time dilation and relative experience of time. Hyper-intellectual aliens. Space baby temper tantrums.

Space is big, but then the space between the less empty empty spaces are even… more empty. And there’s a lot of it.

-Lee Colbert

There’s only one thing that can go the speed of light and that’s… light

-Christopher Peterson

Heroes and villains by era

Zod vs Luthor. Henchman. Old-school bad guys with actual bona-fide lairs. Christopher Reeve was so perfect as Superman. Henry Caville’s magically-perfect chestbeard.

Super powers

The history of Superman’s powers of flight. Hulk jumps! Kryptonian evolution. Superman’s resistance to cancer from x-rays. Alternative vision modes, and Superman rubbing his eyes right against things for ultrasound. Kryptonite! And the Kryptonite shrimp challenge.

Evil plans

Clever villainy. Megaton yields.

CC0 Time travel

Superman already did the one real kind. Spinning the earth back and forth like a record.

Does Light Experience Time?: YouTube

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Annihilation : Episode 143 May 22, 2018

Alex Garland

❤️. Ex Machina.

Abominable mutants

Shark-gators. Flower-deer. Man-bear-mole-pig. Dr Manhattan-style animal transformations. Big blue tree phalluses.

Horizontal gene transfer

Micro vs macro.

Continuous mutation

Plants.

The shimmer

Exponential understanding. Deciphering the puzzle of Earth life. Clams with human faces. Desctructive/transformative information processing. They’re Made Out of Meat

Micro-life in the shimmer

Boa constrictors in your gut. Tapeworm run amok. Gut bacterial colonies and fungus. Cordyceps zombie fungus a la The Girl With All the Gifts.

The Shimmerrer

Interfacing with alien life. Different levels of understanding. Von Neumann machines.

The ending

Deciphering the ending without putting the major spoilage here in this page.

The Girl With All the Gifts: parasitic fungi, speed of smell, and the end of humanity: Decipher SciFi
Ex Machina: ai software, wetware, and the turing test: Decipher SciFi
The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage by Kurzgesagt: YouTube

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Avengers Infinity War: space mapping, Dyson spheres, and the purple coin purse May 15, 2018

Thanos

Josh Brolan was so good! And the character itself too! Coin purse chin. The story of how a light flick to the coin purse could have saved the world.

Economic modeling

Thanos breaks out the Excel spreadsheets. Productively employing the bottom trillionty billion around the galaxy. Ultimate utilitarianism.

The upper atmosphere

Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia.

Space mapping and orienteering

Visualizing three-dimensional routes as two-dimensional on Earth-maps. Visualizing four-dimensional routes as three three physical dimensions plus time.

Star forges

Forging in the heart of a neutron star vs heart-of-a-neutron-star-adjacent. Breaking assumptions. Neutron stars. Facts and figures and analogies. Converting teaspoons of neutron star matter into 5-Dollar Footlongs. Thor jelly vs Thor Jam and their relative whelmingness.

Dyson Spheres

Disovering that Dyson’s original conception (1960) of the Dyson “sphere” actually better fits the modern description of a Dyson “swarm.” Different Dyson sphere variants. Statites.

Vision based on movement

But it isn’t! It’s contrast-based! Toad vision feature detection. Jurassic Park confusion.

Iron Man

Nanotech. Programming nanobots to eat brains - or gloves!

Megastructures 1.1: Dyson Spheres by Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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Zathura: planetary ring lifecycles, science words, and light pollution May 08, 2018

Science words

Jumanji in space. Card-by-card science words.

Light pollution

The night sky “never looked that close before.” The majority of Americans being unfamiliar with a real view of the night sky. Light pollution. Dark sky preserves. The LA blackout and the milky way. Light pollution and the effect on wildlife. And the effects on us.

Sky glow. Light pollution! Royal Astronomical Society CC-BY Planetary rings

100% ring rate on gas giants in our solar system. Ring size and albido. The lifecycle of a ring system. The “Roche Limit.” Ring formation beginnings. Rocks vs ice in ring systems. Super-large ring system discoveries.

The Roche limit Theresa Knott CC-BY-SA-3.0 Cryonic sleep

Cryonic sleep and galactic travel. Teenager sleep schedules.

Gravity Wells

Weightlessness in orbit. Orbit is falling.

Meeting aliens

As per Hawking: you might not want to!

Zorgons

Don’t forget: people are meat too! Cold blooded vs warm-blooded intelligence. Metabolic rates and bloodedness. Dinosaurs may have been mesotherms!

You are as meat as a cow!

-Colbert

Space food

Tubes and bricks. Bad roomates and sardine tubes. Kimchi rocket ships in spaaaaaace. Eating your sandwich in the bathroom, just in case your microbiome can’t handle the onslaught.

Shooting stars

IRL shooting stars. Rogue stars. Meteor shower disappointments.

If Earth had Rings by Artifexian: YouTube

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Lost in Space: supercooling, space imaging, and sexy robots w/ Adrian Falcone May 01, 2018

Space travel and orienteering

Space maps. Star brightnesses and reference points. The ESA Gaia Project. Landing in glaciers. Glacier life cycles. Fjords! Callback to Seveneves.

Space imaging

Dude, we have video from a comet! How various inputs are composited into attractive imagery. Public data and the opportunities for citizen science and science communication. Spectroscopy and impactor makeup-detection. Detecting invisible glass clouds by how they scatter light. Red shift and blue shift.

“Superfreezing”

Superfeeezing, supersaturation, etc. Booby-trapped microwaved water. Nucleation points. Slushy bear. Day/night cycles and weather around extreme freezing/thawing.

The “crew”

Dad’s triage skills. Recognizing magnesium. Is it bigger than a breadbox?

Robots!

General Grievous gets the thigh ground. Fueling your nether regions with gasoline. Power-saving mode in the murder module.

“Fire seeds”

Giant redwood reproduction strategies. Living through wildfires. “Cleverness” in the unguided process of natural selection.

"Video" from the comet 67p: Twitter
Lost in Space (1998 film): gifted children, future vlogging, and colonizing space: Decipher SciFi
Which Are The Real Pictures of Space? What’s a Photo and What’s An Illustration? by Fraser Cain: YouTube

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Westworld: extreme theme parks, first computer virus, and sensory processing Apr 24, 2018

Disney

Westworld is some Disneyworld-level theme park logistics. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Westworld ticket prices.

The Wild West

The mythos. Cowboys shootin’ and rootin- tootin’. The time period. The expansion of settlement exceeding governmental reach and the perception of lawlessness.

TV vs Movie

Deep questions about consciousness and self and where they really really aren’t.

AI in the 70s

Depictions of artificial general intelligence in the period and how awesome 2001: A Space Odyssey was/is. The “AI Winter.” The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence. Heuristics. Teaching our machines to learn. Neural net black boxes. Machines created by other machines.

Smart AI/dumb AI

Collections of very convincing modules, sans consciousness, vs AGI. In what way can a computer system “understand” language?

Sensory processing

How long it takes humans and machines to adapt to moving in their environments. The speed of artificial neural networks in learning and human evolution of millennia. Computer vision in 1973! Face tracking. Human attention to human attention.

Robotics!

The difficulty in developing human-like robots. Our subconscious alertness to any oddness in our human-to–human interactions. The people-watching your brain does when you’re not watching.

Computer viruses

Coinage. Von Nuemann’s “self-replicating automata.”

The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence [1973]: YouTube
Westworld (the series): iTunes Amazon

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Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam Ginty Apr 17, 2018

Will Smith

He’s the best!

Alien life

And the forms that it takes. Arthropoids. Cephalapoids. The names we give the aliens and the names they give themselves.

Aliens and stimulants

Coffee!

Humanity’s beverage history

And in particular how wonderfully wonderful caffeine is. Dwarf Fortress and ale supplies. Depressants vs stimulants and the shape society.

The “real” Men in Black

Frustration with being made a joke.

Human gestation and intelligence

Evolution, hip size, and cranial size. Bipedalism. Early homo adaptations and social assisted delivery.

Earth as universal backwater

Alien advocates for the ethical treatment of dumb humanity.

Memory wiping

Possible unreliable narrators. Neuralizers vs “memory sticks.” This is my roofie stick. Short term and long-term memory “wiping.”

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage: iTunes Amazon
Mirror - A single-page PnP micro RPG for you and your friends by Liam Ginty: DrivethruRPG Itch.io

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Snowpiercer: entomophagy, what caused the hole in the ozone layer, and extreme cold survival Apr 10, 2018

Climate control

CW7 climate change-fixer compound. “Artificial cooling.” Climate manipulation. The end of the world. “Snowball earth” capped by massive volcanic activity and leading into life explosions. Weather manipulation vs climate manipulation. Radioactive hurricanes and sharks with frickin lasers. Micro-life survival.

The ozone layer

What is that for. Chlorofleorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion.

Cold

The frozen arm punishment. Cooling rates and atmospheric density. Christopher’s experience (or lack thereof) freezing limbs with liquid nitrogen.

Food in the cryopocalypse (entomophagy)

Efficiency in energy conversion in food sources. Disgust reactions in the face of starvation. Feed conversion ratio. Indiginous food sources and feeding a growing human population. Competing with dung beetles. Christopher’s adventures in preparing wax worms. Maggot cheese and knowing your limits.

Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained by Kurzgesagt: YouTube
Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet by Daniella Martin: iTunes Amazon

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Stargate: pyramid builders, ancient Egyptian writings, and swole Daniel Jackson w/ Dominic Perry Apr 03, 2018

Pre-historic Egypt

The notability of the introduction of a massive metal space-portal 10,000 years ago, when Egyptian were still just barely getting down with agriculture.

Egypt and the pyramids

When was the Bronze age anyway? Pyramid time scales. Familial pyramid-building competitions. The progression from small-scale burial mounds to “great” pyramids. Egypt vs meso-American pyramid research. Seasonal construction recruitment.

Stone and copper tooling for stonework

Stone tools. Copper tools. Early Brone tools. Limestone vs granite. Arsenical copper advantages.

Pyramid-building alien hypotheses

“Chariots of the Gods” and the origin of alien pyramid conspiracies. Judging fringe theorists.

Ancient Egyptian language and writing

The origin of the writing systems of ancient Egypt. Accounting.

Daniel Jackson

Inspiring budding Egyptologists and getting suddenly swole.

Stargates

Stargate discovery. Deep time and the chances of happening upon ready-made technology after an extinction. Permeable wormhole membranes. Stargates vs black holes. EM transmission and accretion disks. Molecular deconstruction.

Probe robots

Bomb disposal space bot. Colonization.

Exoplanets

Stargates and our knowledge at the time.

The History of Egypt Podcast: Website
The Trouble With Transporters by CGP Grey: YouTube

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Timecop: carbon dating money, confederate gold coins, and time loops Mar 27, 2018

JCVD

Green screen etc.

Time machine carrying capacity

Red smear memorials. Time travel in tiny, sweaty drug subs. It all comes down to laser machine guns.

Confederate gold

Get rich quick slowly schemes.

Smuggling from the past

Cost of moving mass through time. Burying your pilfered gold for pickup vs time traveling it to the present. Inefficient black market time travel business models.

Carbon dating

And how you can’t carbon date gold itself.

Depression Profiting

Sicilian grandmas. Skyrim health potions and time travel interest-compounding. Better investment plans:

Put money into savings account
…
profit
repeat

Making the future

Ugly self-driving cars. Greebles. Glue some crap to some crap and bam, you’re in the future.

Timecopping and paradoxes

Time loops. “The same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time.” The indistinguishability of atoms of the same isotope. Quantum word soup. “Touching” by neutron star. The grandfather paradox where you bang your grandma. Ted Chiang anti-time loop deciphering advice. It’s not gay if you don’t touch and as a bonus you also don’t explode in paradox.

“I’m gonna live forever, hahaaaa”

Bloodsport: iTunes Amazon
Bloodsport Mentos: YouTube
You Can't Touch Anything by Vsauce: YouTube
Can We Really Touch Anything? by Vsauce: YouTube

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Pacific Rim: square cube law, giant death robot, and Earth terrafroming w/ Stephen Granade Mar 20, 2018

Brain-controlled machines

Brain-machine interfaces. EEG. The advantage of the group over the individual. Humans in tandem with AI and the closing window of human cognitive superiority. Computational offloading. Wetware/hardware integration and explaining the “excessive” neural load of Jaeger drift.

Drifting

Localized neural “loops.” Neural load and body mass. Chasing the rabbit. Multiple input control vectors. Meatsack adaptations and proprioception. Human biofeedback and ambulation vs “Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments”

Square-cube business

Materials and size scales and the inappropriateness of humanoid design for your giiiiiiiiiiant robots. The square cube law. Don’t forget Godzilla and King Kong!

Kaiju

Neural loads and signal speed. Central pattern generators and “butt brains” and how the dinosaurs didn’t have them. Blue ammonia heavy metal blood. Atmospheric pressures.

Jägers

Metallic construction. Irrational fear of alloys. Possible material engineering choices. Beryllium is the worst. Graphene and spraying pencils. Incentive systems for robot design. Square cube again. Density.

Power sources

The subtlety of nuclear reactors vs nuclear bombs. Orion nuclear blast spacecraft. Carl Sagan. Energy density of fuel sources. Nuclear testing for fun and profit. Playing science fast and loose.

Alien terraforming projects

Playing the looooooooong game. Statistical Great Filter analyses. Earth is a fixer-upper. Jerk bully aliens.

Stephen Granade: Website Twitter
Stephen on Pacific Rim again but with more physics: YouTube

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Johnny Mnemonic: data couriers, brain storage capacity, and the cyberpunk Amish Mar 13, 2018

William Gibson

Cyberpunk!

Data couriers

When to move the data physically by human. CYA. The impression of security. Offline attacks. quantum supremacy. RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service).

Storage doubling

And exceeding limits. The lack of connection between physical brain material and storage of particular sorts of memory, especially temporal sequences.

Data encryption and uploading

“Light therapy” and affecting brain states. Fuzzy encryption keys for biometrics. Brute force attacks.

Lo-teks

The cyberpunk Amish. “Pants are technology!” Privacy-focused ludditism. Human brain face-detection. Limpy-Frankenstein to avoid person-tracking. Ice T memes.

Snatch back your brain, zombie. And hold it!

J Bone

Naval "dazzle" camoflage Naval History and Heritage Command CC-0 Non-graphical computing

VR silliness. Command-line life. Christopher tried a MUD/MOO. Abandoning cheeky abstractions. AI solving yet another problem. Morgan Freeman Espeak modules.

Science Fiction Film Podcast #247: Johnny Mnemonic featuring Christopher Peterson: LSG Media
Wing Commander: PC games nostalgia, pilgrims, and space combat w/ Dean from LSG Media: Decipher SciFi

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Zardoz: eating only meat, awkward sexual experiments, and dealing with immortality Mar 06, 2018

Weeeeeeeeeird stuff

Pulling a James Cameron. Sean Connery is down for anything. Weeeeeird stuff. A list of some of our favorite things

Zardoz’ mustache
Zardoz’s speeches both and and out of stone head
Sean Connery’s everything
Psychic attacks

Bullets in the air

One of the worse ways to celebrate. Coins off of a skyscraper. Mass and volume and drag. Bullet lethality reductions with different trajectories.

Eating only meat

The benefits and drawbacks. The inuit diet. Surprisingly-high carbohydrate intake when all your meat is raw. Micronutrients via organ meats. Food preservation through controlled rot. Using fats and proteins to energy.

Evolutionary humanity

Other varieties of humanity that coexisted with homo sapiens. The study of evolution. Fossil evidence and developments in mitochondrial DNA analysis. The multiregional hypothesis -> the out of Africa hypothesis.

Human evolutionary promiscuity

Neanderthals, Denisovans, and uh…. gorillas? The evolutionary relationship between gorilla and human pubic lice.

Metacognition

Don’t forget other animals are smart too! Humans are still way better though.

The boner test

Awkward science. Would you pass?

Transhumanism in Zardoz

The nature of power the “Eternals” have. Evolutionary timescales vs the application of technology. AI control.

Dealing with immortality

Boredom is for boring people. The value of freedom of will when you can’t die.

Facts about Human Evolution by SciShow: YouTube
Rick & Morty - Raising Gazorpazorp: iTunes YouTube

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The Cloverfield Paradox: NASA bone loss, simulated gravity, and gyroscopes w/ Adrian Falcone Feb 27, 2018

The Cloverfield Formula

Cloverfield -> 10 Cloverfield Lane -> The Cloverfield Paradox -> Overlord

Find a script
Add monsters
…
profit

Artifical gravity. With a twist!

Like, literally a twist. Balancing huge gyroscopes on a central stem. Spinning buckets. Bucket size

Combating bone and muscle atrophy with the ARED.

How the ARED works. The danger of jackedstronauts coming back from space to take over the planet.

Particle colliders

Anatoli Burgorski took a proton bream to the back of the face. It went surprisingly well for him! Phineas Gage of the nuclear age. Linear vs circular particle accelerators. The Cloverfield Paradox.

3D printing

Impressively unimpressive food printing. Printing plastic handguns and metal lower receivers. Maybe don’t use a gun on a space station though that’s pretty dangerous.

Gyroscopes

Chris’ immense latissimus dorsi. Avoiding affecting sensitive space mechanisms by avoiding spewing mass into space around your station/telescope.

Losing earth/losing a space station

Geocentric vs heliocentric orbits. How to tell if Earth is gone/how to tell if your space station is gone.

10 Cloverfield Lane: iTunes Amazon
Burning Astronaut Pee - Smarter Every Day 149: YouTube
Space Telescopes Maneuver like CATS - Smarter Every Day 59: YouTube

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Mad Max Fury Road: salt flats, parabiosis, and the Namib desert w/ Brandon Rollins Feb 20, 2018

Wow this is pretty good

Chris’ varied experiences of this film over time. Color grading and the Black & Chrome edition.

Roads!

Roads are awesome. The US highway system is awesome. Eisenhower’s road trip. Road trips are awesome, too.

Deserts!

Lack of roads in the outback. Accidental un-deserting. The Namib desert. The Namib dessert is 55 million years old!

The Great Salt

The oceans? No way. Red salt planet in The Last Jedi. Evaporating the oceans.

Blood bags

War Boys stealing blood from “healthy” donors. Lack of red blood cell production from blood cancer and the need for transfusion in the late stage. Blood loss limits. Adrenaline transfer.

Parabiosis

Science vampires! Callbacks to Daybreakers. Combining mice. Kidnapping Wim Hof for his blood.

Teeth!

Malnutrition, radiation poisoning, the oral bacteriome. Dental hygiece pre- vs post-agrciulture. Beneficial dental plaques. The evolution of the human lower jaw.

Chroming

Berserker mushroom mode. Signalling. Low framerate editing effects.

Wtf cars

Car stuff with DJ Moffett! Superchargers, turbochargers, maintenance and machining.

Music

Guitar dude with his hundred-amp truck. Energy consumption of flameguy vs a literal drummer boy. Mobile FM transmitting stations. A bard that can melt your face.

Highways and Byways a game from Brandon Rollins: Highways & Byways
Brandon the Game Dev: Brandon the Game Dev
Making-of Fury Road: Cars: YouTube
Making-of Fury Road: Tools: YouTube

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Transformers The Last Knight: the size of the cosmos, colliding planets, and the useful scientist w/ Jolene Creighton Feb 13, 2018

Michael Bay The spark of life

Unicron and the spark of life between worlds.

War in The Dark Ages

Trebuchets. Traction trebuchet vs counterweight trebuchet. Siege weapons vs anti-personnel. Army sizes in the early middle ages.

