Decipher SciFi : the show about how and why

Spaaaaace Clouds in space…? Microsoft Azure Space and Azure Orbital. Making space cheaper and more accessible with satcomm as a service. VR The new Oculus Quest. Past predictions. Pulling the VR market in the direction of affordability? Pandemic winter VR. Hating Facebook while embracing their VR product. Getting better at not getting sick. Experiences of unreality. Conferencing Virtual chewing noises. Missing irl conference-going. It’s like a vacation for adult nerds! Food Food preservation. Preserved dairy variations by latitude. Jerky! Appreciating controlled rot. Earthworm jerky. Roasted grasshoppers! About Chapulines: Wikipedia Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube Support the show!

AI everything Creating a thinking, feeling artificial intelligence to do really important things for humanity like… sorting through your e-mail. N-dimensional AI chess. Rapid takeoff scenarios. Personal Assistants Natural language processing developments. The rise of proactive digital personal assistants. Predictive local, personal information. Digital relationship Virtual aural closeness. Presence and audio AR. Developments in form factor, interface, and functionality. Understanding the acoustics of spaces, materials, and your biology. Room mapping. Love, infinite attention, and generosity. The Forehead Feeling the heartbreak, right in the forehead. Her forehead scene: YouTube Support the show!

Forgetability The valley of forgetability (The Core) between science-respecting sci-fi (e.g. Arrival) and totally bonkers nonsense (e.g. Jupiter Ascending). Space shuttle Landing the “flying brick.” Bird navigation Magnetite beaks. The possibility of quantum eyeball magnetic navigation HUDs. Corvid appreciation. Why birds don’t all fly into our windows and our eyeballs. Pacemakers Keeping your heart on-rhythm. Not as immediate a death sentence as portrayed. Earth’s outer core The absurd energies in the spinning of Earth’s core - a ball of iron the size of Mars, spinning a thousand miles an hour That’s a whole lot of energy. If it doesn’t sound like much, let’s convert it to megatons: it’s the equivalent energy of five trillion one megaton bombs going off. Phil Plait on the spinning outer core Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Review of The Core: BadAstronomy.com Support the show!

Clouds in episode image from “Storm Clouds” by Albert Bierstadt/The White House Historical Association CC-O @ Wikipedia Waffles Belgian Waffle formula Tasty waffles! Stank waffles! With lots of syrup! Solving food problems with casseroles. Gravy! VR Marveling at the Oculus Quest two 25% price drop from the last generation. Hating Facebook. Realizing the separateness of AR and VR development, even within companies working on both at the same time (Facebook). Can/will AR and VR converge and become ubiquitous? WFH Working from home. Surprisingly long hikes and arachnid attacks. Tiny child legs and tiny child wills. Venus Life on venus? The dense, deep, permanent nature of the Venusian cloud layer. The possible effect on drake equation. Looking forward to balloon probes in the Venusian atmosphere. Ocean data Ocean-floor data centers. The cost of infrastructure and cooling vs the cost of real estate. The value of removing humans from the environment because we’re so loud and clumsy and moist. Review: We do not recommend the $299 Oculus Quest 2 as your next VR system: Ars Technica Oculus Quest 2: Oculus.com Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus: Nature Astronomy Chemical that shouldn’t be there spotted in Venus’ atmosphere: Ars Technica Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success: Ars Technica Support the show!

