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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Feeling the heartbreak, right in the forehead.

1. Her forehead scene: YouTube

Landing the “flying brick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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-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.

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

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.

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.

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

1. Exoplanet Exploration - Planets Beyond our Solar System: NASA

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. [4K,60Fps,Colorized] Titanic, First and Last Voyage, April 1912 AI Recovery, added sound: YouTube
2. RMS Titanic Survivors True Accounts of The Sinking: YouTube
3. RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts by the Engingeering Guy: YouTube
4. Titanic - Alternate Ending: YouTube

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The honey badger of the north!

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

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

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.

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!

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

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” 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.

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

• “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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 😥).

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. 👌

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?

For real, fuck those guys. Cultural appropriation.

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

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

Again with the motion sickness.

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.

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.

As per our Colossus Roundtable: watch Person of Interest!

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

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.

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.

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

1. Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable by kaptainkristian: YouTube
2. Watchmen (2009 Film): iTunesPrime Video

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

1. The Teslasuit literally shocked me by CNET: YouTube

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

The great synthetic filter from beyond space and time.

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

Christopher Peterson

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.

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

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

1. The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: YouTube

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

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! 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.”

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

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

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.

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

DO NOT REPLY

DO NOT REPLY

-An alien

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

“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.

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

1. Seamus Blackley bakes actual Ancient Egyptian bread: Twitter

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

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).

1. Battlestar Galactica: iTunesAmazon
2. Battlestar Galactica: curse words linguistics, formal code verification, and robo Jesus: Decipher SciFi

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

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.

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

Social distancing. Hoarding steak and toilet paper.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

1. Matcha! It's so tasty.: Wikipedia

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

1. TMNT decayed costume nightmare fuel: Twitter
2. Why danger symbols can’t last forever by Vox & 99pi: YouTube
3. 10 Thousand Years: 99% Invisible

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 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.

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.

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

1. Inception: iTunesAmazon
2. The Matrix: iTunesAmazonYouTube
3. The Matrix - green phosphors, neuroplasticity, and rejecting utopia w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi
4. The Truman Show - objects visible from space, dome megastructues, and reality testing: Decipher Scifi

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

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

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 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.

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

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

… 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.

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.

CRISPR! What will eventually result from this one?

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Sorry! Happy holidays!

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.”

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

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

1. Guardians of the Galaxy: Decipher SciFi
2. Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Decipher SciFi
3. Avengers Infinity War: Decipher SciFi
4. Black Panther: Decipher SciFi
5. Avengers Endgame: Decipher SciFi

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.”

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)

1. Bronson: iTunesAmazon
2. Locke: iTunesAmazon
3. Peaky Blinders: iTunesAmazonNetflix
4. Warrior: iTunesAmazon
5. The Dark Knight Rises: iTunesAmazon

• The Terminator: bootstrapping, machine uprising, and time traveling meatballs w/ Joe Ruppel
• Terminator 2: advanced puppetry, Skynet, and liquid nitrogen handling w/ Joe Ruppel
• Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines: hacking cars and supercomputing Skynet FLOPS w/ Joe Ruppel
• Terminator Salvation: body donation, realistic time travel, and the legal shmegal defense w/ Joe Ruppel
• Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

1. The Orville: iTunesAmazonHulu

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

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: 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.

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

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

Twelve months to make a fake Arnold.

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 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.

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?

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

Who wants to go do my mom

• John Connor

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

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

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

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

1. Terminator Salvation the Machinima Series: YouTube

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

1. Works by Madeline Ashby: Amazon
2. Person of Interest: iTunesAmazonNetflix

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

Favorite Spiderman movie?

1. Exhalation by Ted Chiang: iTunesAmazon

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

1. Harlan Ellison and the Terminator: YouTube

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

James Brown and showboat Apollo. The Khaleesi naming scheme.

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

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.

Surprisingly not a cynical product placement.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

… 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

“2 stars, car was clean”

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

1. Whaling: Wikipedia
2. Whale Oil: Wikipedia
3. Margarine: Wikipedia
4. Moby Dick by Herman Melville: iTunesAmazon

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

1. Game of Fuckin' Thrones by Anamanaguchi: YouTube
2. Nightflyers (SciFi!) & Other Stories by GRRM: iTunesAmazon

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

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

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

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

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

Savantism before the invention and eventual ubiquity of writing.