King Arthur

Legend vs myth vs folk tales. Staff-bearer selection methodology. Humans all look the same to Transformers.

The classic definition of myth, legend, and folktale is William Bascom’s 1965 article “The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Bascom defines folktales as prose narratives told as fiction, myths as prose narratives told as true set in the remote past before human history, and legends as prose narratives told as true set in the time of human history. (Bascom does not take up fables, but they are generally considered a type of folktale with animal characters and an obvious moral lesson.) However, folklorists today tend to focus less on the matter of form and cross-cultural classification—any one of these genres can be conveyed in non-prose, non-narrative media—and more on how people classify, communicate, and contextualize their own folk narratives. A sacred text conceived as the true and literal account of creation to one person may be considered an entertaining but completely fantastical account by another, even if the form remains exactly the same. Bascom’s attention to belief in classifying folk narrative remains an important contribution, and folklorists today consider how tellers and audiences of folk narrative negotiate belief and skepticism in the narrative event, offering proofs that the events happened as described (“I didn’t use to believe in ghosts, but I saw it with my own eyes”) or leaving room for some doubt.

Jolene’s friend Steve Stanzak who is a folklorist from Indiana University…

The size and nature of the cosmos

The number of planets in the solar system and the percentage that are “Earth-like” and might harbor life. Our expanding understanding of the richness of the cosmos.

When Worlds Collide

Speaking of which, I’m starting to feel like maybe we’ve covered.this.before. Gravity, orbit perturbations, and impending doom after the credits.

Ghost scrotum

Papryus, paper, and vellum. Goat scrotum!

Buster the Science Guy

Subverting the trope of useful scientist.

Futurism: Futurism.com
What is Bayhem? by Every Frame a Painting: YouTube
When Worlds Collide: observable universe, 20th century astonomy, and modern space industry w/ Daniel James Barker: Decipher SciFi

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Altered Carbon: Zoltan Istvan on transplant immortality, identity, and consciousness uploading Feb 06, 2018

Immortality by transplant

Analogy with developments in head transplantation. Consciousness uploading. Preservation of identity. Conflict of human immortality with religion.

Transhumanism and Identity

The meaning of race and gender in a world where anyone can be any variety of human (and more). Merging with AI and technology in general.

Sleeving

The boundaries of the “self” and the “mind” and the meat. Hard to draw! The influence of the greater body system over the “self” part and boners. So many boners. But not from nipple stuff, no sir. ?

Zoltan: ZoltanIstvan.com
Altered Carbon (the novel) by Richard K. Morgan: iTunes Amazon

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Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams: self-replicating AI, the illusion of self, and parasites Jan 30, 2018

Philip K Dick

Callback to some.of.our.episodes on PKD and his stories. Pulp scifi of the 50s and 60s. General appreciation for his ideas and the return of thoughtful anthologies.

Autofac

PKDpocalypse. Consumerism something something. Supreme dedication to a task. The Paperclip Maximizer and the possible danger of a highly-capable AI dedicated to its task. Universal Paperclips. The unconscious, apathetic skynet.

Real Life

PKD was all about that hash tag life. The malleability of our perception of “reality.” Am I Anna Paquin? Neurological explanations for Deja Vu. Gaslighting. Dick moves. Colbert’s joke-telling disability.

Convincing your girlfriend she’s crazy or paranoid is called gaslighting, and it’s a dick move. But convincing her she’s a robot with artificial implanted human emotions is called bladerunning. It’s a Phillip K. Dick move.

Nathan Anderson

The Father Thing

Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Stranger Things. Really really affordable spacecraft for extremophiles. Parasites cleaning up after themselves poorly. Sometimes you just gotta step up and try to murder someone. Home alone booby-trap techniques, poorly applied. Compressed parasite operating systems.

Universal Paperclips: DecisionProblem.com
Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi
A Scanner Darkly: the surveillance state, drug abuse, and rotoscoping: Decipher SciFi
Minority Report: Eliot Peper on freedom and algorithmic precognition: Decipher SciFi

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Black Mirror Season 4 Part 2: dating, robots, and pain w/ Liam Ginty Jan 23, 2018

Episode 4 - Hang the DJ

The one with the dating. Like The button, but instead of one person it’s thousands. And instead of a million dollars you get a date. And still only maybe. Calculating Black Mirror horribleness for comparison between episodes. Massive data-crunching techniques.

Episode 5 - Metalhead

The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini.

Episode 6 - Black Museum

The one with the museum. Weird sex stuff. Don’t touch my nipples! The Schmidt Pain Index. The value of actually doing and recording research. Black Mirror trashy romance novels. Pleasure buttons. Sensory mapping. Consciousness partitioning. Liam was on Turn with this dude from this episode! Diffuse vs localized brain injury. Communicating with locked-in patients. Split brains! You Are Two! Waiting for law to catch up with dystopian technology.

Liam's appearance on "Turn: Washington's Spies" AMC STudios ARR

Voices from L5: Voices From L5
Problems with Mind Uploading by exurb1a: YouTube
You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube
Blindsight by Peter Watts: iTunes Amazon

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Black Mirror Season 4 Part 1: AI control, surveillance, and lotsa murder w/ Fraser Cain Jan 16, 2018

Episode 1 - USS Callister

The one with the Star Trek. Protecting the new kinds of consciousnesses we will eventually create. Sleeping through the AI apocalypse. What our solo video game habits say about us. Posthumous digital simulations. Data sources for creating a digital simulacrum and how DNA is one of the least useful. Designing your brain-machine interface to not possibly ever lock someone in ever.

Episode 2 - Arkangel

The one with the helicopter parenting. Mundane parenting concerns writ large in tech. Becoming luddites and finding your breaking point. But then you die and it doesn’t matter. The danger of cloud services. Computer vision and visual input filtering.

Episode 3 - Crocodile

The one with the murders. Would you like a little more murder on your murder sandwich? The genius of the automatic, unmanned pizza truck. The pointlessness of human testimony. Crowdsourcing accurate memories. Memory obstruction strategies.

Fraser’s things: Universe Today Astronomy Cast Fraser Cain @ YouTube

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Nothing but GIFs, all day - Q&A #2 - Episode 124 Jan 09, 2018

Our second Q&A episode, wherein we ask our friends to help us answer the the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!

Question: “Could you have x-ray vision?”

Answerer: Fraser Cain

X-ray vision. Cybernetic eye replacements. Wavelengths of light. The visible spectrum. Ghost in the Shell. Riddick. Light amplification. Gamma rays. Cancer avoidance.

Question: “What if numbers are wrong?”

Answerer: Adrian Falcone

Math. Numbers. Logic. Ted Chiang’s short story “Divide by Zero” was in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Adrian mentioned Faith Physics.

Question: “What if black holes didn’t exist?”

Answerer: Daniel James Barker

Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse.

Question: How long before all the gasoline spoils in the zombie apocalypse?

Answerer: James Peterson

The eternally-unanswered concern that zombie shows ignore always. How long after the zombie apocalypse before all the gas is spoiled? Chemical engineers vs chemists. Oxidation. Inert gas vapor displacement.

Question: Could there be a Star Trek-style universal translator?

Answerer: Nick Farmer

Please also see our Arrival episode with Nick for a ton more on alien languages. Machine learning. Man vs machine. Man vs alien languages. Universality of language. GIF communication.

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Avatar: cryo sleep , terrestrial bioluminescence, and mooons vs planets Jan 02, 2018

Alpha Centauri

Closest star systems to Earth. Sudden outbursts of James Cameron appreciation. Alpha Centauri {A,B}, Proxima Centauri. Sub-light space travel.

Cryo sleep

Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness.

Pandora the moon

Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora.

Bioluminescence

The utility of light in dark environs. Bioluminescence evolution on Earth. Useful wavelengths of produced light in water/air. Standard human bioluminescence. Japanese gameshow science.

Pandoran flora and fauna

Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality.

Na’vi

Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan.

The Pandoran internet

Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer

Unobtanium

Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.”

The Science of Avatar by the Seattle Public Library: SPL.org

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The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk Dec 26, 2017

Space combat

Naval analogies and a callback to a similar discussion in our Valerian episode. Magnetic (fused) torpedoes!

(FTL) Ramming speed!

Ramming vs telefragging. Kamikaze fleets, or attaching telefrag Warp Drives to asteroids and the like. Energy levels with ramming operations at lightspeed. Ruining Star Wars combat by introducing telfragging.

Explosions in space

Explosions in space shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts!

Explosive decompression

Teleporting Colbert to his doom. For science! Multimodal attacks. Explosive decompression. Sausage people and asphyxiation. Freezing in space and how thew force disables all bets. Sausage people and elasticity of human tissues. Consciousness vs useful consciousness.

Skimmer ships

Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.”

hydrofoil boat U.S. Navy CC-0 Salt planet

“Salthoth.” “Hey, it’s salt.” How salt flats form on earth. Salt rising and drying from seasonal flooding. Salt-friendly bacteria and weird oxidation.

Green milk

Yum! Domesticating mammals for their milk. Mailing baboons. Milk’s macronutrient ratios and the micronutrients that color it with the bulk removed e.g. for cheese). How it’s kinda green irl too. Domesticating the aurochs and testing the nipples.

Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
The Last Jedi - Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media

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The Osiris Child: floating cities, terraforming, and the reverse Moreau maneuver Dec 19, 2017

Indie scale

Scifi adventure throwback. Corporations are always evil. Ambition in scope of indie scifi.

Cloud city

Floating cities and air bases. Energy requirements. Floating cities on Venus, where balloons of an atmosphere of Earth-like density can float safely and happily in the high clouds. Hamster ball pleasure cruses. IRL “floating aircraft carriers.” Realizing that all aircraft carriers are “floating.”

Space settlement light and dark

The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane.

Backwards Dr Moreau A comparison Individual picture elements property of their respective owners

“Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose.

“Terraforming”

Maybe “ecoforming?” Ecological manipulation. Seeding new ecology vs tearing down existing ecology. NASA sterilization practices and caution in avoiding contamination vs throwing turtle monsters at it.

Self-destruct cleanup mode

[Rule 34](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34(Internet_meme)? Nuclear reactors can explode, but they don’t explode _like a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl as example. Hot water and pressure reactive with metal and exploding. Metldown and the elephant foot.

Taking risks

Character elimination and happy fairy tale endings.

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Blade Runner: replicant discrimination, synthetic farming, and virtual girlfriends Dec 12, 2017

Replicant discrimination

Is racism the right word? Hate and discrimination against replicants. Replicant slavery.

Synthetic farming

Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects.

Solar concentrators

Hey these are neat

Replicant birth

Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves.

Space settlement

Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto.

Digital Girlfriend

Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology.

Data storage

DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" Anime Short: YouTube
BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn" Short: YouTube
BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2048: Nowhere to Run" Short: YouTube
Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: alien evolution, intelligence exaptation, and layered universes Dec 05, 2017

International Space Station

Contemporary space station size comparisons. ISS transformation over time.

Alien life

Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes.

Alpha Station

“Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization.

Alpha Station location and travel

FTL(?) via “exospace.” The plan to exit the solar system. The issues re planetary orbits when you build a brand new moon around earth with tons and tons of foreign (to the solar system) mass. Languages! 5,000+ languages are spoken on the station, not even including “computer languages.”

Mül and the Pearls

Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math.

Space battles

Should they happen so near planets? Travel and planned space battle. Don’t fight on a planet because you’re vulnerable to Christopher’s favorite: the Brannigan maneuver.

The Fifth Element: space turtles, magic stones, and LeeLoo Dallas multipass: Decipher SciFi

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When Worlds Collide: observable universe, 20th century astonomy, and modern space industry w/ Daniel James Barker Nov 28, 2017

The “observable” universe

The part of the universe that we can, in principle, capture light from as a function of the speed of light and the expansion of the universe.

Galactic perspectives

Learning more about the breadth and contents of the universe since the 1950s. Hubble and “island universes.” Figuring out there are other galaxies and past and present ideas of just how many there are.

The modern space industry

Appreciation for where we are finally. Space travel becoming cheaper and cheaper and the legit settlement of other planets on the horizon.

When worlds actually collide

Spitzer detecting the aftermath of what seems to have been a planetary collision. Other planetary collisions in the history of our own solar system, like the one that produced our moon.

Artist's conception of a collision around the star NGC 2547-ID8 NASA/JPL-Caltech The incoming star: Bellus

Only 12x the size of earth. Luminosity and distance. What type of star could be in this range of size and luminosity?

Herzprung-Russel Star Diagram of star surface temperature and luminosity ESO CC-A-4.0 Uranus

Somehow we got to this topic. And now here is some history!

Effect on the solar system

Oh no! Will the planet be able to find a stable orbit in our solar system after presumably affecting the fairly stable orbits of the other planets? Star system escape velocities.

Landing on a new world

And not even having time to remark upon the clearly engineered structures on the surface before your whole planet is flung from its sun and everything freezes and you die. :cry:

When Worlds Collide by Powerman 5000: YouTube
2000000000000: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
Hubble Deep Field by Vox: YouTube
And another about the Hubble "Ultra" Deep Field by Deep Astronomy: YouTube

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The Day After Tomorrow: paleoclimatology, thermohaline circulation, and climate modelers Nov 21, 2017

Origins

Roland Emmerich. And from a book by Art Bell! …of all people. Not known for hard scifi.

Climate science communication

Some examples are better than others.

Arctic vs Antarctic

They are… different! How they are different and why the movie might have chosen to go with the “wrong” one for the real-life event on which the opening scene based. Larsen B Ice Shelf. Continental ice vs glacial ice.

Antarctic ice shelves A. J. Cook and D. G. Vaughan CC-BY-3.0 Thermohaline circulation

Arctic/antarctic events and affect on the thermohaline circulation. The Younger Dryas event as an irl historical example of extreme climate shift which still took decades longer than the events of the film.

Paleoclimatology

Human records. Ice Cores! Meteoric ice. Tree rings! Water body beds! Caves!

Ice cores

Age and layers. Ash, gas, life, temperatures from oxygen isotope ratios.

Climate modeling

Colbert’s insights from The Supercomputing Conference. The big data; it is very big.

“Landicanes”

… which are the name we’ve made up for the misnomered “hurricanes” that seem to form over land in the movie. Air flow. the Coriolis effect, thermodynamics and superfreezing in the center of the storm.

attr_text:

Inside The Giant American Freezer Filled With Polar Ice by tom Scott: YouTube
13 Misconceptions About Global Warming: YouTube

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2012: Mayan Calendar realities, galactic alignment, and ark ships w/ Fraser Cain Nov 14, 2017

Mayan calendar

They had one! And so do we. They both end on some sort of the cycle and the world never ends because of our arbitrary selection of scope. Fraser is really tired of having to argue about this sort of thing with death-cultists. The end.

Galactic alignments

Neutrino detection.

Heating Earth

Earth’s layers. Discovering new and different regions of the earth’s internal structure via seismography. Rate of temperature increase. Effect on oceans. Heat retention and radioactivity.

Ark ships

Space settlement and Christopher’s disappointment. Seveneves as the gold standard for how to relocate humanity to space in an emergency.

Perpetuation of specieseses and culture

Should we keep giraffes? Cows? Any larger fauna? Recognition of the complexity and energy-inefficiencies of the food chain. Surviving on crickets and phytoplankton.

Yellowstone

Yellowstone is no joke! Yellowstone supervolcano (more volcano conversation in our Volcano episode). Pyroclastic flow rates. Lake Toba (is larger).

Magnetosphere

The earth’s internal metal. Pole-flipping!

Tsunami

Propagation of energy via wave through fluid and how it probably shouldn’t roll the ship. Asteroid impacts, landslides, and misplaced fossils.

Anti-apocalypse rant

Fraser’s got some stuff to say on this matter, tell-you-what.

Seveneves: impactors, guided evolution, and radiation shields w/ Daniel Mann: Decipher SciFi

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Volcano: seismic detectors, tar pit geology, and dangers of volcanic ash w/ Joe Ruppel Nov 07, 2017

What is a volcano?

No, seriously, what is a volcano? A lot of film critics at the time whiffed on this one and at least one or two of us were in the wrong too. Volcano:

A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically erupting forth lava and volcanic gases onto the surface.

-Wiktionary

La Brea tar pits

Predator/prey capture ratios. Biological activity causing the bubbling and subsequent discovery of a bunch of different bacterai that live in there. Larger things we find fossilized there:

Sabretooth tigers
Mammoths
Giant feline
looooooooads more

Fault lines

The different fault types and which of them tend to manifest volcanoes. Spoiler alert: LA has a transform fault which is the kind that is really really really unlikely to sprout a volcano under normal conditions. Transform faults

Volcano detection

Major monitoring methods looking out for pending eruptions:

Seisimic activity
Gas!
Groundswell - actual deformation of the landscape from the pressure

Pompeii/Herculaneum

Pyroclastic flow vs lava. The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79AD. Casting the cavities that surrounded trapped bodies. Cast of a pompeii body

Volcanic dangers

Volcanic ash, which is often basically just teeny tiny glass for you to breathe in. Lava temperatures: between holy shit hot and omg holy shit hot. Lava weather systems. Gasses! Lava fountains.

Measures

Dams! Backwards or otherwise. The Decade List.

Experiencing a volcanic shockwave: YouTube
From the movie: a human being melting directly and immediately into mere inches of lava: YouTube

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The Fly: teleporters, dna detection, and arthropod digestion Oct 31, 2017

Body horror

Body horror, biological horror, organic horror or visceral horror is horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the unnatural graphic transformation, degeneration or destruction of the physical body.

-Wikipedia

Cronenberg! And Carpenter! You may recall some similar horror themes from our episodes on Event Horizon (though that concentrated rather on the cosmic horror) and The Thing.

Mad… scientist?

More like mad “project manager,” as he describes himself. How refreshing to see something sidestep the trope of the omnicapable super-scientist and have someone NOT create world-changing supertech by themselves. The art of the kludge/bodge.

The computer

It’s basically a genie! Rules-lawyering a computer is programming a computer. The nature of this interpretive computer system and the feats of artificial intelligence that enable it to coherently fuse Brundle and fly together.

Teleporter

Materials-detection, DNA analysis, and black-box DNA recombination algorithms. That’s a hell of a design. And the voice recognition isn’t too shabby, either.

DNA detection

How do we tell between species by DNA these days? DNA barcoding! Find a good, differentiable locus and make a database of that area for a certain type of earth life. Where do we keep the database? The Barcode of Life Data System.

How genetic fusion teleportation could go wrong

Animate vs inanimate. DNA fusion or DNA damage and how and when problems could manifest. Expressing or ignoring large chunks of odd DNA. The unlikelihood of coherent expression of fly-like traits from the fused fly DNA. Junk DNA and its influence on our robustness against fly fusion.

Turning into a fly

Gross hairs. Super strength and the square cube law a la our King Kong episode. Enzymatic digestion. Insect reproductive cycles.

Flies lifecycle: YouTube
A Scientist Responds… to The Fly: io9

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Event Horizon: cosmic deep time,lived-in space ships, and real hell w/ Caelum Rale Oct 24, 2017

Settling nearby space

Mars vs the moon. Inconvenient solar exposure schedules breeding technological food solutions. Substitute engineered fungi for photosynthetic plants as a food source.

Exposition

Vs “show don’t tell.” Australian flags and separation from the United Kingdom.

Space ships

Lived-in ships and how they were exemplified in Alien or Star Wars. The “traditional” design of the Lewis & Clark, basically maintaining the naval analogy in space travel. BUT! The Event Horizon is much different.