“Banana” image used in featured image with our brains by nicubunu CC-0 Josh, recently Made a strong showing on the recent Saving Private Ryan episode over at LSG Media. Real human stuff in between the dick and fart jokes. Teledildonics Tales of coupled internet-connected sex toys are way up! Hooray for free and open source teledildonics at buttplug.io. Nuclear things Making long-lived diamond nuclear batteries from spent nuclear fuel. The banana equivalent dose of radiation. The trouble with battery-tech press releases. Eating enough grapes to give you superpowers. Buttplug archaeology. Tongue twisters. Forever-vibrating mummies and the Silurian hypothesis. Simulations The major leap in tech in the new MS Flight Simulator. Taking the fun out of games by making them rigorous simulations. The value of process simulations when the real thing is expensive or dangerous. Going all Ender’s Game on actual military simulations with Close Combat. Buying military might with lots of money. Tabletop RPGs Missing the humans-at-a-table element during the pandemic. Appreciating how much fun we had with Liam in our Mirror RPG playthrough (parts I, II, and III). And catching Josh 100% on the hook to GM for the podcast again in the future! Hooray! Saving Private Ryan w/ Josh: LSG Media The X-Files Podcast /w Josh: LSG Media Buttplug: an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware: Buttplug.io Strapped Into A Sinking Helicopter (with U.S. Marines) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube Support the show!

Production Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general. Classism First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth. Technology The pace of technological development in industries, especially intercontinental travel by steamship. Comparing the early 1900s to other periods of technological progress like the 1980s and 1990. Noting the nature of the automobiles in the film: literally the design of a “horseless carriage.” The cutting-edge wireless technology aboard the ship. The ship Three engines! Of two varieties. Steam-driven piston engines and steam-driven a turbine. Note: you cannot reverse a turbine. Peak power: 46,000 horsepower. 600 tons of coal daily. An anecdote about Mr. Diesel. A collection of small problems The nature of many disasters, probably including Titanic: a series of small problems, adding up to a catastrophic failure under the rigt (wrong) circumstances. Rich people hogging the Marconi wireless. Out of date lifeboat regulations. Loading lifeboats (badly). The reality of “women and children first.” Avoiding chaos until it’s too late. Judgements The inquiries from shortly after the event, and the great surprise you may experience when realizing that the company men consistently pushed blame back up the chain of command. Modern evidence changing our conception over time. Actually ultimately coming to the consensus that this particular ship on this particular voyage was mostly operated in a way that was totally normal in almost all respects and simply got very unlucky. All told, it does seem that Titanic was really really well-engineered and did remarkably well under the circumstances. [4K,60Fps,Colorized] Titanic, First and Last Voyage, April 1912 AI Recovery, added sound: YouTube RMS Titanic Survivors True Accounts of The Sinking: YouTube RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts by the Engingeering Guy: YouTube Titanic - Alternate Ending: YouTube Support the show!

Fear of mutation Our recent X-Men. Irl post-war nuclear anxieties. More mutant panic and more mutant supremacy bad guys. Irradiating Earth Not enough to make superpowers, but we sure did irradiate a lot. The clear mark of human civilization in the geological record. Past discussions of the Silurian Hypothesis. Neanderthal interactions 2010 Neanderthal DNA news and the possibility of this informing the film. Extincting things more by accident than on purpose in pre-agricultural times. Consistent neanderthal pronunciation consistency issues. The plan(s) Causing global nuclear war so you can… rule over the ashes? At least the Magneto version of the plan didn’t destroy infrastructure. Powers The energy levels required for useful destructive resonance as a superpower. Brown-noting your enemies in combat. Once more determining that functional immortality is the best power that w actually want. Submarining Fitting nuclear submarines in your megayacht. Ice floes vs icebergs vs glaciers. Where to get the best ice for your drinks. How I Boarded a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube Boarding a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic by Smarter Every Day: YouTube What if We Nuke a City? by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube Support the show!