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

1. The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz: Amazon
2. Media used: Heavy Metal Riff by tgfcoder: CC-BY
3. Media used:Retro Robot Thinking Sound by orginaljun: FreeSoundCC-BY

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.

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.

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. 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.

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

• Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot language, intelligent animals, and where do trees get their mass?
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: space jumps, empathy telepathy, and ❤️ Yondu
• Avengers Infinity War: space mapping, Dyson spheres, and the purple coin purse

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

1. Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

1. The Backwards Brain Bicycle by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
2. The Animatrix: iTunesAmazonYouTube
3. The Pizza Matrix (it's terrible): YouTube

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. 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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…

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

“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.

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

• The Expanse: Nick Farmer on conlanging and the intersection of language and scifi
• The Expanse VFX: an interview with Cailin Munroe, VFX Producer
• The Expanse Season 2: falling into the sun, martian gravity, and human g-force limits w/ Fraser Cain

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

1. 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
2. The Expanse Season 3: Amazon
3. Guide to Space by Fraser Cain: YouTube

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

1. FACE SWAP by David Gidali: Vimeo

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Evolutionary milestones. Latent abilities. Guided evolution. Atavism.

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).

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

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

1. First kind: visual contact
2. Second kind: evidence of contact
3. Third kind: in-person contact

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

1. Captain Disillusion: YouTube
2. Escherian Stairwell Deconstruction by Captain Disillusion: YouTube

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Shark public image management. Sharks with eyebrows.

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

• 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!?)

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.

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.

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

1. Bandwidth by Eliot Peper: Amazon
2. Borderless by Eliot Peper: Amazon
3. Key & Peele Obama Meet & Greet: YouTube
4. Key & Peele on Code Switching: YouTube

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.

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

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

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

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.

1. War Stories by Ars Technica: YouTube
2. GDC Classic Game Postmortems: YouTube

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Forever the voice of Mission Control.

Almost as scary as the ocean.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Vertical cities

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

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

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 suppression! Overheated air and air pressure for aircraft.

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

PORK CHOP SANDWICHES

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.

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

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

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.

Nano walls! Water on Mars! Telefragging!

1. Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
2. The X-Files Podcast: LSG Media
3. Masters of Doom by David Kushner: iTunesAmazon

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

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

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.

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

(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)

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

Space impactors. Resource

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).

Bas Rutten for king. Right hoooook.

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

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

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.

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

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

(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)

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

Genetics research in spaaaaaace. CRISPR. Bremen Drop Tower.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The rise of private space industry. Going dystopian.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

1. The Water Fountain You Pee In: YouTube

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

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.

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.

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.

Virtual world scale and sharding vs mon-worlds.Virtu

Real virtual economies and responsibility.

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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

Resolutions?

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

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

• Spatial light manipulation
• Temporal light manipulation
• Spectral light manipulation

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Implantable devices. API development.

Lojban. Constructed languages. Esperanto.

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.

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

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

Climate change and glacial surges.

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

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

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

Ughhhhhhhhh. Compression and suffocation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Was it a success? Drugs make you a superhero.

1. Universal Soldier alternate ending: YouTube

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.

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

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

Time scales for change on the technological curve.

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

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

1. Space Warfare by Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Mainframes and the Unix Revolution by Computerphile: YouTube

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

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.

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.

Clever villainy. Megaton yields.

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

1. Does Light Experience Time?: YouTube

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

Micro vs macro.

Plants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia.

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

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.

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.

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

Nanotech. Programming nanobots to eat brains - or gloves!

1. Megastructures 1.1: Dyson Spheres by Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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.

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.

Cryonic sleep and galactic travel. Teenager sleep schedules.

Weightlessness in orbit. Orbit is falling.

As per Hawking: you might not want to!

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

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.

IRL shooting stars. Rogue stars. Meteor shower disappointments.