The Event Horizon

How the Event Horizon is the opposite of Joseph Campbell’s “belly of the whale.” Radula hallways and OSHA. Gothic architecture and religious imagery in interior and exterior design.

FTL

The Event Horizon and its gravity drive something-or-other. Spacetime-folding visual analogies. Using contained black holes to create wormholes. The Monty Hall problem, but with Hell instead of a prize.

The Solaris Effect

Completely foreign consciousnesses probing for something to communicate. Accidentally poking at raw human neuroses like a toothache. Other forms of consciousness, where consciousness is a form of information processing.

Hell

Is this Hell a place? Or a manifestation of our neuroses? Or a greater consciousness just rolling over on us by accident?

Lovecraft

Cosmicism. Humans facing life from deep time. Human-scale irrelevance.

Caelum Rale: Instagram
The public-domain works of H.P. Lovecraft: Archive.org Amazon

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Daybreakers: medical vampirism, living without a heartbeat, and blood substitutes Oct 17, 2017

Classical vampires…?

And is this a horror movie? Better than the sparkly Twilight ones.

Blood-squirting lizards

Just because that’s awesome

Blood substitutes

Substitutes for what part or what function of blood? Making a blood sword on our Conan episode. What blood is made of. What blood does for us biologically.

It’s got plasmatic electrolytes

It’s what bodies crave

Blood transfusion

Blood types and our developing understanding during the 17th and 19th centuries. Carlos Lammerstammer’s initial work distinguishing the blood types. Pre-modern medicine and the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-who-dies method of medical research, e.g. injecting milk or ale or whiskey into the blood to see what happens.

Vampire blood flow

We’re told and see demonstrated that the vampires have no heartbeat, BUT - the other things we observe suggest that they do have blood flow, somehow. Intravenous vampire blood. Vampire blood extraction. Vampire peristalsis.

Medical vampirism

“In case of human frailty, break glass.” With a “cure” for vampirism available, the ensuring rise of using vampirism as a cure for deadly ailments. But you only get to use it once, so make it count! Connections between vampire lore and the possibility of parabiosis.

Downsides to vampirism

Blood isn’t really usually considered delicious. Ethical concerns with surviving on human blood UNTIL the “blood substitute” is developed.

Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, Elizabethan sexuality, and Kenau's awesome accent w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi

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The Mummy (2017): the New Kingdom, Egyptomania, and chaotic neutral gods w/ Dominic Perry of the History of Egypt Podcast Oct 10, 2017

Geographical Context

Traveling from ancient Egypt to Mespopotamia. Hiding evil things as far away as possible.

Deciphering the Mummy’s historical period

Context clues pointing to Egypt’s “New Kingdom,” circa 1500BC-1200BC. Some touches that hinted: Ahmanet’s Nefertiti-inspired crown, her blue finger-paint as direct reference to King Tutankhamun’s golden finger- and toe-jewelry.

Speaking of King Tut…

His (lack of) actual historical importance. Public knowledge due to the simple coincidence of which things are best preserved and then discovered.

Egyptomania

From ancient Rome to Victorian England to King Tut in the mid-20th. It keeps coming back! The combination of modernity and exoticism of Ancient Egypt.

The Rosetta Stone

Napoleon’s groundbreaking work in enabling the study of science and history while conquering things. The birth of Egyptology.

Egyptian book of the dead

Hollywood’s chronic misunderstanding of the nature of The Book of the Dead. It’s not evil! Egyptian beliefs re death and the afterlife.

Misunderstanding the ancient Egyptian gods

Chaotic neutral Seth and how he is totally not the god of death. Preservation of order against chaos in Egyptian mythology. Enumerating the actual gods of death and how they’re not necessarily bad guys. The problem with mummies.

The History of Egypt Podcast: The History of Egypt Podcast
The Japanese Art of Self-Preservation: Damn Interesting
Diablo Postmortem : YouTube

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Pitch Black: tri star systems, micrometeorites, and eyeshine w/ Fraser Cain Oct 03, 2017

Stasis

Stasis for interstellar space travel. “Freezing” people into a low-activity biological state. IRL medical developments.

Microimpactors in space

Space junk in near-earth orbit. That time a paint chipped cracked a window on the ISS (don’t worry, the ISS is fine). Comet tails and variously-sized chunks of ice as impactors.

Landing on M6-117 (and other planets)

Atmospheric density vs interstellar velocities. The benefits of landing on a planet with atmosphere vs a planet without. It’s hard without! Realizing having an atmosphere to slow down in can be a blessing if the ship can handle the temperatures due to atmospheric compression under/around the vessel.

Trinary Star systems

Trinary systems and the chance for stable planetary orbits. Proxima Centauri. Globular star clusters as alternative for “all light all the time.”

Bioraptors (the monsters)

Predators on the “cicada cycle.” How the ecology of this world appears or does not appear to support this cycle. Slowly-heating stars and the shifting “goldilocks” zone.

Riddick

Eyeshine! Light amplification or translation from outside of our cone of EM reception. Night vision. Replacing eyeballs with robust cameras. Ghost in the Shell and X-ray vision.

Glow-worms

Evolving bioluminescence as a food-collection mechanism vs keeping away the flying death-machines.

Fraser Cain's different stuff: Astronomy Cast Universe Today YouTube
Farewell Cassini: The Grand Finale and the Final Images of Saturn by Fraser Cain: YouTube
What If Saturn Paid Us a Very Close Visit? by Phil Plait: Bad Astronomy
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: iTunes Amazon

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Crematoria, necromongers, and ambush predator defense Sep 26, 2017

Necromongers

Where do I sign up? Scary space death cults. Necromonger gothic architecture and interior design. Frowny-faces.

Face on your face

Avoiding ambush predators via application of faces. Strong jaws. Designing against ambush predators. FACES EVWERYWHERE.

Why Google’s Deep Dream A.I. Hallucinates In Dog Faces

(Atmospheric) penetration

Atmospheric entry bombs. Landing invasion ships, overpressure, and displays of power. Also the blue ball planet-killing explosion thing.

Interstellar travel

Ion drive acceleration and speed and average distances between stars. The unlikeliness of non-FTL travel between star systems during the span of human lifetimes.

Private prison

The economics of the private prisons in this universe and how it’s cost-effective to basically put a prison facility on Mercury.

Crematoria

Hot planets close to their sun. Lack of atmosphere and lack of green-house effect causing extremely quick extreme temperature changes. This planet was pretty much Mercury. The impossibility of breathable atmosphere in these circumstances. The speed of the sunset and solar terminators.

Crematorian dog-things

Robustness of skin. Comparison to other color-changing creatures. Luminescence vs passive color-change.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay/Assault on Dark Athena: Amazon
The Chronicles of Riddick by Folding Ideas: YouTube

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: space jumps, empathy telepathy, and ❤️ Yondu Sep 19, 2017

Confetti breath

Colorful monster breath. Aurora borealis or australis and how the solar wind interacts with our atmosphere at the poles. How “confetti breath” is a better name than “Taserface” and how Taserface looks like Mr Lordi:

Skin

Drax’s misunderstanding about “thickness,” and our approval of his intuition that the inside might be easier to pierce. Pick a meatus. And… it can be gold! How not to die from using bodypaint.

The Sovereign

The gold people with the gold parts. Grills? Genetic design of a whole civilization and levels of caution for personal safety graphed against length of life.

Drones

For once in space-scale scifi: drones! The levels of cost and complexity when designing craft to safely transport squishy humanoids. Galaga!

Space jumps/wormholes

Hexagons! And what they reveal about interstellar travel in this universe. Space straws.

Brain Planet

Escape velocity and atmosphere and centering your vulnerable mass. The life lost when a creature that lives for eternity is vanquished. Inability to take on perspectives.

Empath…y?

Empath vs telepath and imagining how this ability could communicate “emotions” but not “thoughts.” FMRI. Lizard brain. Fight or flight. Side-channel data leakage and influencing the system via things like Trans-cranial direct current stimulation.

Yondu

A Yondu-appreciation party and exploring the control of the arrow via the fin. Controlling the arrow not by his whistle but by direct bionic neuro-feedback.

The Complex Feels of Guardians of the Galaxy v.2 by Lindsay Ellis: YouTube
Does water freeze or boil in space?: Starts With a Bang
The Trelenburg Gate by Andy P: Batch 25 Comics

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The Time Machine: HG Wells, geological time scales, and time travel self-consistency w/ Joe Ruppel Sep 12, 2017

H.G. Wells

The book, his prescience, and his coinage of the term “time machine.” His scientific literacy and the ideas in the physics and mathematics of his time. Other times he was on the show.

Moving through time

Dimensions and physics and moving through the invisible dimension of time.

Humanity and war

Time traveling between wars. The inevitability of global conflict in the late 19th century. The inevitability of nuclear apocalypse in 1960. The inevitability of humanity overreaching in manipulation of the natural world in 2002. Really large explosions, nuclear and otherwise. Krakatoa vs Tsar Bomba. The year without a summer.

Geological scales

Time traveling across geological time scales. Tracking in relative space and over miles across the planet’s surface. “Time and space machine.” Staccato time travel.

Eloi and Morlocks

Human evolution and selective pressures. Humans as cattle. Inefficiency in turning sunlight into steak. Maintaining 19th-century English over millennia.

Time travel paradoxes

Single-timeline self-consistency. Time travel victory strategies.

Books

What books would you bring with you to repair future society?

Weenas

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: iTunes Amazon
The Time Machine (2002): iTunes Amazon

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The 100 (pilot): space station maintenance, post-nuclear Earth, and grumpy old men Sep 05, 2017

The particular value of pilot episodes

We did this once before and had a really good time. Covering pilot episodes specifically and exclusively to get at a high-concentration of scifi ideas and worldbuilding. And now we’re at it again with The 100!

Free-floating constructed space settlements

And their value versus planetary settlements or settlements otherwise on existing bodies in the solar system. Time to develop space settlements and what a dozen individual, national settlements suggest about the state of industry in space before the apocalypse in the show. Inflatables in space settlement.

Space resources

Both before and after earth enters nuclear winter. Water, air, hydrocarbons and where to find them.

Rules and enforcement under extreme circumstances

Freedom vs keeping everyone from dying. Reproduction policies. Simulations for generation ships - maintaining sufficient genetic diversity through selection and control of reproduction.

Aging equipment in spaaaaaaace

We hit on this once before in our Seveneves episode. Using landing vessels that have been sitting in orbit for a century. Don’t keep your equipment next to your bananas.

Nuclear apocalypse

The 7:10 rule. Human civilization vs survival of the human animal. Nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. Types of radiation and radiation cookie puzzles.

Post-Nuclear Earth

Ancient Roman artillery (ps we said “scorpio” but meant “ballista,” whoops). Bioluminescence in a forest.

How Damaging is Radiation? by Veritasium: YouTube
Cruel Bombs by Vsauce: YouTube

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Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design Aug 29, 2017

How to watch Blade Runner

About the different releases and how very bad voiceovers can be. But tl;dr: watch the “Final Cut” for sure always.

Creators’ Intent

Philip K Dick’s vision in the novel Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep vs Ridley Scott’s in the film. Dick’s use of scifi as a tool to explore humanity.

Cyberpunk

High tech, low life. Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Many other examples in our episode history. Social stratification and the wealth gap. Cyborgy bits and noodle bars. Environmental destruction. Flying cars?

VFX

And cinematography. What a beautiful movie! Practical effects and things that age well from the 80s.

Replicants

Detection. Genetic design. Testing for replicants with bullets like testing a witch with drowning.

Robotic Anthropomorphicization

Why design your androids to be so human? Designing anthropomorphized androids to operate with human tools in a human environment.

Robot Revelations

A new theory for how replicants work. Terminological issues. Maybe they shouldn’t be called “androids?”

AI Issues

The control problem and cellular kill switches.

The Voight-Kampff Machine

The Voight-Kampff machine as analogy to the lie detector, i.e. the BS intimidation machine for coaxing people/androids into admitting things. Or shooting the interviewer. Turtle vs tortoise vs terrapin.

Brain design and selection

“Android” brain production analogy with CPU production methods.

Memory, Mortality

Memories providing the context that makes up our selves. Looking for nipples.

Deckard’s humanity

Is Deckard a replicant? It depends on whether you’re talking about the book and then also which cut of the film.In the book, no. In the theatrical release, probably not. In The Final Cut, yes.

Bad Voiceover Montage from the Theatrical Release of Blade Runner: YouTube

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Alien Covenant: neutrinos, weakly interacting massive particles, and swole Jesus aliens Aug 22, 2017

Crew Selection

Human pairing in space crews. Sex selection for different purposes, and in particular settlement. The Voices from L5 episode on Gender in Space. If humans still need to gestate the old-fashioned way, you’re gonna need a lot of human wombs.

Colonizing

The numbers game of space settlement. The possibility of gestating the next human generation on the target planet from frozen embryo: i.e. population bomb.

Neutrinos

Weakly interacting. How to detect a “neutrino burst” in space and not be vaporized by a supernova. Tools to grant perspective on the topic. Neutrino detectors large and small. “World’s Smallest neutrino detector.”

A model of the Japanese neutrino detector 日:Jnn Swole Jesus

More details from Ridley Scott about the connection between Jesus and the engineers. The suggestion made in Prometheus made more explicit. Swole Korean Jesus. Swole white Jesus.

Alien Evolution

Parasitoid developments. Design vs natural selection. Indiscriminate resource consumption.

How to break out of a chest

These guys made some assumptions and ran with them. Mouth-mouth saw-saws and their use in chestbursting.

What is a Neutrino? by Minute Physics: YouTube
Quantum SHAPE-SHIFTING: Neutrino Oscillations by Minute Physics: YouTube
Alien: Covenant | Prologue: Last Supper by 20th Century FOX: YouTube
Alien: Covenant | Prologue: The Crossing | 20th Century FOX: YouTube

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The Truman Show: objects visible from space, dome megastructues, and reality testing Aug 15, 2017

Reality TV

The Real World, reality TV, etc… and then The Truman Show. Thank the writers strikes and the economics of production sans writers.

Seeing things from space

Calculating the size of the Truman show dome from the satellite images in the film. Seeing man-made things from space. How the Great Wall is not visible from space but the pyramids are. And where does “space” begin, anyway? Looking from the ISS.

The Dome!

Weather systems inside man-made structures. The dome is plenty large enough to have its own weather systems. Hugeness and economic realities. Other scifi domed-city discussions.

Product Placement/Advertising

And our own plans for how to sell out. Thoughts on “Gorilla” marketing. Unrelated: send advertising inquiries to contact@deciphermedia.tv (｡◝‿◜｡)

The Truman show Delusion

Colbert’s mustache woes. Delusions of grandeur over time. This guy’s really interesting personal story of his experience with “the Truman Show Delusion.”

Reality Testing

How would you know if it were you? Occam’s razor. Glitches in the matrix. Plato’s Cave.

How Much of the Earth Can You See at Once? by Vsauce: YouTube
The Truman Delusion/Being Famous byh Johnny Benjamin: YouTube

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Power Rangers: a gold monster, Elatarian conlang, and zord suggestions Aug 08, 2017

Dinosaur extinction event

Dinosaurs spotted in the Cretaceous period. The K-Pg (Cretaceous-Paleogene) aka K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction event (the one with the comet). Hypothetical competition with the vulcanism explanation. Morgan Freeman, Brian Cranston, and Christopher’s favorite move, the “Zap Brannigan”

Get off my lawn

Damn teenagers being irresponsible, endangering others and themselves and whatnot. But then they get superpowers so I guess it’s cool.

Life seeding and crystals and whatnot

Origin of life on earth: crystals. Pro tip: it’s really hard searching online for science things about crystals because all the results are woo woo nonsense. The Prometheus problem. The sameness of all life (that we see). Bipedalism seems to be a generally useful adaptation, I guess. Yay us.

Alien Language

Christine Shreyer created the Eltarian conlang for the movie. Here is an interview where she discusses her work on both Man of Steel and Power Rangers. Erlang is a programming language, in case you get confused. Sources of ancientness that she used in the construction. Language change over time and how to avoid it.

Gold

10,000 nukes. Calculating the gold tonnage needed to create a Goldar. Recovering splattered riches. Places to find Goldar-sized gold deposits.

Megazord

Combat strategy. Our best Zord ever idea: MANTIS SHRIMP.

Controlling a Mega Zord

It’s basically Octo Dad, Or QWOP.

Is Rita Repulsa’s Staff More Destructive than Her Monsters? by Because Science w/ Kyle Hill: YouTube
POWER/RANGERS UNAUTHORIZED [BOOTLEG UNIVERSE] by Adi Shankar: YouTube

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Rick & Morty: Shrödinger, many worlds, and rules-lawyering AI w/ Adrian Falcone Aug 01, 2017

Many Worlds

The interpretations of quantum physics that gives Rick & Morty the “multiverse.” Probabilities and determinism.

Shrödinger’s Cat

Shringer’s thought experient, initially a criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics cum go-to example.

Universes

Organizing and labeling universes. The “central finite curve.”

AI Foibles

Rules-lawyering with a genie, again. Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg. Kevin Kelly’s take. Keeping them in the box.

Universes in Universes

Energy efficiency in multiverse batteries. Creating universes. the Kardashev scale.

Community also by Darn Harmon: iTunes Amazon
Rick and Morty - Finding Meaning in Life by Will Shoder: YouTube

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Kong Skull Island: geological mapping, combat-ready herbivores, and Kong size over time Jul 25, 2017

Hiding islands

Perpetual storms. Jupiter’s storm and other non-Kongish Jupiter appreciation.

Spy Satellites

Early spy satellites. Stability-spins and film-return techniques.

Geological Imaging

“Seismic charges” i.e. bombs to irritate aggressive megafauna. Earthquakes, real or otherwise, and using them to understand the inside of the earth. The “hollow earth theory” is dumb garbage.

Kong

King Kong size inconsistencies over time and even within films. Godzilla comparisons.

Combat-ready herbivores

Gorillas! When herbivores have sharp fangs. The economics of displays of aggression instead of fighting.

Giant Creatures Evolution

Pygmification of island species irl. Limitations on resources. Keystone species in ecosystems.

The dangers of the tropics

Venomous creatures and their prevalence in warmer climes. Why Do Venomous Animals Live In Warm Climates?

Medieval weaponry…

And how this relates to King Kong..? Was the flail a ‘real’ weapon?

Why Do Venomous Animals Live In Warm Climates? by Veritasium: YouTube

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Judge Dredd: combat robots, mega cities, and food recycling Jul 18, 2017

Mega Cities

Big. Tall. How they can be good, and how this one is bad.

Breaking the oxygen cycle

The environmental calamity in the movie that broke the earth is not detailed, but we try to consider how long humanity has if it doesn’t fix it somehow.

Recycled Food

Reclaimed food waste? OR… reclaiming synthetic food from human waste. Unjustified psychological aversions.

Ground Effect in aerodynamics

“In fixed-wing aircraft, ground effect is the increased lift (force) and decreased aerodynamic drag that an aircraft’s wings generate when they are close to a fixed surface. When landing, ground effect can give the pilot the feeling that the aircraft is ‘floating’.” -Wikipedia

Warbots

Awesome bang-for-buck robot design. Chris adds “Warbot head model” to his list of things he needs even more than air.

The Janus Project

The practical impossibility of incubating neurologically-adult humans. Babies in sacks and the benefits thereof.