3D tracking Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift. Weather AI Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning weather models. Hyper-local extrapolation and push notifications. Weather forecasting/reporting as a demonstration of probabilities. Website search We took the bullet for our website visitors and implemented a site search on DecipherMedia.tv in JavaScript! The result: we still do not enjoy JavaScript. But we do have search! Future functionality improvements. Here is our internal documentation. And a reminder that our whole site is open source and available on GitLab! Doom on everything Our continuing fascination in seeing Doom on more things. And the less it makes sense, the better! Doom on Windows 95 in Minecraft, because why not. Game feel Game feel the book. Creating a satisfying input/response loop when all you’re really doing is mashing buttons. Vlambeer on mobile game “juice.” The relative difficulty of providing good “feel” on mobile games with a uniformly smooth display as an input device. Putting overtime into the design of basic repetitive game mechanics, e.g. Mario or God of War. New frontiers in game feel. Game programming for kids A wonderful, simple, directly productive introduction to core concepts: Scratch! Proud parent moments. Jesus news Apparently The Passion is getting a sequel? The wackiness of ecclesiastical minutiae. Discovering more schisms in Christianity. CamTrackAR: Apple App Store DecipherMedia Site Search: DecipherMedia.tv You Can Now Play DOOM on a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft: InterestingEngineering.com Game Feel: GameFeel.com Vlambeer - 'The art of screenshake': YouTube Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks: YouTube Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share: MIT.edu Support the show!

Comic book movies X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman. Superhero physique Belgian Blue musclecow Roby GFDL Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to. #hollywood -@robmcelhenney Mutation Mutations: usually do nothing or are bad. But also sometimes are good! Exploring the high variance in mutations in the world of X-Men. Picking the best X-Men power: raw force production vs longevity. Wolverines The honey badger of the north! What happens when everything else gets his by lightning Lichtenberg figures. Making puberty even more awkward. New-mutant death rates. Norwegian reindeer mass lightning death. How Lightning Can Kill 300 Reindeer With One Strike: Wired The Ultimate Warrior Being Crazy: YouTube Support the show!

Hacking The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media. Free Software Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration. Unicode things hooray Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji! Tattoos Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod. RPGs Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty. Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura Percent! “Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them. Spotted dick A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty! Attribution “Six dice of various colours” used in episode image - by Diacritica CC-BY-SA-3.0 Decipher RPG Mirror illustration commissioned for Decipher Media by Amber Lee Jones Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura: Kickstarter Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein: Decipher SciFi Splatmoji - Quickly look up and input emoji and/or emoticons/kaomoji on your GNU/Linux desktop via pop-up menu.: GitHub.com Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1: Decipher SciFi Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2: Decipher SciFi Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!): Decipher SciFi The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.: Slate Support the show!

Cashing in Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl. Console wars Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily. Sega does what Nintendon’t Sega, an intellectual Sonic Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude over decades and how to undo it all in your first draft of your movie. Don’t forget creepy-ass original movie sonic with his creepy human teeth. VFX responsibilities and character re-renderings. Tiny blue Godzilla. Release the butthole cut! -Christopher Speed Sonic’s smagic speed powers. Comic book power levels where they expand to fit the plot. The speed of sound and relationship with atmospheric density. Creating “frozen time” action scenes. Setting the bar at Quicksilver. Sometimes, you can only care about the science as much as the movie does. Supersonic vs hypersonic vs ultrasonic and the mixing of and Latin. Running loops. Hedgehogs A long-term human domestication collaborator. The lovable version of a porcupine. Spikey defense mechanisms. Covering yourself in other animals’ poop for fun and profit. Allocoprophagy. Sonic the Hedgehog: The Animated Series Theme Song: YouTube Human Loop the Loop with Damien Walters: YouTube Console Wars by Blake J. Harris: AmazoniTunes SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE ™: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: YouTube Support the show!

Tulsa Massacre The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar. Ozymandias Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity. Dr Manhattan Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr Manhattan formula from human to complete lack of concern for humanity. Nostalgia Chemical VR. An alternative route to Alzheimer’s treatment. Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable by kaptainkristian: YouTube Watchmen (2009 Film): iTunesPrime Video Support the show!

Computing Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs. Raspberry Pi4 model B Michael Henzler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0 YouTube Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription. Memeseeks The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.” The original Memeseeks Box logo art Nicholas Lowe, used with permission Robot vacuums Both a cleaning tool and a defense against madness in the presence of eldritch horrors. “Because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.” Using the Roomba as a parenting tool. Deebot Ozmo. Plastic Rain It’s everywhere. Referring to our Wall-E episode with heaping portions of appreciation and concern for plastics. Big tech Withholding the sale of facial recognition tech from police. Bezos the nigh-trillionaire being able to afford his own ISS. Christopher & Colbert Meseeks illustration by Nick Low. Used with permission. “Cartoon Room House” used in episode image background, by mixrobastudio/pixabay/CC-0 Old Glory Robot Insurance by SNL: YouTube Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain: Wired Support the show!