1. If Earth had Rings by Artifexian: YouTube

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Coinage. Von Nuemann’s “self-replicating automata.”

1. The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence [1973]: YouTube
2. Westworld (the series): iTunesAmazon

And the forms that it takes. Arthropoids. Cephalapoids. The names we give the aliens and the names they give themselves.

Coffee!

And in particular how wonderfully wonderful caffeine is. Dwarf Fortress and ale supplies. Depressants vs stimulants and the shape society.

Frustration with being made a joke.

Evolution, hip size, and cranial size. Bipedalism. Early homo adaptations and social assisted delivery.

Alien advocates for the ethical treatment of dumb humanity.

Possible unreliable narrators. Neuralizers vs “memory sticks.” This is my roofie stick. Short term and long-term memory “wiping.”

1. A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage: iTunesAmazon
2. Mirror - A single-page PnP micro RPG for you and your friends by Liam Ginty: DrivethruRPGItch.io

What is that for. Chlorofleorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion.

The frozen arm punishment. Cooling rates and atmospheric density. Christopher’s experience (or lack thereof) freezing limbs with liquid nitrogen.

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.

1. Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained by Kurzgesagt: YouTube
2. Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet by Daniella Martin: iTunesAmazon

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 tools. Copper tools. Early Brone tools. Limestone vs granite. Arsenical copper advantages.

“Chariots of the Gods” and the origin of alien pyramid conspiracies. Judging fringe theorists.

The origin of the writing systems of ancient Egypt. Accounting.

Inspiring budding Egyptologists and getting suddenly swole.

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.

Bomb disposal space bot. Colonization.

Stargates and our knowledge at the time.

1. The History of Egypt Podcast: Website
2. The Trouble With Transporters by CGP Grey: YouTube

Red smear memorials. Time travel in tiny, sweaty drug subs. It all comes down to laser machine guns.

Get rich quick slowly schemes.

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.

And how you can’t carbon date gold itself.

Sicilian grandmas. Skyrim health potions and time travel interest-compounding. Better investment plans:

1. Put money into savings account
2. …
3. profit
4. repeat

Ugly self-driving cars. Greebles. Glue some crap to some crap and bam, you’re in the future.

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”

1. Bloodsport: iTunesAmazon
2. Bloodsport Mentos: YouTube
3. You Can't Touch Anything by Vsauce: YouTube
4. Can We Really Touch Anything? by Vsauce: YouTube

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”

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!

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.

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.

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.

Playing the looooooooong game. Statistical Great Filter analyses. Earth is a fixer-upper. Jerk bully aliens.

1. Stephen Granade: WebsiteTwitter
2. Stephen on Pacific Rim again but with more physics: YouTube

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).

And exceeding limits. The lack of connection between physical brain material and storage of particular sorts of memory, especially temporal sequences.

“Light therapy” and affecting brain states. Fuzzy encryption keys for biometrics. Brute force attacks.

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

VR silliness. Command-line life. Christopher tried a MUD/MOO. Abandoning cheeky abstractions. AI solving yet another problem. Morgan Freeman Espeak modules.

1. Science Fiction Film Podcast #247: Johnny Mnemonic featuring Christopher Peterson: LSG Media
2. Wing Commander: PC games nostalgia, pilgrims, and space combat w/ Dean from LSG Media: Decipher SciFi

• Zardoz’ mustache
• Zardoz’s speeches both and and out of stone head
• Sean Connery’s everything
• Psychic attacks

One of the worse ways to celebrate. Coins off of a skyscraper. Mass and volume and drag. Bullet lethality reductions with different trajectories.

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.

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.

Neanderthals, Denisovans, and uh…. gorillas? The evolutionary relationship between gorilla and human pubic lice.

Don’t forget other animals are smart too! Humans are still way better though.

Awkward science. Would you pass?

The nature of power the “Eternals” have. Evolutionary timescales vs the application of technology. AI control.

Boredom is for boring people. The value of freedom of will when you can’t die.