LAWWWWWWW

You Betrayed the Law: YouTube
Dredd (2012): iTunes Amazon
Demolition Man: cryogenic criminal justice and three seashells: Decipher SciFi

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Robocop: cyorgification, space defense, and robot on robot violence Jul 11, 2017

Verhoven’s genius

Over-the-top satire. Starship Troopers. Blood and guts in the late 80s/early 90s. Co-ed locker rooms and mocking commercial advertising interludes.

Space Defense

The “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. Firing weapons from space, orbital platforms, and simulated gravity. Depictions of artificial gravity in media at the time.

Cyborgification

Availability of cyborg components and social stratification. Different kinds of artificial hearts.

Robocop

The economics of the brainwashed cyborg vs pure AI robot. Body transplants vs brain transplants.

Brain-machine interfaces

Opto-neural processing enhancement. Reading visual memories from brain activity.

Machine learning and eyeballs

The resolution of the eye. Simple computer-vision and inadequacy of 1980s VHS tapes.

Robot vs Robot

Cyborg body design type choices. Bipeds descending stairs. Dean Kamen’s stair-climbing gyroscopic wheelchair. (correction: I talked about “tri-wheeled” tread-based wheelchair on the show. The iBot actually had two sets of wheels and I was thinking of other wheelchair designs)

ED-209

“Stop, citizen, or I will rub my poop-hands on you.” Animal noises and postural intimidation tactics. Safety alarms.

Primary directives

Comparison with Arthur C Clarke’s three laws.

# Robocop Asimov 1. Serve the public trust. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. Protect the innocent A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. Uphold the law A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Our Robocop Remake: Our Robocop Remake
That scene from Our Robocop Remake with all the dicks: YouTube
What is the Resolution of the Eye? by Vsauce: YouTube

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Doom: PC games nostalgia, intelligent supercomputers, and interdimensional beings w/ Daniel James Barker Jul 02, 2017

Doom

Doom was a really awesome important thing in 1993. History lessons because Dan is too young to understand but we are old. Nostalgia, for better or for worse. Modularity and the development of game modding. How to play a modern game without playing it.

The true test of technology

The true test of any technology: can it run Doom? Doom running on a Macbook Pro Touch Bar.

Volumetric Projections

“3D holograms.” As a narrative/historical record playback device. As seen in: Prometheus. Difficulties versus augmented reality.

Health

Measuring “life” as a life meter. Micromorts and actuarial considerations. Safety gear in health packs.

Hell Universe

Tapping into unlimited energy; who could resist?

Vega the supercomputer

Turing tests. Regrets. “Absolute zero” cooling systems and marketing speak. Backups analagous to DNA cloning.

Samuel Hayden

Body transplants vs brain transplants. Where does the self reside? Cyborg geniuses. Life goals.

RIP AND TEAR

Doom (The original game): GoG Steam Android
Doom 2016 Soundtrack: YouTube
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner: iTunes Amazon

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The Girl With All the Gifts: parasitic fungi, speed of smell, and the end of humanity Jun 27, 2017

Dad jokes

A fun guy lol ?

New sorts of zombies

Fungus zombies! Similarities to The Last of Us. Surprise that we’re not completely tired of zombies. Pandemic vs epidemic.

Fungus

Mycelium, hyphae, fruiting bodies. Spores! “All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.”

Fungus Marionettes

Fungi playing Surgeon Simulator with human bodies.

Sense of smell

Hunting by smell. Covering scents. Smelling slow and fast. The power of Axe Body spray. The power of chemical warfare. How “smells” work.

IRL

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis! The real fungus on which the zombie fungus is based. The rundown of its lifecycle. Biting the leaf. Chemical instructions controlling behaviour.

Cordyceps moving to humans

The difference in arthtropod and human circulatory and nervous systems. How to best spread fungal infections between humans.

The end of homo sapiens

Parasites forcing their hosts to act in their interests. Mushroom towers. The rise of homo boletus. Coming around on anthropocentrism.

Goodbyes

Do you want a cat?

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey: iTunes Amazon
Why Do We Have Two Nostrils? by VSauce: YouTube
The Last of Us: Amazon
Zombie Parasites from Nat Geo Live: YouTube

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Childhood's End: revealing aliens, Drake equation, and scientific inquiry Jun 20, 2017

Arrival/First Contact

Aircraft shielding. Impressing upon humanity the futility of resistance.

Selecting Diplomats

Alien diplomatic moneyball.

They Know Us

Flawless colloquial earth languages. Cultural context. How to manipulate apes. Benevolent alien dictatorship.

Curbing Scientific Inquiry

Approaching utopia removing incentives for innovation. Alien limits on research. “The stars were not meant for man.”

The Great Filter

Maybe these aliens in the show are the great filter. Filling in some slots of the Drake Equation. Maybe we’re just terrible for the universe and they know it. :/

Butt Numbers

Directed evolution at a scale of tens to thousands of years.

Alien Appearance

This part is too spoilery for this page

Remember Us

Not too much to ask, really. We could have had a worse run.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: iTunes Amazon

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Kingsman The Secret Service: gaia hypothesis, rebooting civilization, and Oddjob with swordlegs Jun 13, 2017

Gaia Hypothesis

The idea that the biosphere self-regulates to support life. Does it hold up?

Civilization Reboot

Sim cards. Better ways to select the humans that will survive. Minimum populations.

Oddjob with swordlegs

Sword legs! Cleaving humans not just through but vertically.

Prosthetic feet/legs

Butts! And their utility for distance running. Hugh Herr and awesome climbing feet.

Augmented Reality

Versus virtual reality. Physical positioning and orientation fudging in virtual and augmented reality shared spaces. Rainbows End. HoloLens.

Church Scene

It’s so good! Also: long shots, real or otherwise.

The Culling

SIM card splodeyheads. Transcranial direct current stimulation. To cull, or not to cull.

Kingsman: not so secret effects: FXGuide
Arrival Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media

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The Expanse Season 2: falling into the sun, martian gravity, and human g-force limits w/ Fraser Cain Jun 06, 2017

Falling into the sun

Why not dump all of our nuclear waste there? Shedding orbital velocity. Eros the magic space potato.

Martian Gravity

Our lack of understanding irl of whether humans can conceive and gestate and grow in low or microgravity. Centrifugal artificial gravity.

Epstein Drive

Pulling Gs. Human limits.

Exciting times

Finally we’re in a place that we’re taking space settlement for granted. Developments in space travel like the Falcon Heavy et al. Recently, Stratolaunch:

Settlement issues

Fragility of interconnected systems at small scale. Radiation. Living inside a big rock.

Venus

Venus sucks. Mostly. On the surface, at least. Soviet Venus missions. Turning Venus into a spaceship.

Solar Energy

Harvesting and limiting solar exposure in different parts of the solar system. Relative solar intensity.

Fraser's things: Universe Today Astronomy Cast Fraser Cain @ YouTube
The Expanse: Nick Farmer on conlanging and the intersection of language and scifi: Decipher SciFi

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Midnight Special: fatherhood, synesthesia, and unconventional computing May 30, 2017

Superpowers?

Energy usage and biclops lasereyes.

Radio reception

The old wive’s tale of dental fillings picking up terrestrial radio signals. Satellite military communications frequencies.

Alternative Computing

Quantum and DNA computing. Synesthesia. Recognizing that we are all synesthetes within the bounds of “normal” human brain operations.

Dimensions

Extra- super- ultra-dimensionality. Flatland again.

Superdimensional Beings

“Beings of light” and why this might be the most reasonable example of the trope. The world on the other side.

Carl Sagan on Dimensions: YouTube
Arrival Part 1: superdimensionality and alien physics w/ Jolene & Adrian: Decipher SciFi
: Decipher SciFi

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Nausicaa: rewilding, technological anxiety, and what is "nature?" w/ Miles Greb May 23, 2017

Miyazaki recognition

This is Miles’ favorite. Chris doesn’t generally love Miyazaki but really really loves Totoro.

Environmentalism in Media

Processing human-caused catastrophe. We previously explored this in our Godzilla episode with Miles. Miyazaki was inspired by Minamata disease.

Aircraft

irl Nausicaa glider!

Rewilding

The ways in which humanity is worse than poison. Thriving of wildlife in our absence. Predators.

What is nature

Colloquial definitions versus recognition that we are part of nature and not really separate from it.

Technology Anxiety

Nuclear power safety and the negative effects of fossil fuels. Recognizing the relative safeness and harm. Being responsible with our technology.

Preservation

Of knowledge and technology over epochal time. Infrastructure and production. The scientific method as essential technology.

Espers - From Nothing, Something Comes by Miles Greb: Kickstarter

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Prometheus: yoked aliens, cave paintings, and seeding life May 16, 2017

Love and hate

A story of love for Prometheus with recognition of its faults. Surprisingly high tomato ratings. So much stuff to think about?

Seeding Earth

Natural selection, evolution, and engineers seeding life on Earth. This would require seeding all life on earth, to explain our shared genetic heritage with everything else that lives here.

Objective-based evolution

In this movie, I guess Lamarck Was Right. Continued Egineer presence over the course of the history of life on earth, guiding things toward their goals in order to make us like them.

The Engineers

Yoked as hell. Albinos with allopecia.

Cave Paintings

List of cultures visited. Radiocarbon dating (carbon-14). Uranium dating. Informational density.

Star Maps

Constellations and hemispheres and directions to solar systems.

Alien System

FTL. Moons and ringed planets. How not to safely approach and explore a new planet/moon. “Eh, seems fine” as a modus operandi for your space exploration mission.

Alien Pregnancy

Parasites. Superparasites, Tearing the umbilical cord. Placenta.

Messages for the Future by VSauce: YouTube

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Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot language, intelligent animals, and where do trees get their mass? May 09, 2017

A bit of review

Because we really enjoyed this movie.

The team

A human, a green humanoid, an enhanced raccoon, Drax, and a hypermobile hyperintelligent tree.

Rocket Raccoon

Cybernetic skeletons. Animal intelligence. Cognitive enhancement and different types of intelligence.

Drax

Kinda like a grey hulk. Putting our lack of comics expertise on display.

Groot

How plants work. Nitrogen from the air making 50% of tree biomass. Plant regeneration and communication.

Language considerations! Yay!

Possible layers of complexity under “I am Groot.” The different ways that could or could not represent language. The complexity of metaphors and similar linguistic mechanisms, and how Drax’s people could lack understanding. Thermians. Tamarians.

Old Terran technology

Chris Pratt’s cassette tapes. Batteries. Audio cassette technology. Wearing oxides and tape-stretching.

Why Do Marvel's Movies Look Kind of Ugly? by Patrick Willems: YouTube
Guardians of the Galaxy 2: iTunes Amazon

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Oasis (pilot): ponics, the vastness of space, and breathable atmospheres May 02, 2017

Amazon Pilot Model

Amazon’s practice of putting out a pile of different pilots and letting the cream rise via actual user data.

London 2032

Environmental collapse. Precipitous economic drop, at least locally. Population collapse maybe?

Space is big

The Oasis settlement is on “the edge of the galaxy.” That’s really far! Nearest edge to Earth still thousands of lightyears. So, magic FTL. Stasis and muscle-wasting. FTL comms may be couriered by the ships.

Preacher man

The role of a man of God on a space station where resources are scarce and engineers are in high demand.

The Oasis Settlement

Not as advertised! We’re still in the early stages of building Elysium here; it’s still being settled. Gravity and weather systems and water. Tectonic activity and proximity to other bodies. Breathable atmospheres and how they get there.

One-way trips

Expense and complexity of designing for return trips in space travel. The nature of the magic FTL seems to still need normal rocket launches to get up there. Processing passenger vessels for materials.

*Ponics

Hydroponics. Aeroponics. Lower energy and water requirements, fine control of variables. Haley Joel is our Mark Watney botanist.

Space Dementia

Ala Armageddon? Mundane explanations, Occam’s Razor, and magnets. Or supernatural. We’ll see!

Magnets. How do they work?

Please see the Veritasium and Minute Physics videos above. This has little (nothing) to do with Oasis, really, but it’s a cool thing we wanted to share. :)

Predictions

What could be going on on this world and what we expect to actually happen. Solaris!

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The Prestige: magic as skeptical training, Tesla, and taming electricity Apr 25, 2017

This movie is so good!

Just a warning: we really think you should watch this before listening to the episode. It’s so good!

Magic as skeptical training

Taking advantage of human intuition. Taking advantage of our sensory aparatus. Inoculating against credulity and being fooled.

Penn & Teller

Excellent showmen who have been at it forever and who are just great. They are “honest liars” and a lot of their media is great training in cognitive biases.

Saving people from drowning

Attempts to derive scientific guidelines for chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save drowning victims might go back further than you’d expect.

Tesla

David Bowie as the perfect dandy to play the rather dandy-ish Tesla.

Modern railguns might be in a similar vein to Tesla’s “Death Ray”

Taming electricity

The wonderment of the period. Misconceptions about the rivalry between Tesla and Edison.

Dedication and obsession and sacrifice

The difference between simple and easy. Going over the top to solve a problem with technology where it isn’t necessary.

The Prestige - Hiding in Plain Sight by nerdwriter: YouTube
The Trouble with Teleporters by CGP Grey: YouTube

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Ghost in the Shell: modern cyberpunk, biorobots, and the nature of self w/ Jolene Creighton Apr 18, 2017

Future City

Where is this movie taking place? Was it made explicit? We’re thinking neo-Tokyo but what’s really interesting is the lengths they went to in order to make New Zealand look like a retro-futuristic Asian city.

Cyberpunk

Roots in Neuromancer etc. The rising Asian power of the period (Japan) and the mixing of western and eastern aesthetics.

Robots!

And robot materials. Robot doctors. Metamaterials. Biorobots and cyborgs. Metal vs biomech. Blending in. Squishiness.

Robot eyes

Networked AR lens implants. Batou had a whole suite of EM filters! Thermal, night vision, and x-ray. X-ray! Otherwise known as “cancer mode.” How x-rays work and the danger he must posing to everyone around him.

Invisibility Cloaks

Harry potter and Predator. First Predator vision, now predator invisisuit! Bending different frequencies of light around objects cloaked with metamaterials.

Memory and Self

Memory “glitch” medication. Implanting learning. Wiping memories and adapting brains to new bodies.

Man vs Machine

The potential foreignness of artificial intelligence. The human brain as a meaning-making machine. Melding with the machines.

Nature of Self

And dualism and the great questions raised in the original film.

Ghost in the Shell (the real one!): iTunes Amazon
Ghost in the Shell: scifi anime, computer evolution, and cybernetics: Decipher SciFi
Measure of a Man - Star Trek TNG: iTunes Amazon

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I Am Legend: zompires, fuel spoilage in the apocalypse, and loneliness w/ Nick Farmer Apr 11, 2017

A book and so many adaptations

I Am Legend (the book) (1954), The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Legend (2007), I Am Omega (2007). This one (if you consider the alternative, better ending) might be the closest to getting the point of the book.

Zompires

Zombies vs vampires and the origin of this story in the pre-zombie era. The book inspired Night of the Living Dead!

Using viruses to our advantage

Viruses as workhorses to deliver medical payloads. Mutations, good and bad. Telomeres. Cancer, and the difficulties of biological immortality.

Loneliness

The post-apocalypse can be rough; it’s difficult for social creatures. Talking to dogs and mannequins. Videos by

Zompire biology

What we observe presumably as the effects of their disease:

Superquick respiration
UV burns them to death
Hairless
Translucent skin
Unhinged jaws
Aggression
Averbal
Strong bones and muscle

Zompires vs Undead

The twist being that Will Smith is the real monster! Depending on which ending you see.

Endings

The “alternative” was so much better. Who is the real monster? The meaning behind the phrase “I Am Legend” and how it is mostly lost in the films.

The Survivors by Nick Farmer: Amazon
The Expanse: iTunes Amazon
Mind Field Episode 1 - Isolation: YouTube

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Life: time in space, ISS safety, and literal firewalls Apr 04, 2017

The International Space Station

Crew of six. Highly trained to do space stuff and… study aliens? Crazy crane-arms.

Is this the future?

Near-future? Referencing the challenger explosion. A survey of the evidence and the answer: basically this must be taking place now. World population: 8 billion!

Origins of alien life

Looked rather similar to life on our own planet. Common origins. Panspermia. Or is life typical in the universe, and life as we understand it is a somewhat typical example?

Time in space

In the movie Jake Gyllenhaal claims 473 days in space. That’s a lot! NASA Twin study.

This alien

Wow what a bastard this alien is. “Just trying to survive.” Pluripotency and cell specialization. A brain made of muscles. “A giant piece of murder muscle.” A jet plane made of biceps. One cell

Kill it with fire!

Literal firewalls. Temperatures of incinerators. Could we burn it up by tossing it down into the atmosphere (hot!).

Kill it with space!

Give that alien some space. Aliens love space.

Plan B: Screw it! Push it and they and everything into space! But is the math in the ballpark of reasonable? Escape velocities from earth’s surface vs the ISS.

Alien: iTunes Amazon
What if... orbital speed?: What If

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Armageddon: explosions, impactor tracking, and density of the asteroid belt w/ Daniel James Barker Mar 28, 2017

💥explosion noises💥

Michael Bay blows things up. Layers of subtlety.

BIG AS TEXAS

Just how very very large and unavoidably catastrophic the impactor in this movie is. Size vs Deep Impact. Size vs the dinosaur impactor.

Visibility of this asteroid in the sky

Angular size of this asteroid. Calculations from size, speed and distance suggested in the film (14 arcseconds). Using Ceres as a baseline for figuring out how bright this asteroid would be in our sky.

Tracking potential impactors

We do this irl! It helps when they’re on our solar plane. Comets can come in all sideways, which can make thing difficult. But we do okay tracking a lot of those too. Apophis.

Asteroid belts etc

Common misconceptions about the density of objects in the belt. It’s really diffuse in general! You won’t need to fly your shuttle like a jet in not-asmosphere.

Things hit earth

Lots of past impactors. Micrometeorites. Modern impacts like Chelyabinsk or Tunguska. Russia is basically a meteor magnet.

Astronauts

Drilling and art vs science. Astronaut training and why it’s not that big a deal and you can pretty much skip most of it and hop on an asteroid. 😎

Misc Physics

Nonsensical simulated gravity. Slingshot maneuvers. Steeling energy from moons and planets.

Deep Impact: citizen scientists, extinction events, and avoidance: Decipher SciFi
Phil Plait's Review of Armageddon: Bad Astronomer
Uncertainty Principle the Podcast: Uncertainty Principle

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Hidden Figures: the real women and some NACA/NASA history w/ Joe Ruppel Mar 21, 2017

On voices

My guest appearance talking about this film on the podcast Voices From L5.

The women!

The movie mostly follows three incredible women in particular.

NACA/NASA

This got left out of the movie, but the history of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), then NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), is an important part of the story.

Space Race

Existential threats. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines obviating much of the interest in basing nuclear weapons in space. Dangerous beeps and boops.

Humans in Space

Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Alan Shepard. National and global heroes.

Space stuff is dangerous

Flight testing is really unsafe. Redstone rockets.

Space Competition

National competition in the day, feels to us more healthy and global-cooperative these days. For now. Until it gets cheaper and there are resources to fight over. :(

Computers, human and otherwise

Human computers. Adding machines. Early programmable computers. (Justified) trust issues with these new machines. IBM 7090. Fortran.

John Glenn

Joe’s favorite superhero. A totally amazing list of accomplishments even before the Mercury program. And then the only person to ride in both the Mercury and Shuttle programs.

Hats off

Appreciation for the people who pulled all of this stuff off, with special consideration for the women featured in the film.