1. Facts about Human Evolution by SciShow: YouTube
2. Rick & Morty - Raising Gazorpazorp: iTunesYouTube

1. Find a script
2. Add monsters
3. …
4. profit

Like, literally a twist. Balancing huge gyroscopes on a central stem. Spinning buckets. Bucket size

How the ARED works. The danger of jackedstronauts coming back from space to take over the planet.

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.

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.

Chris’ immense latissimus dorsi. Avoiding affecting sensitive space mechanisms by avoiding spewing mass into space around your station/telescope.

Geocentric vs heliocentric orbits. How to tell if Earth is gone/how to tell if your space station is gone.

1. 10 Cloverfield Lane: iTunesAmazon
2. Burning Astronaut Pee - Smarter Every Day 149: YouTube
3. Space Telescopes Maneuver like CATS - Smarter Every Day 59: YouTube

Roads are awesome. The US highway system is awesome. Eisenhower’s road trip. Road trips are awesome, too.

Lack of roads in the outback. Accidental un-deserting. The Namib desert. The Namib dessert is 55 million years old!

The oceans? No way. Red salt planet in The Last Jedi. Evaporating the oceans.

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.

Science vampires! Callbacks to Daybreakers. Combining mice. Kidnapping Wim Hof for his blood.

Malnutrition, radiation poisoning, the oral bacteriome. Dental hygiece pre- vs post-agrciulture. Beneficial dental plaques. The evolution of the human lower jaw.

Berserker mushroom mode. Signalling. Low framerate editing effects.

Car stuff with DJ Moffett! Superchargers, turbochargers, maintenance and machining.

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.

1. Highways and Byways a game from Brandon Rollins: Highways & Byways
2. Brandon the Game Dev: Brandon the Game Dev
3. Making-of Fury Road: Cars: YouTube
4. Making-of Fury Road: Tools: YouTube

Unicron and the spark of life between worlds.

Trebuchets. Traction trebuchet vs counterweight trebuchet. Siege weapons vs anti-personnel. Army sizes in the early middle ages.

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 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.

Speaking of which, I’m starting to feel like maybe we’ve covered.this.before. Gravity, orbit perturbations, and impending doom after the credits.

Papryus, paper, and vellum. Goat scrotum!

Subverting the trope of useful scientist.

1. Futurism: Futurism.com
2. What is Bayhem? by Every Frame a Painting: YouTube
3. When Worlds Collide: observable universe, 20th century astonomy, and modern space industry w/ Daniel James Barker: Decipher SciFi

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.

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. ?

1. Zoltan: ZoltanIstvan.com
2. Altered Carbon (the novel) by Richard K. Morgan: iTunesAmazon

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.

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

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.

1. Universal Paperclips: DecisionProblem.com
2. Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi
3. A Scanner Darkly: the surveillance state, drug abuse, and rotoscoping: Decipher SciFi
4. Minority Report: Eliot Peper on freedom and algorithmic precognition: Decipher SciFi

The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini.

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.

1. Voices from L5: Voices From L5
2. Problems with Mind Uploading by exurb1a: YouTube
3. You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube
4. Blindsight by Peter Watts: iTunesAmazon

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.

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.

1. Fraser’s things: Universe TodayAstronomy CastFraser Cain @ YouTube

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.

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.

Answerer: Daniel James Barker

Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse.

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.

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.

Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness.

Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora.

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.

Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality.

Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan.

Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer

Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.”

1. The Science of Avatar by the Seattle Public Library: SPL.org

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 shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts!

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.

Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.”

“Salthoth.” “Hey, it’s salt.”  How salt flats form on earth. Salt rising and drying from seasonal flooding. Salt-friendly bacteria and weird oxidation.

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.

1. Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
2. Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
3. The Last Jedi - Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media

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.”

The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane.

“Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose.

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.

[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.

Character elimination and happy fairy tale endings.

Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects.

Hey these are neat

Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves.

Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto.

Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology.

DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage.

1. BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" Anime Short: YouTube
2. BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn" Short: YouTube
3. BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2048: Nowhere to Run" Short: YouTube
4. Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi

Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes.

“Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization.

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.”

Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math.

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.

1. The Fifth Element: space turtles, magic stones, and LeeLoo Dallas multipass: Decipher SciFi

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.