Hidden Figures (the book) by Margot Lee Shetterly: iTunes Amazon
From the Earth to the Moon: Amazon
Apollo 13: iTunes Amazon

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Q&A: damning moral intuitions Mar 14, 2017

Q&A #1

What: Our first Q&A episode! Wherein we answer the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!

“What would you do for immortality?” (Question from CF Villion on Twitter)

Trolley problems. Types of immortality, especially “virtual” immortality. Consciousness uploading.

“#SciFi #Space: what would happen if a #BlackHole showed up in our #SolarSystem?” (Question from Maxime Duprez on Twitter)

Rogue black holes. Passing through the Kuiper belt. Or passing through the asteroid belt. The myriad ways in which this would totally mess up our solar system and probably kill us all.

“In SciFi movies we are Earthlings but what about galaxy VS galaxy stuff. What would we be called? Cuz I’m not down with being called Milkies” (Question from Michael on Twitter)

Earth-centric point-of-view. Milkies? Maybe the aliens can call us “milksopp.” Don’t forget there could be many many other intelligent species amongst the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, though.

“What would an orbital battle be like?” (Question from John Freeman on Twitter)

Messy. Defining what we mean by orbital. Flotsam and jetsam. Yet more references to Seveneves. Kinetic weaponry and orbital bombardment.

Zap Brannigan style “What would you do if you met yourself? Would be disappointed or in awe?” (Question by Nick Temple on Twitter)

Not liking oneself from the outside. Antisocial magnets of the same polarity.

“If you could have any creature as a pet from SciFi, what would it be?” (Question by Cameron on Twitter)

Ethical implications with trying to take in a creature of unknown intelligence as a pet. Bad pets: Dune sandworms,

“Why Hasn’t Some Disaster Destroyed The Earth?” (Question by MysticInvestigations on Twitter)

Impactors. Protections offered by our moon, Jupiter, and other bodies in our solar system. The formation of our moon, with accretion disks and whatnot.

“Which Newspeak word do you like most? Why?” (Question by David Rozansky)

Doubleplus good.

“Watching Arrival. Why do artsy scifi movies have abstract expressionist art aliens? I mean sure, avoid lil green men, but featureless?” (Question by vgr on Twitter)

We worked a lot out about the aliens from arrival in our two episodes. Alien morphology. More anthropocentrism. Invisible (to us) differentiating markings. Here’s a whole blog dedicated to seeing through the eyes of other creatures in their own areas of the spectrum: Photography of the Invisible World.

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The Space Between Us: lightspeed commuunications and relative gravity w/ Chris Noessel Mar 07, 2017

How we wound up covering this teen romance

Chris was in town and at the last minute, we called together a Decipher SciFi meetup in NYC. Thanks for coming out, folks!

Settling Mars

Long and short term threats to humanity. Anthropocene. Courage and adventure and inspiration.

Astronaut Quarantine

Frank Borman and space vomit and space diarrhea. Pre-flight and post-flight quarantine protocols.

Mars mission design

Rocket to orbit, dock with the larger ship/station, then on to Mars. Not entirely dissimilar to irl concepts. Finding energy on other bodies in space with lesser gravity wells. Public and private space industry partnership.

Timelines and propulsion

Around nine months to mars (maybe). Ion drives? Mundane solid rocket? Apparent weightlessness?

Robots

Remote Agent architecture. Robots prefabricating a Mars base before the humans arrive.

Weightlessness

Weightlessness as an environmental “stressor.” Insemination in space. Fetal and childhood physical development.

Video Chat

Light speed communication speed limitations. Using AI to simulate realtime conversation. Translucent screens! ? A terrible design for the user, but a good design for storytelling in film. Also of some utility to teachers, who can then see what students are looking at. Parallax.

The hardship of existing on earth

What would a native-born Martian human experience coming to Earth? Higher gravity. Heart enlargement. Blood pressure. Thin bones, low muscle mass.

Make it So by Chris Noessel: iTunes Amazon

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Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: history vs myth, and time travel w/ Brandon Rollins Feb 28, 2017

Mismatching of Person and Myth

Flawed characters in history. Remembering to recognize that the characters we imagine may not be as close as we think to the real thing.

Napoleon

A short dead dude, but also irl an imposing figure. And not actually short! Of totally average height - the shortness thing was actually an ex post facto error in conversion from the units of measurement of his time and place.

Socrates

Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle. The Hemlock treatment vs living in the future. Socratic ignorance: “the only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” Bill and Ted’s rolled high on wisdom, low on intelligence. :)

Beethoven

Gradual deafness. Bill & Ted picked him up in 1810, four years before he was reported to have gone completely deaf. So he may have had some limited ability to hear. Piano on the floor, stylus in the mouth, and other coping mechanisms. Beethoven’s metronome. OR MAYBE, he was actually just a crazy old smelly deaf guy and that’s why mall security had to come drag him away.

King Henry VII

They visit his castle in 15th century England and meet two totally bodacious babes. Or something. Attention to linguistic detail in the film: everybody speaks the correct languages! More or less. 15th century English. Chaucerean and Shakespearean pronunciation.

The Princess Situation

Can they read? Write? Reading and writing as two separate skills. Credit cards. Introducing medieval princesses to fiat currency and a debt-based economy.

Genghis Khan

Dan Carlin said all of it better than we ever could: Wrath of the Khans.

Time Travel

Causal loops. Bootstrap and grandfather paradoxes. Dr Who on the bootstrap paradox. “Time circuits.”

War Co Expandable Game: WarCoTheGame
Wrath of the Khans by Dan Carlin: Hardcore History
Doctor Who Explains the Bootstrap Paradox: YouTube

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Independence Day Resurgence: Earth's center, gravity wells, and a hole in the bottom of the sea Feb 21, 2017

Alien Reconnaissance

Distress calls. Radio broadcasts and other ways to watch the best.speech.ever.

Alien Arrival

Wormholes. Telefragging. In-system ship speeds and an incredible ability to slow down.

Human Reverse Engineering

Twenty years of reverse engineering alien tech has yielded great fruit. Propulsion! Anti-gravity.

Getting Stuff in Space

It’s hard! Gravity wells. Magic fusion antigravity obviates the main utility of Lagrange points.

Inertial Dampening

Fluid sack inertial dampening.Breathable oxygenated fluids. Vectors!

Data in a Coma

Muscular atrophy. Twenty years without moving. Communicating with locked-in patients.

City Destroyers

Gratiuitous city destruction. Tactics and strategy. Are the aliens just jerks?

They flew into my butthole! My only weakness, how did you know?!

Harvester Ships

Why do cities lift off of the ground?

Earth is just a ball of rock.

And metal. The creamy center is actually not creamy but rather solid iron. It’s like a Kinder Egg and a Cadbury Cream Egg had a baby. The sorts of doom we’d face by having our core disrupted/extracted. Magnetosphere and the molten core. The crust ranges from 3-25 miles thick, fwiw.

Drilling the Core

Massive energy to not only drill but keep the hole into the earth open. A hole in the bottom of the sea.

‘Baitin

Jeff Goldblum is the master baiter. Alien queen fight. Insectoid queen morphology. Sexual dimorphism. Putting stuff up their butts for victory. Original idea, original idea, original idea:

Final Answer

Why Earth Is A Prison and How To Escape It by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube

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Edge of Tomorrow (Live. Die. Repeat): alien tentacle morphology and biological Von Neumann probes Feb 14, 2017

Names and Names and Names

The light novel (All You Need is Kill) -> the movie (Edge of Tomorrow) -> the marketing (Live. Die. Repeat.)

Tom Cruise in a Video Game

Save points. Back in my day. Old-school save system where you have to go back to the beginning every time.

Biological Von Neumann Probes

The possibility of the cosmos awash in aggressive noodly alien murder machines. What are the odds they’d wind up at our doorstep?

Mimic Morphology

Spaghetti Monster tumbleweeds! Bioluminescence. Alienness. Hybrid creatures. Hierarchy.

Starcraft

Zerg rush! Starcraft was almost Warhammer.

Exoskeletons!

Reminds us of Elysium! Exosuit interfaces. Neural interface versus gestural. Safety mechanisms.

Time Loop Superpowers

What are thresholds of alpha blood exposure to contract timeloopism? Best method: bathing? in the butt? in the mouth? All of the above? Will the effect ever “run out?” Blood-bathing, Sookie Stackhouse style.

Time Loops!

Control of time loops. Like a garage door opener? TV remote? Is it time travel? Many-worlds interpretation. Branching timelines! Terminator meatballs.

Who Wants to Live Forever, Sorta?

Chris does. Whatever it takes!

One-Minute Time Machine: YouTube
Groundhog Day: iTunes Amazon

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Wargames: computers in the 80s, weapons to end all wars, and dinosaurs w/ Joe Ruppel Feb 07, 2017

Cold War

The 50s, the 60s, and the 80s and the climate at the time of the film. Star Wars (but not that Star Wars).

Weapons to End War

Gatling and the Gatling Gun, Alfred Nobel and dynamite, Tesla and his particle beams, and…. nuclear weapons?

Early-80s Computing Hardware

Text-To-Speech. Voder at the 1939 World’s Fair. Matthew Broderick’s computer. WarGames computer graphics and rendering radar screens.

Machine Learning

Teaching computers to teach themselves. The point where this movie steps into scifi territory.

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur extinction hypotheses at the time of the film. Falken is a psychopath.

Hardcore History 59 - The Destroyer of Worlds: Hardcore History
Silicon Cowboys: iTunes Amazon

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Black Mirror Season 3, Part 2: happy endings, brainwashing, and beeeeeeeeeees w/ Liam Ginty Jan 31, 2017

Episodes 4-6

San Junipero, Men Against Fire, Hated in the Nation

San Junipero

Happy endings. Consciousness uploading. Children of the 80s, idealistic recollections and the English lens. Continuity of self. Crippling fear of death.

Men Against Fire

How we get people to do things for us and how technology can make that even more terrible. Hacking visual input. Creepy Watson sex dreams.

Hated in the Nation

Covered in beeeeeees. Drone swarms. Social media hate.

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The Expanse VFX: an interview with Cailin Munroe, VFX Producer Jan 27, 2017

“Decipher SciFi is People”

We did an interview! Since it’s not the normal format, we’re releasing this as a bonus halfway between normal episodes.

We talk here with Cailin Munroe from The Expanse all about a bunch of stuff: the role of the producer, on-set work, diaper butts, ship designs, physics FX, device and environment UI, space hair, dogs barking, matte paintings, 3D animated sets, the next form of the blue goo ☠️

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Ender's Game: insectoid aliens, water in space, and lightspeed communications Jan 24, 2017

Alien attacks

Alien attacks and death tolls. Independence Day and flying planes up the butt.

Water in spaaaaaaace

Liquid water and the Goldilocks Zone. Frozen water all over the galaxy. Water vapor too!

Dying Planets

Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell and the Martian “canals.”

Insectoid Aliens

Anatomy surprisingly like that of our tiny earth-based insects. Tool use? Telepathy? Queens controlling drones, but directly, apparently.

Alien Communication

Distance and lightspeed considerations in trying to communicate with aliens who may pose an existential threat to humanity.

Deciphering Speeds and Distances

28 days. Distances to other stars.

Space Combat Command

Action per minute. Starcraft and command delegation.

Doomsday Weapons

Very very expensive weapons and the meaning of a dollar.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card: iTunes Amazon
Starship Stroopers on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi

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Black Mirror Season 3, Part 1: meowmeow beans, neurological speed, and showing our butts w/ Liam Ginty Jan 17, 2017

Episodes 1-3

Nosedive, Playtest, and Shut Up and Dance

Nosedive

Slow motion train wreck. Meow-meow beans. Chinese social credit system. Real life is this episode. Nuance and charity in judging other people.

Playtest

Backpacking fantasy. Christopher’s beard jealousy. Working while traveling via the internet. Hideo Kojima. Near-death experiences, dream experiences, and neurological speed. Death spike hallucinations. American Psycho Hideo Kojima.

Shut Up and Dance

Integrity. Liam’s butt. The worst of the worst. Anonymous.

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Passengers: helical ship designs, the real Arcturus star, and ethics w/ Adrian Falcone Jan 10, 2017

Ship design

Segmented helix. Simulated/artificial gravity. Fusion reactors and constant acceleration. 0.5c after 30 years.

Arcturus

A red dwarf, 37 lightyears away from earth. Could the ship have made is to that point with the time and speed given? (no) This is the meat right here. Meaningless slingshots. Red Dwarves. Physics!

Stasis

Generation ships vs stasis pods. Stasis as a resource-saving measure. IRL research in “stasis” and muscle-mass conservation. Acceptable levels of brain deterioration. “Minor” brain damage.

Anti-collision measures

Kinda like magic. Atomizing rocks in space at 0.5c.

Gravity and the ceasing thereof

How simulated gravity works on a giant spinning torus (or, in this case, a segmented helix). How it ceases, and the physics necessary in order to create the effect seen in the film. Swimming out of floating water.

Seveneves: iTunes Amazon
"How did the Avalon (seemingly) get to Arcturus so quickly if they are only traveling at .5 of lightspeed?": Scifi & Fantasy Stack Exchange

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Labyrinth: Jim Henson, adolescence, and solving mazes w/ Jillian & Meredith Jan 03, 2017

Labyrinth production

The Dark Crystal -> Labyrinth -> Mirrormask : a spiritual trilogy. Jim Henson. Beverly Crusher’s choreography.

Fantasy Rules and Dream Worlds

Our difficulty with fantasy again, and further difficulty specific to dreamland stories. Nothing makes sense, cause and effect cannot be counted on, and essentially nothing is on the line. Yet Labyrinth is still delightful (because nostalgia!).

Relating to adolescents

Identifying with adults now more, since we are adults.

Dreams

Dreaming. Animal models. Rats and humans and dreaming during non-REM sleep.

The Greek Myth of the Labyrinth

Minotaur, reverse-minotaur. Plus, a succinct and accurate retelling of the story.

#science Maze-solving and cognition

Humans are okay. Rats are okay. Dogs, not so much. “Ecocentric cognitive mapping.” FMRI and navigation in virtual reality.

The bog of eternal stench

Irreparable putrescence. Not something that is on you, but something that infuses your very flesh to continue to be stinky. Or, magic.

The Dark Crystal: iTunes Amazon
Brian Fraud's Art Books: Amazon
The Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud: Amazon

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Conan the Barbarian: antedeluvian mythology, bloodsmithing, and the riddle of steel w/ Joe Ruppel Dec 27, 2016

Conan the Bookbarian

Robert E. Howard and pulp fantasy. His life and death.

Arnold is amazing

Arnold Schwarzenegger appreciation hour. Training. Work ethic. Hustle. The American dream. Grizzled old beardy Conan the Conqueror. Arnold’s blooper with the wolves:

Conan’s world and mythology

“Antedeluvian” history. Chroniclers keeping record of the exploits of historical figures. Genghis Khan.

Swordmaking

Iron, steel, forge technology. How not to make or use a sword.

Steppe peoples

Horsemastery. Wind vs slave power. More Genghis Khan.

Doom

Cannibal cults. Human cookery.

The riddle of steel

Steel, flesh, swords made from the blood of one’s enemies. Our Warrior Dash video.

Conan the Barbarian the Musical: YouTube
Science Fiction Film Podcast - Conan the Barbarian: LSGMedia
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story: iTunes Amazon

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Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix: wizard and muggle technologies w/ Eric Molinsky Dec 20, 2016

Scifi and Fantasy

Our different aptitudes for processing fantasy. Fantasy tropes, internal consistency, Patrick Rothfuss.

Wizard and muggle technologies

Telegraphs, internets, owls and agentive magical paper airplanes. Other things too!

The power of names

“True name” magic in Harry Potter. IRL examples. Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, Jewish mysticism, Aronofsky’s Pi. Rothfuss again.

Classism and wizard racism

Wizard Hitler!

Wizard warfare

Magic bullet machine gun enchanted buckler wizards. Enchanted riot shields with a wand-hole in them. Other innovations.

Characters

The fascististic headmistress, Ballatrix, Luna, and other characters we wanted to note.

Harry Potter: iTunes Amazon
Imaginary Worlds Podcast: Apple Podcasts RSS

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The Golden Compass: scifi fantasy, polar bear evolution, and dark matter dust Dec 13, 2016

Chris' favorite Decipher SciFi selfie ❤️ Production

Issues before, issues during, issues in the final cut. So many issues! How the movie lost much of the depth of the book.

Scifi vs Fantasy

Sciencey veneer over a big pile of fantasy. Maybe steampunk?

Dark Matter

Recognizing that dark matter makes no sense as an explanation for dust. Considering the public conception of dark matter way back when the book was written. Discovery and modern evidence. Bullet cluster. Baryonic matter. Dark energy or the cosmological constant.

The Mind-Body Problem

Familiars and daemons and souls. Dualism. Consciousness uploading. Metaknowledge.

Polar Bears

Polar bear evolution. Shrinking habitat. Hollow hairs and skin color and other adaptations. Blubber and keeping cool.

Parallel Universes

Svalbard! Aurora. The many-worlds interpretation.

His Dark Materials By Philip Pullman: iTunes Amazon
Does Dark Matter Break Physics? by PBS Spacetime: YouTube

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Outlander: viking history, the Prometheus problem, and bioluminescence w/ Lee Accommando Dec 06, 2016

Alien Seed Colony

Human aliens in Norway c 709 A.D. The “Prometheus Problem.”

Viking Language

Old norse and 12th century Icelandic. The Icelandic sagas.

Ocular Data Input

Brain implants, language learning, and nosebleeds.

Whaling

Whales are big!

Warrior Culture

Berserkers and their magic mushrooms. Specific training methodologies between vikings, space marines, and dragon-fighting.

The Monster

The movie turns into Predator. Elephant-lion-crocodiles. Apex predator population scales.

Bioluminescence

Frequency of bioluminescence. Adaptation. Wavelengths. Is bioluminescence expensive?

Viking Age Podcast: Apple Podcasts RSS
Beowulf the movie: iTunes Amazon
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heeney: Amazon

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Arrival Part 2: debunking Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, alien phonology, and conlang writing w/ Nick Farmer Nov 29, 2016

Nick Farmer

He’s a linguist! And a conlanger, technically.

His website: Nick Farmer Linguist

His Twitter: @nfarmerlinguist

Sapir-Whorf

AKA linguistic relativity, and why it is a very very wrong thing. A warm and fuzzy idea that turns out, after facing science, not to reflect reality well. Nick really really wants to set the record straight on this matter.

Spoken Alien Language

Considering the possibilities. Different modalities. Language need not be sound-based! ASL. Frequencies of sound.

Written Language

Heptapod B! Bending over backwards to figure out a way for alien languages to break the linearity of time.

Alien Writing System

The complexity of deciphering alien writing systems. Extradimensionality. Stephen Wolfram wrote the software to create the logograms. Human language analogies. Mapping ideas and words and concepts is REALLY complicated.

Everything by Ted Chiang: Amazon

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Minority Report: Eliot Peper on freedom and algorithmic precognition Nov 22, 2016

Futurists

Eliot shares how Kevin Kelly, Stuart Brand, et al advised the filmmakers on how the future ought to look. The movie’s prescience makes a lot more sense now.

Privacy Intrusion

Intrusion creep. Giving up your privacy knowingly. Testing users.

Thought Crimes

Is it a thought crime? Or just determinism?

Big Data/Precogs

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Policing, advertising. Oakland and other cities.

Utopia/Dystopia

The rather rosy picture painted by Minority Report and its realism. How it seems more reasonable now than it may have at the time.

Gestural Interface

Feedback cycle between our fiction and real life.