Appreciation for where we are finally. Space travel becoming cheaper and cheaper and the legit settlement of other planets on the horizon.

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.

Only 12x the size of earth. Luminosity and distance. What type of star could be in this range of size and luminosity?

Somehow we got to this topic. And now here is some history!

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.

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:

1. When Worlds Collide by Powerman 5000: YouTube
2. 2000000000000: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
3. Hubble Deep Field by Vox: YouTube
4. And another about the Hubble "Ultra" Deep Field by Deep Astronomy: YouTube

Some examples are better than others.

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.

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.

Human records. Ice Cores! Meteoric ice. Tree rings! Water body beds! Caves!

Age and layers. Ash, gas, life, temperatures from oxygen isotope ratios.

Colbert’s insights from The Supercomputing Conference. The big data; it is very big.

… 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.

1. Inside The Giant American Freezer Filled With Polar Ice by tom Scott: YouTube
2. 13 Misconceptions About Global Warming: YouTube

Neutrino detection.

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.

Space settlement and Christopher’s disappointment. Seveneves as the gold standard for how to relocate humanity to space in an emergency.

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 is no joke! Yellowstone supervolcano (more volcano conversation in our Volcano episode). Pyroclastic flow rates. Lake Toba (is larger).

The earth’s internal metal. Pole-flipping!

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.

1. Seveneves: impactors, guided evolution, and radiation shields w/ Daniel Mann: Decipher SciFi

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

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

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

Major monitoring methods looking out for pending eruptions:

• Seisimic activity
• Gas!
• Groundswell - actual deformation of the landscape from the pressure

Pyroclastic flow vs lava. The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79AD. Casting the cavities that surrounded trapped bodies. Cast of a pompeii body

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.

Dams! Backwards or otherwise. The Decade List.

1. Experiencing a volcanic shockwave: YouTube
2. From the movie: a human being melting directly and immediately into mere inches of lava: YouTube

-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gross hairs. Super strength and the square cube law a la our King Kong episode. Enzymatic digestion. Insect reproductive cycles.

1. Flies lifecycle: YouTube
2. A Scientist Responds… to The Fly: io9

Vs “show don’t tell.” Australian flags and separation from the United Kingdom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is this Hell a place? Or a manifestation of our neuroses? Or a greater consciousness just rolling over on us by accident?

Cosmicism. Humans facing life from deep time. Human-scale irrelevance.

1. Caelum Rale: Instagram
2. The public-domain works of H.P. Lovecraft: Archive.orgAmazon

Just because that’s awesome

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 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.

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.

“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.

Blood isn’t really usually considered delicious. Ethical concerns with surviving on human blood UNTIL the “blood substitute” is developed.

1. Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, Elizabethan sexuality, and Kenau's awesome accent w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi

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.

His (lack of) actual historical importance. Public knowledge due to the simple coincidence of which things are best preserved and then discovered.

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.

Napoleon’s groundbreaking work in enabling the study of science and history while conquering things. The birth of Egyptology.

Hollywood’s chronic misunderstanding of the nature of The Book of the Dead. It’s not evil! Egyptian beliefs re death and the afterlife.

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.

1. The History of Egypt Podcast: The History of Egypt Podcast
2. The Japanese Art of Self-Preservation: Damn Interesting
3. Diablo Postmortem : YouTube

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.

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 systems and the chance for stable planetary orbits. Proxima Centauri. Globular star clusters as alternative for “all light all the time.”

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.

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.

Evolving bioluminescence as a food-collection mechanism vs keeping away the flying death-machines.

1. Fraser Cain's different stuff: Astronomy CastUniverse TodayYouTube
2. Farewell Cassini: The Grand Finale and the Final Images of Saturn by Fraser Cain: YouTube
3. What If Saturn Paid Us a Very Close Visit? by Phil Plait: Bad Astronomy
4. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: iTunesAmazon

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 entry bombs. Landing invasion ships, overpressure, and displays of power. Also the blue ball planet-killing explosion thing.

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.

The economics of the private prisons in this universe and how it’s cost-effective to basically put a prison facility on Mercury.

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.