Dismantling The System

Could such a system be dismantled! It’s hard to just part with a murder rate of zero. Eliminating murder vs civil liberties.

Cumulus by Eliot Peper: Amazon
Make it So by Chris Noessel: iTunes Amazon

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Arrival Part 1: superdimensionality and alien physics w/ Jolene & Adrian Nov 15, 2016

Alien Ship Technology

Ship materials construction. Anti-gravity technologies. Tesseracts. Shadows looking into other dimensions.

Alien Math and Physics Jef Raskin's alien math

Superdimensionality. Imagining alien understanding of maths and physics. Different perspectives forcing different approaches. The physics of alien arrivals.

Linguistic Relativity

The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not backed by good evidence. Superdimensional alien languages. Gaining new perspective into the reality of the universe.

Preparation

Military secret-keeping. General Whitaker’s Morpheus operandi: “I cannot tell you what the matrix is. I have to show you.”

Everything by Ted Chiang: Amazon
Ted Chiang on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi
Darmok: iTunes Amazon

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Star Trek Beyond: drone swarms, teleporters, and decompression w/ Jolene Creighton Nov 08, 2016

Lament

Our love for Star Trek and how this does or does not fit.

Drone Swarm

Drone swarm tactics. Realizing they’re robots.

Explosive Decompression

It is all manners of unpleasant.

Universal Translator

Christopher’s revelation. IRL real-time translation software. Skype Translator.

Security Systems

And bad design.

Teleporters

Breaking phsyics. Weaponization.

The Trouble with Teleporters by CGP Grey: YouTube
Deep Space Nine: iTunes Amazon
The United Federation of 'Hold my beer, I got this': Imgur

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The Island of Dr Moreau: vivisection, individual plasticity, and the human animal w/ Joe Ruppel Nov 01, 2016

what Vivisection

Definitions. Victorian science and protest movements. John Hunter and the John Byrne Irish Giant. Behaviourist views of animal feelings.

Humans as an animal

Coming to terms with our place in nature in Wells’ time. Natural selection vs selection by Moreau.

Individual plasticity and heredity

More vivisection. Human body modification and evolution.

Religious analogy

The “father” and the “laws.”

Should we do x?

Chris plays the amoral scientist monster every time we ask this question.

Carnivore vs herbivore

Moral of the story: Moreau really should have bred a race of herbivores. Would have side-stepped a lot of issues.

Transhumanism

Strategies in evolving humanity and combining with our replacement life form.

Frankenstein: science fiction horror, reanimation, and victorian context w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
The Limits of Individual Plasticity by H.G. Wells: Google Books

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The Thing: antarctic explorers, extreme doctoring, and figuring out aliens w/ Cae & Ryan Oct 25, 2016

Movie origins

Who Goes There? short story. Previous adaptations: The Thing From Another World (1951) · Horror Express (1972) · The Thing (2011)

Antarctic Exploration

British and Norwegian missions. Cultures and approaches.

Antarctic Research

Conditions. Connectivity. Boredom. Whiskey, cigars, and shoe leather.

Antarctic Doctoring

You need a certain kinda Dr MacGyver badass for this job. Spinal self-diagnosis, etc. Wilford Brimley diabeetus.

John Carpenter cinematography and soundtracks and storytelling

Cae and Ryan understand these things, and explain them to us. We mostly get it.

The Thing

So many questions. Where did it come from? How does it work? The nature of the creature. Is it intelligent?

The nature of consciousness

If you were The Thing, could you know you were The Thing? Would The Thing know it was The Thing? Self interest in all cases. Group interests in all cases.

Infection

If I can’t win, neither can you. The doctor was the only one acting rightly. Best plan: destroy the base and kill everyone, just in case. Sexual tests as alternatives to blood…

“The Things”

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance. The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else. The Things by Peter Watts

The Things by Peter Watts: Clarksworld Podcast
The Politics of Experience & The Divided Self by R.D. Laing: Amazon
Lee Hardcastle's The Thing Claymations: Thingu @ YouTube Claycat's The Thing @ YouTube Frozen blood test scene @ YouTube

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The Exorcist: demonic possession, skepticism, and horror w/ Adrian Falcone Oct 18, 2016

Editions

Theatrical vs “The Version You’ve Never Seen.”

Demons

Devils, demons, pazuzu, deception. How do people get possessed? Different theories.

Supernaturalism

Supernatural detective work. Priest losing his faith.

“Real” Exorcism

The Catholics. The Rite of Exorcism. Bureaucracy. Serious vs loosey-goosey exorcisms.

Simple vs Easy Explanations

Occam’s razor. Science.

Latin

Tradition. Latin as the language of ancient evil. Ecclesiastical latin.

Order of Operations

Medicine -> fringe medicine -> call a priest!

Horror

The ways this movie is timelessly excellent and scary. Parenting.

Demon Battle Plan

Demons might not be the best at planning, OR we might be inconsequential nothings to them, OR creating a rift between god and his people is their job.

The Exorcist - Killapalooza: Double Feature Podcast
You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube

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28 Days Later: zombie attacks, survival skills, and a quarrel about plagues w/ Jolene Creighton Oct 11, 2016

Lab Safety

Security in researching highly contagious zombie viruses. Animal liberation.

Biological Infection

Viruses, parasites, R0, monkeys. Infection rates. Bloodborne illness.

Zombies

Zombie taxonomy. Do these count as zombies? A disgreement. Fainting goats.

Preparedness

CDC recommendations. Weapon choice. Get on a boat.

Hospital Escape

Cillian Murphy’s wiener. Playing God.

Shaun of the Dead: iTunes Amazon
Dead Island: Steam
Brookhaven Experiment for HTC Vive:

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Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, Elizabethan sexuality, and Kenau's awesome accent w/ Joe Ruppel Oct 04, 2016

Keanu

We love Keanu. But that accent! Oy vey. And standing across from Gary Oldman, no less.

Vlad

Vlad history lesson. Spikes in the butt. Motivations.

Elizabethan Sexuality

Promiscuity, puritanism. Syphilis. Bloooood.

Vampire Rules

How to vampire.

Eating/drinking Blood

Maasi blood drinking. Blood preparations in various world cuisines. Blood fetishes?

Science vs Supernaturalism

In the period and place.

Bram Stoker's Dracula by Bram Stoker: Project Gutenberg iTunes Amazon Librivox
Dracula (1931): iTunes Amazon

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Robinson Crusoe on Mars: Mars history, golden age space, and scientific accuracy Sep 27, 2016

Steven Seagal

Adam West, pre-Batman. An impressive entrance and an early, unfortunate exit.

Scientific Accuracy

Surprisingly reasonable space tech and portrayal of mars! For the time.

The Martian

Commonalities. Scientific accuracy with the knowledge of the time.

Mars

Bowser fireballs. Atmosphere.

History of our Knowledge of Mars

Galileo, albido mapping, canali, Percivall Lowell, modern missions.

Planetary Exploration

How to explore a new planet

Open mask
Breathe deeply
Cross your fingers

Martian Resources and Features

Water, underwater sausage plants, red vines, air, atmosphere. Ice caps, aurora, vulcanism.

Columbus on Mars

Exploration and enslaving people. Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Culture and intelligence.

The Martian: iTunes Amazon
The Martian on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi

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Planet of the Apes : Episode 56 Sep 20, 2016

Just a normal day in the studio Relativity time travel

Jerky Charlton Heston. 99.999995% the speed of light. Time dilation.

The Mission

Settle? Explore? Three men and one women on a colonization mission. Charlton Heston is a bad person.

Moon on the brain

Exploding moons, broken moons, moon impacts. Callbacks: Cowboy Bebop, Seveneves, Deep Impact

Language

Biology of speech. Cognitive speech development. Language evolution.

Animal Intelligence

Octopuses, corvids, elephants, various apes. Mostly chimps. Tool use, language. Moving the goalposts.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: iTunes Amazon
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal: iTunes Amazon

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Cowboy Bebop: biodomes, scifi westerns, and weather control Sep 13, 2016

Meta

Cowboy Bebop the series, Yoko Kanno, style points.

Space Western

Shades of Firefly.

Gate Disaster

Shades of Seveneves and Deep Impact. Meteor impacts are becoming a recurring theme!

Settling Mars

Biodomes, marscrete, martian soil, regolith, constructive impacts. Terraforming. Biodomes.

Weather Control

China! Weather control before and after the Beijing Olympics. Cold and warm cloud seeding. Chemicals. Super-frozen, uncrystallized. water.

Cowboy Bebop the Series: Funimation
Voices from L5: Patreon

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Deep Impact: citizen scientists, extinction events, and avoidance Sep 06, 2016

Citizen Astronomy

People. Computers. Computer vision. KIC 8462852.

E.L.E.

Extinction level events. Dinosaur impact. Impactor scales.

Impactor Types

Meteors, meteorites, meteors, comets, asteroids.

Avoiding Impacts

Gentle (nuclear bombs), and less gentle (gravity tug) methods of redirecting impactors.

Earth Impacts

Tunguska, dinosaur impact. The difference between a small number of large impacts and a large number of small ones.

Humanity’s Fate

Floods, atmospheric disruption, a world aflame from the heat of a million impactors.

The Formation of the Moon: YouTube
Asteroids in Resonance with Jupiter: YouTube
Death from the Skies by Phil Plait: iTunes Amazon
Solar System Collision Calculator: Astronomy Workshop

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The Day the Earth Stood Still: Gort, nonviolence, and aliens w/ Scott W Indiana Aug 30, 2016

Origins

Short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. Cold War paranoia. 50s.

Aliens

Humanoid and otherwise. Sex with aliens? Alien life from Mars, Venus, or maybe even moons of Jupiter.

Period Things

Everybody smokes. Letting your kid go around town with strange men. Independent women of the 50s. More smoking.

Language

Emray Klaatu naruat macro proval brarato lukto denso implikit yavo tarri axell plakatio baringa degas.

Gort

Gort’s real concerns. Who is the real master? Open source space police operating systems.

Atomic Power

The atomic energy scene in the 50s. Great power and great responsibility.

Violence

Whoever carries the biggest stick seems to be right.

Lotus Dimension: Lotus Dimension

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Star Trek First Contact: transhumanism technology and ant behavior w/ Jolene Creighton Aug 23, 2016

Time Travel Choices

Why 2063? World War 3. Population. Booming warp drive economy.

Borg Fighting

Defensive strategies. Best weapons for fighting the borg: bats or sneakers?

Borg Origins

“Borgigins.” Transhumanism. Definitions of evolution.

Borg Behaviour/Design

Like ants! And maybe bees a little. But mostly ants! Comm techs. Bee-dance grammar.

Warp Drive

Alcubbiere drives, distorting space-time. Antimatter is expensive!

Star Trek: Amazon

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Hardcore Henry: super fun action, VR media, and motion sickness Aug 16, 2016

The movie’s history

Crowdfunding. Timur Bekmambetov. Biting Elbows music videos.

First-Person film and video games

Visual language of first person shooters. Our affection for the genre and this film by extension.

Filming and FX

“Adventure Mask” iterative design. Camera mounting and how bets to capture first person action. VFX difficulties with Go Pros.

Motion Sickness

Surprising study results with old and young players. Motion sickness vs simulation sickness.

Sharlto

A Sharlto appreciation party. Remote surrogate body control.

Horse

horse, lol.

How Hardcore Henry's POV shots were made by Ian Failes: FXGuide
The Stampede by Biting Elbows: YouTube
Bad Motherfucker by Biting Elbows: YouTube

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Seveneves: impactors, guided evolution, and radiation shields w/ Daniel Mann Aug 09, 2016

Read the book

Our attempt to convince folks to read the book. Do it!

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

The opening paragraph of Seveneves

Neal Stephenson

Big old nerd. Chris expresses appreciation for his deep-dives.

Meteor Strikes

Tunguska. Chelyabinsk. Measuring in five dollar footlongs and blue whales. Who knows how many fathoms?

Shielding!

Humans and computers are both susceptible to radiation.

Choosing Our Evolution

Deaf parents choosing to have deaf babies. Culture.

Technology in Space

Difficulty in producing microchips. Dan’s experience in chemicals and computing. Lost knowledge.

Gliding

Thermals and ridge lifts and whatnot. Terrifying!

The Day The Moon Blew Up by Bill Gates: GatesNotes

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The Fountain: nebulae, mesoamerica, and finding meaning w/ Daniel Barker Aug 02, 2016

Aronofsky

Shooting for the moon. Making beautiful film.

History

Olmec, Mayans, Aztec. Murder factories.

Nebulae

Particularity. Stellar nurseries.

Life and Death

Differing viewpoints, religious and atheist.

The Fountain graphic novel by Daren Aronofsky and Kent Williams: iTunes Amazon
Darren Aronofsky remastered and mixed Director Commentary: David Weisbrod
Uncertainty Principle the Podcast: Uncertainty Principle

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Brazil: user interface satire, complexity, complexity, and ducting w/ Bradnon Rollins Jul 26, 2016

Sci-Fi Dystopias

1984, Brazil, Farenheit 451, etc. Why do these count as scifi?

User Interfaces as analogy

Thanks to Chris Noessel for pointing in the Facebook group the way the “badly designed” user interfaces are really incredibly well-designed, if the point is absurdism. :)

Complexity

In business, objects, life, gadgets, systems. Ducts! Creepin’.

Security Theater

Statistics, fear of skin cancer vs shark attack. Viscerality.

Euphemistic Language

Covering up reality. Making uncomfortable behaviour easier to swallow. Hiding reality.

Dreams and Reality

Cracking up. Dreams. Endings.

War Co. Expandable Card Game: WarCo
The Egnineering Guy: YouTube

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Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb Jul 19, 2016

This is real life

Well, partially. Lcuky Dragon #5. Hydrogren bomb testing. Real life and movie deaths. Press censorship.

Giant movie monsters

Godzilla and his ilk. The Lost World. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Oxygen destroyer

¯\(ツ)/¯

Science and regret

Oppenheimer. Eyepatch guy. Suicide to save the world. Analogies.

Goodbyes

Let them fight.

Godzilla: Half Century War by James Stokoe: Amazon
King of the Monsters: History of Japan Podcast
Double Blasted: Radiolab
After the Gold Rush: After the Gold Rush

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The Expanse: Nick Farmer on conlanging and the intersection of language and scifi Jul 12, 2016

Conlang

What are constructed languages? Who makes them?

The Expanse

Designing the language for the TV show. Designing a posteriori languages and a priori languages and difficulties of each.

Slang

A Clockwork Orange, Andrew Niccol, and other uses of slang to flesh out fictional worlds.

Pidgins, Creoles

What is a creole, and how did Nick approach designing one for The Expanse

The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson: iTunes Amazon

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Weird Science: science, magic, and moral development in adolescence Jul 05, 2016

John Hughes

And the Brat Pack. Uncle Buck and Breakfast Club.

Smagic

Science so unscientific, it is magic: smagic. Callbacks to pygmalion and Frankenstein.

Sexism/Objectification

Boy howdy. Literally using a barbie to create a living sex object. Consent. Creating sex bots. The 1950s comic on which the movie was based.

Geekery

What are they? what are we? Geeks? Nerds? Both?

Growing Up

Adolescence sucks. Being a sexually frustrated teenage boy. Fantasies and ethical concerns.

Frankenstein w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
Made of the Future/Weird Science: Mars Will Send no More

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Jupiter Ascending: gene splicing, industrialized panspermia, and going over the top Jun 28, 2016

Jupiter

Baby naming. Looking through a telescope with the kids and co-bff Joe. Astrology. 😒

Fermi Padadox

Jupiter Jones: Because a dream is the only way any of this make sense. Caine Wise: Compared to what? The idea that you’re the only intelligent species, on the only inhabitable planet, in a universe so full of planets that you don’t even have a number to describe how many there are.

Civilization Development

“Tersies.” Seeding planets. The “prometheus problem.” Coexistence with dinosaurs??

Harvest

Analogies to our treatment of animals. It can still be “affecting.”

Genetic Modification

Cyberpunk. CRISPR. Animal trait splicing. Channing Tatum with his mouth open.

Space Feudalism

Lots -isms and -igarchies and whatnot. An economy sort-of based on time reminds us of Andrew Niccol’s In Time.

Nihilism

What would you do if you owned whole planets?

A Quick Note on Jupiter Ascending's Politics: This Cage is Worms
Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR by Radiolab: Radiolab

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Tomorrowland: the World's Fair, retrofuturism, and making dreams reality Jun 21, 2016

Brad Bird

50s and 60s techno optimism. The Iron Giant. The Incredibles.

World’s Fair

Stages of the worlds fair. Our tech and relationship to it.

Walt Disney

Futurism. Techno optimism. Shaping reality to fit his vision.

Tomorrowland

Disneyland. EPCOT. Disney’s vision for a designed city.

A sense of wonder

Childlike optimism. Positivity in the face of pessimism. Three wolf moon.

Future Visions

Visions of technology and the future from different periods.

omg car is driving how can that be

Walt Disney - The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler: iTunes Amazon
A 19th Century Vision of the Year 2000: The Public Domain Review

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Senenity: Firefly, reavers, and space settlement sans FTL Jun 14, 2016

Joss Whedon & Firefly

Johhhhhhn Cena prank call. Fox’s predilection for cancelling the most-loved shows. Viewing orders.

Hard and soft scifi

Joss Whedon doesn’t care about the science. Star system design without FTL. A call-in from Adrian Falcone.

Sci-Fi western

From cyberpunk to westerns. Frontier living.

Culture and language

Language evolution on generation ships. Creoles. Joss’ poetic Rialogue.

Reavers

The mythology and the more reasonable backstory. Samuel Mumby calls in to express his appreciation for the former. “Who does the dishes?”

Religion

Sci-fi treatments of religion by Whedon and others.

Firefly: iTunes Amazon
Serenity on Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
Bad Character by Ted Chiang: The New Yorker

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The Man From Earth: biological immortality, and what is a micromort w/ Adrian Falcone Jun 07, 2016

Production

Jerome Bixby’s final, lifelong work. A bittorrent success story. The Man From Earth: The Series

Why this movie is the best

A great mechanism for great conversation: a collection of domain experts exploring hypotheticals.

Human Evolution

Biological differences. Geography. Proto human language.

Memory and Learning

Plasticity. Long term memories. Retrospective fill-ins. Meta-memory.

Immortal Biology

Regeneration. Disease. Scarring and cancer.

Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Living through humanity’s violent past. Adjusting to the current morality. Old fashioned ways.

Danger and Risk

Micromorts. Judging risk and how to live life when you’re immortal.

"Good job, BRAIN!" by Good Job Brain: GoodJobBrain.com
Risk. by VSauce: YouTube
:

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Transcendence: Transhumanism and AI takeoff scenarios w/ Zoltan Istvan May 31, 2016

Zoltan!

Running for President of the USA as an atheist and a transhumanist.

The Singularity

Kurzweil. Vernor Vinge. The post-work economy. Luddites and progress.

Artificial Intelligence

Uploading the human mind. Will people try to convert the first real artificial super intelligence?

Transhumanism

Improving humanity through technology. Medicine. Life extension and immortality. The Transhumanist Wager. The power of love.

Zoltan Istvan: ZoltanIstvan.com
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom: Amazon iTunes
The Singulatiry is Near by Ray Kurtzweil: iTunes Amazon

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Interstellar Part 2: wormholes, time dilation, and love stuff May 24, 2016

Gravity and Black Holes

More Kip Thorne. Wormholes. Detecting gravitational anomalies.

Time Dilation

Einstein. Train rides. Relativity. Frames of reference. Frame dragging. Time as an expendable resource.

Crazy Planetary Adventures

Water planet is the stuff of Christopher’s nightmares. Frozen clouds!

So Many Dimensions

Abstraction of extra dimensions into fewer. Tesseracts. Carl Sagan’s genius powers of explanation.

Time Travel Paradoxes

Predestination paradox? Self-consistent single timelines.

Love

Multidimensional beings and the power of love. Social utility and bonding, etc.

Space Settlement

O’Niell cylinders. Another call-in from Liam Ginty of Voices From L5.

Flatland & The Fourth Dimension by Carl Sagan: YouTube
The Science of Interstellar w/ Kip Thorne: YouTube

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Interstellar Part 1: monoculture farming, robot locomotion, and Kip Thorne May 17, 2016

Memories of Carl Sagan’s Contact

Kip Thorne does movie science again. Carl Sagan’s Contact. Mathew McConaughey plays two opposing roles.

Corn, Corn, and Corn

Monocultures. Blight. We talk about anthropogenic climate change even though it isn’t mentioned in the film. Reduced population. Governments.

Explorers and Pioneers

Scientific mindset. Humanity’s will to expand. Good science parenting.

Robots

TARS. 2001. Humor settings and the best robot locomotion.

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Surrogates: materials science, pseudonymity, and ludditism May 10, 2016

Areas of progress

Areas needing a lot of progress to lead to the world of Surrogates: robotics, materials science, network bandwidth and latency, human-machine neural interfaces, legality and ethics.

Effects

Violent crime nearly nonexistent, productivity, pseudonymity, anonymity, merito cracy. Level playing field for people with disabilties. Soldiering by proxy.

Human connection

The loss of it. The resistance. Surprisingly bad solutions.

DEKA "Luke" Arm: YouTube
Game Over by A Life Well Wasted: 99 Percent Invisible

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Forbidden Planet: robust design in AI, exobiology, and philology w/ Chris Noessel May 03, 2016

Robbie the Robot

Prop design. AI language understanding. Super strength and a matter replicator. Bad reactions to conflicting orders. Like a mechanical calculator dividing by zero!

Morbius

He’s totally Zod! Philology. Engineering. Dangerous tech designs.

Gender Stuff

Cutting edge sexiness in the 50s. Innocent virgins. Blaming the victim. To the captain go the spoils. The deleted scenes that explain the animal behaviour:

Decoding the Krell

Best attempts at judging Krell biology from their technology and architecture. Their “plastic educator.” Deciphering their language. Using alien Wikipedia on microfilm. Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The alien arithmetic problem.

Jef Raskin's Alien Arithmetic Problem Jef Raskin Self Destruct

A comparison of scuttling procedures in Alien and Forbidden Planet. Speculation about Krell hearing and sight frequencies.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: iTunes Amazon

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The Dark Knight: Batman gadgets, sonar phones, and blowing up the boat Apr 26, 2016

Is Batman science fiction?

Short answer: yeah, sure. Featuring a voice clip from Liam Ginty, space nerd.

Batman’s detective work

CSI bullet reconstructions. The trappings of science.

Batman’s Bondian Gadgetry

All kinds. The skyhook.

Sonar Phones

Prerequisite technologies. Zero day vulnerabilities and phone hacking. Distributed computing to combine the massive data. Google’s Project Tango.

Law, Fairness, and Chaos

Batman and his enemies in the film.

Batman Chooses His Voice by Pete Holmes: YouTube
Batman The Animated Series: iTunes Amazon
Heart of Ice from Batman TAS: YouTube

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The Fifth Element: space turtles, magic stones, and LeeLoo Dallas multipass Apr 19, 2016

The Film

90s, Leeloo’s thermal tape, awesome hair.

Alien Species

Space turtles, space orcs, space squids, space humans. Archeology and ancient mythology. Chamber design.

Malevolent Evil

The possible nature of the evil space-mass. Zorg’s motivations. Broken window fallacy.

200 Billion Citizens

Overpopulation. Governance over interstellar distances. Real-time FTL space comms. Space wizards. Space borders.

Building Leeloo

3d printing skeletons. Genetic design and genetic data storage.

The Stones

Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Good and bad places to smuggle 20 pounds of stone. “Space opera.” Impossible series of vocal notes. Saved by love, or something.

The Divine Language:
Affordances and Constraints in the Fifth Element: Vimeo

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Man of Steel: burly Superman, Kryptonian prison rehab, and yellow sun superpowers Apr 12, 2016

Krypton is Imploding

No refuge! Except for all the different refuge options. Harvesting the planet’s core something something oh no it’s collapsing!

Zod is the Good Guy

On Krypton at least. Sure, he sounded a little bit like Hitler, but look what happened when they didn’t listen to him - no more Krypton! And then

Kryptonian Prison Rehab

They seem to put some serious resources into their criminal rehab system that barely gets used. Mundane black hole tech. Dildo butt plug space ships.

The Codex and the Genesis Chamber

Kal first natural birth in centuries. Clearly Kryptonians were multistellar once upon a time. Wonder what happened.

Super Awakening

Lessons in how not to handle a kid having a panic attack. Humans actually do pretty well adapting to new sensory input. Clark’s compensation and self control.

Yellow Sun Superpowers

Disagreement over the exact function of Kryptonian power armor and the nature of the yellow sun/superpower relationship.

Simulated Consciousness

Russel Crowe hologram simulation. So the Kryptonians reached the singularity basically, but don’t seem to be impressed enough.

Defeating Zod

Super strength, super neck bones, super despondent military leaders with nothing to protect.

Superman (1978): iTunes Amazon
Fleisher 1940s Superman Cartoons: YouTube
All-Star-Superman: iTunes Amazon

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Signs: the ending, religious determinism, and how not to invade a watery planet Apr 05, 2016

Shyamalan

Christopher loved his direction in this movie. “Twists.” Appears in all his own films.

Crop Circles

Crop circle hoaxes. Not a great method of communication.

Two Groups of People

People who think there is meaning, and people think the universe is deterministic and unconcerned with us as individuals. Benjamin Franklin’s pragmatism re religion. Our own perspective.

The Aliens

A list of unreasonable presumptions from the movie about alien life. Recon forces. Encryption. Spoilers.

The Signs Demon Theory by ZorroMeansFox: Reddit
Joaquin Phoenix's Forehead Face: YouTube
You Are Not So Smart: The Podcast

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War of the Worlds: aliens, biological warfare, and Orson Welles radio w/ Joe Ruppel Mar 29, 2016

War of the Worlds - the book, the movie

Original book. Orson Welled radio broadcast hysteria not as reported. Radiolab report on repeated adaptations. The new developments at the time of writing that informed the book.

Alien Attack

Methods, research, planning. Trying to explain the buried death-bots.

But Why

Are we food? Do they want our resources? Making the most sense of the options. Are liquified people good for fertilizer?

Germ Attack

They might have done a little more research.

War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: Project Gutenberg (ebook)Project Gutenberg (audiobook)
War of the Worlds (1953 film): iTunes Amazon
War of the Worlds Orson Welles original radio broadcast: YouTube
Could it happen again? And again?: Radiolab

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Bicentennial Man: laws of robotics, biorobots, and natural language processing Mar 22, 2016

Asimov’s Three Laws

Enumerated in spectacular fashion in the film in order to get it out of the way and never speak of it again.

Natural Language Processing

It’s really hard! Errors in humor and social expectations. Infinite conversational loops.

Robot Personification

A nurturing environment maybe contributed to Robo Williams’ sentience. Art as awakening. Acting human. Emergence.

Robot Slave Class

Why don’t we see them?

Uncanney Valley

Turing tests. Robots, androids, biorobots. Robo Williams’ synthetic organs.

What is Life?

Actually kind of hard to define.

Immortality

“Death is an engineering problem.”

Positronic Man by Isaac Asmiov: Amazon
Humans: iTunes Amazon
Robin Williams in Motion by Every Frame a Painting: YouTube
Uncertainty Principle Podcast by Daniel James Barker: Soundcloud

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Frankenstein: science fiction horror, reanimation, and victorian context w/ Joe Ruppel Mar 15, 2016

Mary Shelley and The Book

Volcanoes and the year with no summer. Women writing books. Philosophers and children of philosophers.

Trendsetting

The movie vs the book. The beginning of scifi. The ways that each broke boundaries in their own ways.

Scary

Was it scary at the time? The movie intro. Everything that’s cliché now was new once.

Playing God

Science, evil science, and playing god. The ethics of mad science.

Science Horror

How to take the cutting edge and make it a horror story. Electricity. X-rays. Quantum stuff. Nano bio tech now? Deepak Chopra is full of crap.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Project Gutenberg (ebook)Project Gutenberg (audibook)
Young Frankenstein: Amazon
The "Slip n Slide" scene from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: YouTube

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Dune: spice, David Lynch is weird, and wetware technology w/ Miles Greb Mar 08, 2016

This movie is weird

David Lynch. Return of the Jedi. Different editions of the film. Alan Smithee. Internal monologues.

Dune politics

Before Game of Thrones, this was a new level of deep. Game theory and politics.

Anti-digitalism

Mentats. Eyebrows.

Spice

Like oil? Drugs?

Treatment of Homosexuality

Was Frank Herbert homophobic? Considering the man and the time in which it was written.

Gods and Cults

How the movie and the book had opposite lessons. Making it rain.

After the Gold Rush by Miles Greb: Gold Rush Comics
Dune + Jodorowsky's Dune by Double Feature podcast: Double Feature
Dune by Frank Herbert: iTunes Amazon

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Wing Commander: PC games nostalgia, pilgrims, and space combat w/ Dean from LSG Media Mar 01, 2016

Video Games

As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time. Ground-breaking, even. PC games pre-windows. FMV.

1990 Wing Commander
1991 Wing Commander 2
1994 Wing Commander 3
- 5 million bux
1996/7 Wing Commander 4
- 10 million bux
1999 Wing Commander Movie
- 30 million bux

Chris Roberts

Director of the games was also director of the film! We hypothesize based on zero knowledge of anything how it may have been difficult for this first-time feature film director. We consider whether he is the George Lucas of video games, in both the good or bad senses.

Kilrathi

Cat creatures? This may not have been clear in the film. Hairless cats.

Mister colbert, mount the forward laser pointer!

Space Combat and Naval/Air Combat

Simplifications of space combat, ignoring the vast distances and incredible speeds in their portrayals. Things that did it pretty right.

A Crew of Mavericks

At least in Top Gun, there was only one Maverick. Here we have to consider if we’d want a ship full of Mavericks as Earth’s last best hope.

Space Romance

One makes sense. One seems to come out of nowhere. Maniac is awful and dangerous. This movie’s idea of “search and rescue” seems a bit off.

Pilgrims and Navigation

Pilgrim discrimination. Pilgrim backstory. Using pilgrim brains in the Navcom. Faith vs genetics.

LSG Media:
The Wing Commander video game series: Good Old Games
The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell: iTunes Amazon
Battlestar Galactica (RMG): iTunes Amazon

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Idiocracy: cynicism, user experience research, and dysgenics w/ Adrian Falcone Feb 23, 2016

Movie Production Issues

Lack of studio support. Poor audience test results. VERY small number of screens. Somehow, a cult hit after release.

Why Do People Love This Movie?

Has internet cult hit status. Why? Appealing to elitism and cynicism? Fart jokes? Love it or hate it.

Christopher Has a Problem With This Movie

It feels mean, basically. Also the extrapolations it makes are unreasonable as far as I’m concerned.

Dumbing Down Society

Network covered similar ground in the 1970s.

Whose Fault is this Situation?

The yuppies for not reproducing more? The “dumb” people? The system? Corporatism, selfishness, etc?

Human Evolution

Defining terms because people use them in the wrong way too often. How humanity actually evolves. Dysgenics. Why the movie is wrong.

Bad Things

“Crab mentality.”

Self absorption. Laziness. Selfishness. Willful ignorance. Materialism.

Design for Idiots

Actually there are some interesting examples here. Simplification of UI. “Idiot-proofing.” Automation.

How Do We Avoid This Future?

Each host gives their plan to save the world. Governor Adrian implements the ~mushroom~ marshmallow test.

The Genius of Idiocracy: Rolling Stone
Idiocracy is a Cruel Movie and You Should Be Ashamed for Liking It: Gizmodo
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: iTunes Amazon

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Looper: Ted Chiang on causal loops, mama bears, and time travel Feb 16, 2016

Ted Chiang, Guest Co-Host

Thanks to Ted for coming on and helping us figure out what’s going on in Looper. Rather than an interview, Ted is a fully-fledged guest co-host with all the power that entails. :)

Plot Outline

This gets a little convoluted, because the movie is not incredibly worried about logical consistency.

Looper Isn’t Actually About Loops

Despite appearances and the language in the film about loops and looping, we decide that either there are no paradoxical loops or the movie just doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard. Or maybe both things. Probably both.

Diagramming Timelnes

We straighten out how many Bruces/JGLs there have been and how they all lived out their lives. It might be more than you think! Ted has to reign us in so we don’t spend the whole show making diagrams with straws. :)

no straws, but we spent some time with a whiteboard. too much time. here is a sampling CC-BY-NC Motherhood

Actually it turns out this movie is about motherhood (an uncommon topic for science fiction) and the importance of a mother in keeping boys from growing up “lost.” We needed a professional writer on the show to get us to shut up about time travel long enough to figure out the point of the movie. Thanks, Ted.

Free Will

Comparing and contrasting the appearance/reality of free will in this film and other examples (Twelve Monkies, Back to the Future).

Rewriting Looper

Ted tries to rewrite the movie but realizes how important all of the logically difficult plot devices are to the story and characters.

_The first half of the film, where criminal organizations are sending people back in time to be killed - that made no sense at all! And that really bugged me.

But I quite liked the second half of the film, which was about the importance of motherhood and the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence.

I wanted there to be a way to fix the first half of the film, but keep the second half.

So I, in my mind, tried to rewrite the film…_ -Ted Chiang

And keep an eye out for the upcoming movie “Arrival” based on Ted’s story “Story of Your Life” (with Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams) probably some time this year. Should be really good!

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: iTunes Amazon
There is No Loop in Looper by Prof Hames Van Cleve: A Time Travel Website
Director Rian Johnson Talks Plot Holes and Burning Questions: YouTube

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Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy Feb 09, 2016

People Really Love This Franchise

Fandom. Why do people love this so much?

Why Are We Not Bananas About Star Wars?

Fantasy vs. science fiction. Humanities, sciences. Star Wars is a “fairy tale.”

Childhood Memories

People bonding with Star Wars in their youth. Watching it with the kids. There are younger people who actually dig the prequel trilogy, believe it or not.

Science in Star Wars

Canons. Robots. Spaceships. FTL. Gravity. The Force. Planets. Language.

Death Star Scales

Big, bigger, and biggest! Engineering and construction. Military and civilian populations.

Technology and The Force

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

Star Wars Movies:
Star Wars 'Filmumentaries' by Jamie Benning: Filmumentaries
Robot Chicken Star Wars Parodies: iTunes Amazon
Bad Lip Reading Star Wars (especially the songs!): YouTube
Emo Kylo Ren: Twitter

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Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit Feb 02, 2016

Our Star Wars meta discussion covers merchandising revolutions, VFX, viewing order (machete!), Star Wars Revisited, Star Wars Despecialized Edition, more.

VFX

George Lucas. Industrial Light and Magic. Practical effects vs. CG.

Merchandising/Marketing

Star Wars was a revolution in movie merchandising.

Official Release Editions

Original Trilogy only because the prequels are less complicated and we just kinda don’t care

1985 VHS, pretty much theatrical
1993 Definitive Collection (The Laserdisc). Grognards dig this one. For some reason.
1997 Special Edition - the one that ruined Star Wars according to nerds. Reportedly cost like $10 million to do this work and it just made everyone mad. Lots of CGI was overlaid atop non-CG stuff from the original. New scenes, different music. Introduced the Greedo shooting first thing, which is stupid and paints the character of Han incorrectly.
2004 Original Trilogy DVDs - More changes. Nerds say the color correction is garbage, sound was messed up.
2006 Star Wars Trilogy Limited Edition Box Set. Had the 2004 editions of each film, but ALSO the original “theatrical cuts”. Actually the same cut as the laserdisc. They are letterboxed and grainy and bad with lots of video quality issues and look like shit.
2011 Star Wars Complete Saga Bluray - Basically the same thing as 2004 DVDs, but on Bluray.

Viewing Order

It’s important! Here is the original (really good!) article for machete order, but if you need the tldr it’s 4,5,2,3, and 6.

The Phantom Edit

Google for it, maybe try to find a copy on Youtube. It’s around. It’s an edit of the prequel trilogy which puts them all into one feature-length movie, mostly leaving out the first film.

Fan Edits

Star Wars Revisited - LOTS of changes. Christopher is partial to this one. Starts with theatrical and makes it beautiful. Color correction improved. More ships and more destruction in space battles, makes it feel more epic. Also presumes a bit much and makes some questionable changes, but these can be avoided by getting the “purist” edition. So not only did they do this, but they separated into different editions depending on how sensitive you are to different issues. Holy crap, so much effort.

Despecialized edition - THIS is the one to watch if you have no idea. Based on 2011 Bluray, with bits from various other cuts where needed. Removed all special edition changes, pretty much. Made it look great. There are special high quality theatrical prints around used as color reference. Here is a video outlining the changes in general.

Others - so many others! But you shouldn’t care, mostly. The other two are the important ones to know about.

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Contact: SETI, Carl Sagan love, and scicomm Jan 26, 2016

Carl Sagan

Our love for Carl. How his character and interests manifest in the characters in the film.

SETI

What it is. Why it is. Why is doesn’t get taken seriously. Their website.

Real Science

The story of Carl’s question for Kip Thorn producing actual time travel science. Black holes and wormholes.

Carl’s Model Scientist

The Jodie Foster character really emulates Carl in a lot of ways. Also partially based on SETI astronomer Jill Tarter.

Role Models/Parents

The dad in the movie. Carl Sagan’s gentle and understanding skepticism.

Aliens

How to communicate with aliens. Dimensions and moves of communication.

Atheism/Agnosticism

No one trusts atheists. Our feelings on the Jodie Foster character and our own positions on things.

Contact - by Carl Sagan: iTunes Amazon
Cosmos (1980): YouTube
Cosmos (2015): iTunes Amazon

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Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein Jan 19, 2016

90s

We’re from there! We love the fashion. And the music!

Hacker Taxonomy

Hackers, crackers, script kiddies, etc.

Kevin Mitnick

Huge in the new at the time. Media coverage. The model for Dade’s legal situation.

Hacking

Hacking, social engineering, dumpster diving.

Doxxing

Ruining Agent Gill. Reddit.

Ghost in the Wires - by Kevin Mitnick: iTunes Amazon
Freedom Downtime: iTunes Amazon
Mr Robot: iTunes Amazon
Security Now:

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Philip K Dick: valis, valium, and adaptations w/ PKD FIlm Festival Director Daniel Abella Jan 12, 2016

Philip K Dick

The importance of his work. Valis experience. Drugs! PKD’s place in the pantheon of science fiction writers, among Asimov, Bradbury and others. Humanity. Dignity. Technology vs humanity.

As we come closer to the machine, the machine comes closer to us. -Daniel Abella

Daniel Abella

Movies Based on the Work of PKD About Which We Have Something to Say

Blade Runner
Total Recall
A Scanner Darkly
Minority Report
Paycheck
Next
Screamers
The Adjustment Bureau
Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick Film Festival

Indie sci-fi film festival. Featuring a bunch of interesting films, shorts, and documentaries. Even one video game! Here are some trailers:

Patreon

We’ve just launched our Patreon to help us improve the show! Check out the Support the Show page to see our spiel.