Robustness of skin. Comparison to other color-changing creatures. Luminescence vs passive color-change.

1. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay/Assault on Dark Athena: Amazon
2. The Chronicles of Riddick by Folding Ideas: YouTube

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 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.

For once in space-scale scifi: drones! The levels of cost and complexity when designing craft to safely transport squishy humanoids. Galaga!

Hexagons! And what they reveal about interstellar travel in this universe. Space straws.

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 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.

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.

1. The Complex Feels of Guardians of the Galaxy v.2 by Lindsay Ellis: YouTube
2. Does water freeze or boil in space?: Starts With a Bang
3. The Trelenburg Gate by Andy P: Batch 25 Comics

Dimensions and physics and moving through the invisible dimension of time.

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.

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.

Human evolution and selective pressures. Humans as cattle. Inefficiency in turning sunlight into steak. Maintaining 19th-century English over millennia.

Single-timeline self-consistency. Time travel victory strategies.

What books would you bring with you to repair future society?

Weenas

1. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: iTunesAmazon
2. The Time Machine (2002): iTunesAmazon

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.

Both before and after earth enters nuclear winter. Water, air, hydrocarbons and where to find them.

Freedom vs keeping everyone from dying. Reproduction policies. Simulations for generation ships - maintaining sufficient genetic diversity through selection and control of reproduction.

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.

The 7:10 rule. Human civilization vs survival of the human animal. Nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. Types of radiation and radiation cookie puzzles.

Ancient Roman artillery (ps we said “scorpio” but meant “ballista,” whoops). Bioluminescence in a forest.

1. How Damaging is Radiation? by Veritasium: YouTube
2. Cruel Bombs by Vsauce: YouTube

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.

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?

And cinematography. What a beautiful movie! Practical effects and things that age well from the 80s.

Detection. Genetic design. Testing for replicants with bullets like testing a witch with drowning.

Why design your androids to be so human? Designing anthropomorphized androids to operate with human tools in a human environment.

A new theory for how replicants work. Terminological issues. Maybe they shouldn’t be called “androids?”

The control problem and cellular kill switches.

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.

“Android” brain production analogy with CPU production methods.

Memories providing the context that makes up our selves. Looking for nipples.

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.

1. Bad Voiceover Montage from the Theatrical Release of Blade Runner: YouTube

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.

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.”

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.

Parasitoid developments. Design vs natural selection. Indiscriminate resource consumption.

These guys made some assumptions and ran with them. Mouth-mouth saw-saws and their use in chestbursting.

1. What is a Neutrino? by Minute Physics: YouTube
2. Quantum SHAPE-SHIFTING: Neutrino Oscillations by Minute Physics: YouTube
3. Alien: Covenant | Prologue: Last Supper by 20th Century FOX: YouTube
4. Alien: Covenant | Prologue: The Crossing | 20th Century FOX: YouTube

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.

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.

And our own plans for how to sell out. Thoughts on “Gorilla” marketing. Unrelated: send advertising inquiries to contact@deciphermedia.tv (｡◝‿◜｡)

Colbert’s mustache woes. Delusions of grandeur over time. This guy’s really interesting personal story of his experience with “the Truman Show Delusion.”

How would you know if it were you? Occam’s razor. Glitches in the matrix. Plato’s Cave.

1. How Much of the Earth Can You See at Once? by Vsauce: YouTube
2. The Truman Delusion/Being Famous byh Johnny Benjamin: YouTube

Damn teenagers being irresponsible, endangering others and themselves and whatnot. But then they get superpowers so I guess it’s cool.

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.

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.

10,000 nukes. Calculating the gold tonnage needed to create a Goldar. Recovering splattered riches. Places to find Goldar-sized gold deposits.

Combat strategy. Our best Zord ever idea: MANTIS SHRIMP.

It’s basically Octo Dad, Or QWOP.

1. Is Rita Repulsa’s Staff More Destructive than Her Monsters? by Because Science w/ Kyle Hill: YouTube
2. POWER/RANGERS UNAUTHORIZED [BOOTLEG UNIVERSE] by Adi Shankar: YouTube