The Philip K Dick Film Festival:
Minority Report: iTunes Amazon
A collection of free PKD audiobooks and ebooks:
The Man in the High Castle: Amazon

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Sunshine: the lifecycle of a star, solar sails, and Captain America in space Jan 05, 2016

Dying Sun

Sun science. Stages and timeline of sun death.

Spaceship

Solar radiation. Reflector shields. Ion drive. Magical gravity. Oxygen garden. Sun room.

The Crew

LOVE pragmatic Chris Evans. Our favorite person. Cillian is always great. Earth room holo tech. The different captains and their madness. Jumping through space! PS: we’ve covered this before, in episode 1.

Third Act

Thoughts on the third act juxtaposed with the first two.

Tough Decisions

Why return trip? Rendezvous a good idea? Thinning the herd. Pragmatic Chris Evans again.

Bomb Scene

We looooooooooove the score around this whole thing.

Post-Credits Secret Scene

An alleged intro to the Sunshine script by Alex Garland:
Solaris: iTunes Amazon

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Our Favorite SciFi TV: dystopias, sentient machines, Star Trek, etc Dec 29, 2015

We realize that there are some very obvious omissions from our lists. In the episode we address these, so check out the episode to see how we treat your favorite thing!

We welcome you to contact us to tell us how wrong we are. Please! Especially if we left out your very obvious #1. We’d like to hear from you.

Science Fiction Film Podcast - Top 5 Sci-Fi TV Shows:
Black Mirror: Netflix
Babylon 5: iTunes Amazon
Battlestar Galactica: iTunes Amazon
Humans: iTunes Amazon
Futurama: iTunes Amazon

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Elysium: power suits, wealth gaps, and an O'Neill cylinder Dec 22, 2015

Language

Spanish, French, Transatlantic Accent. Class identifier. Norman invasion. Linguistic bigotry.

Rich Folks

Facial branding. Fancy Pip Boys. Differences in rich and poor tech.

Magical Healing Chamber

How does it work? Neurological limitations. Altering personality.

Neural Tech

Brain storage implants. Encryption. Kill switches.

Exo Suits

REALLY cool installation montage. Order of installation operations. Current tech. Warhammer Space Marines.

Space Settlement

Voices from L5! Space planes. Torus settlements. Artificial gravity. Division of rich and poor. Space exploration

Stanford Torus Donald Davis CC-0

Voices From L5:
The High Frontier - by Gerard O'Neill: Amazon
District 9: Amazon

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Battlefield Earth: L Ron Hubbard, fermi paradox, and intergalactic war w/ Daniel Mann Dec 15, 2015

50s Pulp Stories

Chewed to bits by giant turtles! The Pulpiest Pulp.

The pulp school L. Ron Hubbard came from. The book should not stand out much against this background. Except it came out in the 80s!

The Film

DUTCH TILTS. The book Hubbard most wanted made into a movie. Travolta stood behind it as a love letter to Scientology. Reportedly, interference from Scientology higher-ups destroyed the whole thing, and then they threw John Travolta under the bus.

Earth After 1000 Years

Nature would take over. Paper would waste away. People would… start to act like chimps? Chernobyl. The Koream DMZ.

The Fermi Paradox

Read about the paradox on Wikipedia. The Psychlos as the great filter. They’re Made Out of Meat on The Truth Podcast.

Judging Alien Intelligence

Psychlos underestimating humans. Tool use and language.

Alien Design

In the book, they were feline! Douchey Klingons. Breathable atmosphere. High and low gravity. Cats are jerks.

Intergalactic Civilization

Why gold? Why slaves? Corporate space exploitation.

Battlefield Earth - by L Ron Hubbard: iTunes Amazon
Life After People: iTunes Amazon
Looking beyond the Cover and baggage of Battlefield Earth - by Jason Heller: AV Club
The Fermi Paradox: Wait But Why

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Ghost in the Shell: scifi anime, computer evolution, and cybernetics Dec 08, 2015

Anime

We watched a lot of it in highschool. How this film transcends the norm. Timeline of anime and the cyberpunk aesthetic.

Influence

The influences that went into this movie. The huge influence this movie had on everything after.

Plot

For once we have to lay out the plot of the movie in detail, because it’s kind of complicated!

The Opening Scene

Awesome. Exploding heads. Japanese pornography laws. Encryption as armament.

Cybernetics/Cyborgs

The spectrum on jacked-in-ness in the movie. Taxonomy of androids, cyborgs, and robots.

The Soul/Ghost

Mind-body dualism. The treatment of consciousness in the film.

Evolution in Binary

Emergent AI. What is life? Evolution of digital life forms.

Ghost in the Shell (original manga): Amazon
Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex: iTunes Amazon
The Matrix: iTunes Amazon

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Gattaca: retrofuturism, eugenics, and the ethics of designer babies Dec 01, 2015

Why does everyone love this movie?

Underdogs, sticking it to the man, engaging with our sense of justice and living the American Dream! Or something.

Genetic Determinism

The world of Gattaca banks on this big-time, but in real it’s much more complicated. Nature AND nurture. People are more than the genes they start with.

Designer Babies

Current practices with in vitro and in vivo baby testing. Down syndrome.

The New Eugenics

Racism. “Positive” and “negative.” American eugenics programs. Medical choices are eugenic.

Genetic Discrimination

Loooooong list of inconveniences Ethan Hawke has to keep up with to not get caught. Financial arrangements. Colloquial speech in Andrew Niccol’s films.

Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in Gattaca - by David A Kirby:
In Time - Decipher SciFi episode 11:

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Limitless: nootropics, brain myths, and types of intelligence Nov 24, 2015

FX

How they produced the “zoom” sequences in the film. Color grading.

Brain Drugs

Drugs as tools. 20% brain myth. Christopher’s past caffeine issues. Drugs have side effects, like blacking out, maybe murdering folks.

Intelligence

How do we define intelligence? Social? Knowledge? Pattern recognition? Analysis? Synthesis? Crazy neuro physical adaptation.

Thought Experiments

Would you want the drug? How could this affect society? Going into politics?

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The Martian: scientific accuracy, mars colonies, and poop potatoes Nov 17, 2015

The Film’s Marketing

Really cool Youtube channel. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Spoiler policies.

The Book

Serially published on Andy Weir’s blog. Accidental best-seller.

Nailed the Science

Research. Space travel is dangerous. Radiation shielding.

IRL Travel to Mars

Mars One. Space X. ELON MUSK. Settlement.

Water on Mars

Liquid salinated water. Frozen water under surface. NASA sterilization.

Worth it?

Robots? Human inspiration.

Settling/Colonizing Mars

Growing or shipping food.

Resourcefulness of Astronauts

Pretty much have to be MacGyver. Overcoming functional fixedness.

Digital Dads - Exploring the Final Frontier: Part 1 Part 2
The Case For Mars - by Robert Zubrin: iTunes Amazon
Spin - by Robert Charles Wilson: iTunes Amazon

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In Time: immortality, phramaceutical blockchain DRM, and boredom. Nov 10, 2015

Biological Immortality

Telomeres. Telomerease. Garbage collection. Avoiding cancer. The Immortalists.

Biopharmaceutical DRM

Bitcoin. Digital wealth transfer. Terminator genes. Bio-pharma IP law.

Economics and Time Inflation

Wealth and life evaporate with each passing second. This is on top of inflation used on purpose to thin the herd. Time in the film must be only artificially finite.

Stratified Society

Geographic and economic lockdown. Banlieue 13. [youtube]Md30EDh60Us[/youtube]

Tech

Skin displays. Biological immortality. Payphones. Electric classic cars.

Time Security

Cillian Murphy is lawful good. Minute men. Bad system design: could use personal transfer limits. Arm wrestling.

Immortality getting boring

Hoarding of wealth. Artificial scarcity.

Inequality for All: iTunes Amazon
The Immortalists: iTunes Amazon
The Economics of In Time:

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Lost in Space: gifted children, future vlogging, and colonizing space Nov 03, 2015

Climate Disaster

Colbert talks about it a bunch. Chris goes all Pollyanna. The Newsroom Climate episode (embedded above)

Traveling From Earth

Stargates. Gravity wells. Luck they didn’t wind up inside a sun.

Space Colonies

Space X! Mars One! Christopher gushes about Elon Musk for thirty minutes.

Gifted Children And Rubbish Fathers

Will Robinson. Ahmed Mohamed. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ghengis Khan? Elon Musk?

Future Tech

Cryo sleep. Holographic communications. Vlogging via watch.

Video Communications and Holography

[youtube]Y-P1zZAcPuw[/youtube]

The Newsroom - climate change interview: YouTube
Lost in Space (the original television series): iTunes Amazon
Revelation Space - by Alastair Reynolds: iTunes Amazon

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Lawnmower Man: mind uploading, vr, and 90s computer games Oct 27, 2015

The Novel

The title was taken from a Stephen King short story which pretty much otherwise has no relationship at all to the film. This actually led to a lawsuit.

Director Brett Leonard

Was praised at the time for his vision. Virtuosity.

3D Graphics at the Time of the Film

Wolfenstein 3D. Compact discs technology. Sega CD. The cost of this film in time and money. How impressed we all were at the time. Sega console monstrosity. The Sega Tower of Power.

Virtual Reality: Past

What we thought it would be at the time of the film.

Virtual Reality: Present

360° “VR” movies. Google cardboard. AR. How directed do we want our experiences with art to be?

Virtual Reality: Future

VR training. Holodeck. Pornography. Awesome-sounding VR “theme park” in Utah. [youtube]cML814JD09g[/youtube]

Becoming the Lawnmower Man

Nootropics. The singularity. Controlling the real world via the internet.

Community: Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care: Stream on Yahoo!Episode info on the Community Wiki
Daemon - by Daniel Suarez: iTunes Amazon
Freedom TM - by Daniel Suarez: iTunes Amazon
Altered Carbon - by Richard K Morgan: iTunes Amazon

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A Scanner Darkly: the surveillance state, drug abuse, and rotoscoping Oct 20, 2015

The Novel

Philip K. Dick sort of wrote this about himself and his experiences with the Berkeley drug culture. “Everything in A Scanner Darkly I, actually saw.” This novel is probably the least scifi of Dick’s work.

Rotoscroping

Other famous examples of rotoscroping, but Linklater’s are the first to do it 100%. Interesting custom software with layering techniques. Perfect for this film with its less than firm grip on reality.

Drug Addiction

We are squares and we know roughly nothing about drugs. But it sure seems bad. Especially the drug in the movie: Substance D. LSD experiments like the following: [youtube]n4Sb8jCJUTw[/youtube] Here is the article about these experiments.

Big Brother/Corporate Conspiracy

Small conspiracies vs grand conspiracies. Big brother. Alex Jones and Linklater. Govt agencies compelling sharing by private firms. The social effects of being watched. The war on drugs.

Fractured Indentity

Scramble suits. How much can trust our own senses? Occam’s razor. Unwitting sacrifice.

a Scanner Darkly - by Philip K Dick: iTunes Amazon
Citizenfour: iTunes Amazon
Waking Life: iTunes Amazon

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Galaxy Quest: the best Star Trek movie. Oct 13, 2015

Star Trek

Christopher is a big fan. Has a revelation regarding this on the show.

Star Trek Fandom

Christopher might be a trekkie. The movie is a loving tribute. Star Trek cast reactions to Galaxy Quest.

Aliens in the movie

Tend to be humanoid. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Abundance, working together. Literalism in language like small human children.

Silly Star Trek Tropes

The movie uses them for great meta comedy. Transporter. Omega 13 device. Most important crew members go down to explore new worlds.

Artemis is Really Really Awesome

Here is a good example of the frivolity you could expect (skip to3:38 for gameplay):

Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator: iTunes Android Play Store
Star Trek: The Next Generation: iTunes Amazon

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Starship Troopers: scifi satire, gender equity, and insectoid alien attack Oct 06, 2015

author: Christopher Peterson layout: podcast_post wordpress_id: 245 categories:

Guest Co-Host
Joe Ruppel
Podcast tags:
Action
Adventure
army
asteroid
buenos aires
Casper Van Dien
Christopher Peterson
Denise Richards
Dina Meyer
drill instructor
intelligence
Jake Busey
Lee Colbert
liberation of prisoners
moon
Nieil Patrick Harriss
Paul Verhoven
Science Fiction
soldiers
space battle
space marine
space ship
Thriller
total destruction The Movie is a Satire of the Book

Heinlein wrote what amounted to military propaganda. Picture Heinlein as the teacher with the missing arm.

Verhoven Dislikes Militarism and Fascism

Not a surprise for someone who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland. He thought the book was disgusting and wouldn’t finish reading it - had someone else tell him what happened.

Society at Constant War

Propaganda. Othering. Resources all in to the military-industrial complex. Militarism. Fascism.

Insectoid Aliens and Intelligence

Hive minds. Brain straws. Pheromone communication. Intelligent bugs. Higher-oxygen atmosphere.

Future Tech

Exo-suits, insterstellar travel, shooting projectiles across the galaxy. Drones? Where are the drones?

Gender Equality

Exo-suits, from the book, would close the gap for war purposes. Co-ed showers. Norway and Israeli conscripting women.

Starship Troopers - by Robert Heinlein: iTunes Amazon
The Commonwealth Saga - by Peter F Hamilton: iTunes Amazon
World War II Propaganda Cartoons: Walt Disney: On the Front Lines Looney Toons Assorted Propaganda Cartoons

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I Robot: the three laws of robotics are inadequate Sep 29, 2015

The Script Started Out Much Different

What began as a science fiction version of an Agatha Christie mystery grew into a Will Smith blockbuster. And then the studio acquired the rights to Asimov.

The Three Laws

Law Zero: Robots must not harm humanity.
Law One: Robots cannot harm a human.
Law Two: Robots must obey humans unless it conflicts with 1
Law Three: Rzobots must avoid harm to themselves except where it conflicts with 2 or 3

Reasoning Around the Three Laws

Wouldn’t want any rogue states or terrorist groups getting their hands on a VIKI. VIKI reasons her way around the laws.

Tests For Intelligence

Art? Emotions? People always moving the goalposts. Domain-specific masteries.

Robot Workers

Taking our jerbs. Amazing Amazon warehouse robots. Teachers. Service industry. Creative work the most protected, for now. How to handle the fallout from the robot worker class? Guaranteed minimum income experiment in Holland.

Google Deep Dreaming: Blog post Make your own
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov: iTunes Amazon
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - by Nick Bostrom: iTunes Amazon
Our Final Invention - by James Barrat: iTunes Amazon

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Ex Machina: ai software, wetware, and the turing test Sep 22, 2015

Lone genius inventor

The myth. Thomas Edison. Google. Boss guy taking credit. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Could the open source movement make great breakthroughs possible for small groups? Didn’t it already?

Turing Test

Commonly misunderstood. But the intelligence in this movie is way past that anyway. Testing for theory of mind might be the right track for the future.

Personification of AI

Being a cute, vulnerable girl AI goes a long way. Uncanny valley. Sexual attraction to non-human humanoid intelligences.

AI Danger

Fast/slow takeoff. AI will look back on us like pre-Sapiens fossils. It is not difficult to “escape the box.” If a person can do it, so can a superintelligence.

Machine Learning/Data Collection

Google might be the biggest and most successful AI project in the world. Phone spying. Black-box neural networks. Algorithmic complexity.

AI Ethics

Is it immoral to create an AI and not let it be free? “Do you have someone testing you who could turn you off?” Romantic interest better than morals? Does Nathan consider how he is treating the AIs? God complex. Baghavad Gita. The end of humanity. AI arms race.

[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’]Section Did Ava leave Caleb to die? Did she do it purposely? What will her next move be?[/spoiler]

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - by Nick Bostrom: iTunes Amazon
Our Final Invention - by James Barrat: iTunes Amazon

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Moon: helium 3 lunar mining and emoji robots Sep 15, 2015

Movies with strict limitations in cast and location

Love these! Moon is a good one, seriously only one human actor present. Other pleasing examples include Buried with Ryan Reynolds, The Man From Earth, 12 Angry Men is the greatest.

Isolation

Humans need other humans. Our own introversion. Solitary confinement is torture. Having the light at the end of the tunnel.

Gerty

Love the robot design. Practical to the extreme. He has a cupholder! The name means nothing. LOVE the smiley interface. Hal 9000 references.

Space Business

Multinational mega corporation with government ties. Bottom line is all that matters. The economics of evil and helium-3 mining. Exploitative labor practices. Helium 3 science.

[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’] Cloning

How would you feel to be a clone? To be an original who is cloned? A clone of you, even in adult form with implanted memories, is not “you” anymore once the copy is made. Could you work together with your clone?[/spoiler]

Michel Siffre:
The Island: iTunes Amazon
2001: A Space Odyssey: iTunes Amazon

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Demolition Man: cryogenic criminal justice and three seashells Sep 15, 2015

Wesley Snipes, irl criminal, fights Sylvester Stallone in the future while wearing hammer pants and gaudy earrings. Future sci-fi hijinx ensue.

Criminal Rehabilitation

Rehab or punishment? Synaptic suggestion for true rehabilitation? The time needed for the rehab process in the film. Cryogenic freezing. Stallone says he was awake, probably wasn’t. Better than prison. What if evil dictators had this technology?

Implantable Skills

Huge benefits. Whoah, I know kung fu. Free will. No need for college, just plug in. But who will be the lower class?

Nonviolence

Unreasonable to have a pacifistic society in a world with self-interested human actors? Silliness. Stagnation of martial skills.

Thought Policing

Anything not good for you is bad, hence illegal. Fluid transfer illegal. Can humanity move beyond sex? Maybe after the singularity. Should we even call it humanity at that point?

Future Tech

Communications technology prescience. Video calls on tablets. Self driving cars. Stallone is a curmudgeonly caveman. Cryogenics. Sewer maintenance. No internet? The three sea shells mystery, solved.

Futurama:
The Lost Fleet Books by Jack Campbell:
Rambo:

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Titan AE: Space exploration and Donald Bluth love Sep 15, 2015

Quotes

Cale: “Everyday I wake up and it’s still the present. The same grimy, boring present. I don’t think this “future” thing of yours exists. “ How mundane the miracles of technology seem once they become ubiquitous. Wikipedia. Butt-washing machines. Korso: “That the human race is outta gas. It’s circling the drain. It’s finished! The only thing that matters is grabbing whatcha can before somebody else beats ya to it.” The desperation of desperate people in desperate times. FYGM, rational self-interest. Sci-fi’s common dichotomy between high and low life with high tech.

Director

Donald Bluth directed. also made Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace video games. And the movies An American Tale and The Land Before Time. Fox Animation Studios closed after Titan did badly in theaters.

CG/2D

Space is beautiful in CG. Christopher loves the 2d hand-drawn cell animation on top of CG environments. 2.5d, perhaps.

90s

The music of the 90s. 90s fashion. Mat Damon’s hair. Powerman 5000. Spaceship repair montage.

Alien Creatures

Cochroach chef was almost Jar Jar Binks. Straight-up murder in a cartoon surprised us. Alien kangaroo person’s hundred-jointed legs are of questionable utility. Energy beings made less than enough sense.

Low Human Population

Humanity was down to 10,000 people millennia ago, that was close. Now here they are spread out across space. Space racism.

Titan Device

Like Norwegian Seed Vault, but in space. Sort of. Adam and Eve. New Earth or Planet Bob. Joss Whedon.