Self-driving cars Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles. Economics Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy. Brain scanning Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural scanning. Do we even have any other options for mapping our brain structure? Brain damage and resuscitation. Digital personhood Creating immortal and infinite digital slaves. Multiple instantiation of persons. Hormonal simulation. Physical, mental, and emotional growth when your life is “virtual.” Living longer and learning not to be the horrible old racist grandpa. Sense of self over time when uploaded. What virtual conditions could be so bad that it’s not worth “living” anymore? Waiting for democratized afforable versions of necessary technologies. “ROM hacking” your reality. VR Sharding (not sharting) your virtual worlds. Manipulating and filtering memories into re-experience. VR suit options: piezoelectric, pneumatic, and TENS. The Teslasuit literally shocked me by CNET: YouTube Support the show!

Fitness Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands. Gaming Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe. John Carmack Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia. Dragon mission Yay! Space! Dramatically lowering the cost of space travel. Fancy new flight suits. Are touch screens a good idea? Space travel automation expectations. Language and POV Enjoying the early fight and chase scenes in Extraction. The use of language and subtitles for storytelling. Video. The Hunt For Red October - Learning to Love the Soviets by Patrick Willems: YouTube Masters of Doom by David Kushner: AmazoniTunes Upload - for the next episode!: Prime Video Weekly Free Games: Epic Games Store Starting Strength by Makr Rippetoe: Amazon Support the show!

Deep water drilling It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench. The ocean: scarier than space Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting spaced out of an airlock. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled was barely deeper than Challenger Deep is under the surface of the ocean. Living deep undersea Nitrogen narcosis: it’s bad for you! Atmospheric mixture issues under pressure. Sealab I, II, and III. Aquanatical research. Sperm whales get the bends. Oh no your suit some kind of exploded. Monsters of the deep. Deep sea gigantism. Construction Engineering against 16,000 psi and freezing temperatures. Concrete strengths and saltwater issues. Misc Exothermic implosions - they’re like explosions, but backwards! Pistol shrimp. Long-range radio communications through water. ELF. Past discussions on the matter. Dumb infrared. Astronaut Scott Carpenter Speaks to President Johnson from a Helium-Atmosphere Decompression Chamber: YouTube Mom's Spaghetti by Eminem: YouTube Underwater Alternate Ending: YouTube Support the show!

Prank’d! Kids and aliens and not understanding how pranks work. Losing your arm to a racoon attack, but then turning into a cyborg so maybe it’s okay. Zombie satellites! Joe shared with us this recent development in zombie satellite communications. The long-term orbital stability og geosynchronous orbit, and ssedpace “ruins” as the longest landing mark of an expired humanity. Joy items Huaraches! Coffe tools and supplies. Colbert’s long lost dinosaur mug. Running Sandals! CC-0 Ancient tattoos Ancient tatoo princess art reconstruction. Mummification and skin art preservation. Long-Lost U.S. Military Satellite Found By Amateur Radio Operator: NPR The Wolrd Above Us - every active satellite orbiting Earth: QZ Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos: The Siberian Times Support the show!

Nostalgia Like all the things with Star Trek in them - feeling nostalgia for good Trek. Prophecy/Not Prophecy Conquering the Three Body Problem and moving on to the… eight body problem? Breaking your brain. Tidal forces and planetary ejection. Game theory: secret society, or open discussion? Great filters The great synthetic filter from beyond space and time. If that’s the words, then that’s the words Christopher Peterson Synthetic life Classifying the artificial intelligence of Trek’s synthetic life. Issues with anthropocentric terminology. Backing up synthetic “minds.” Finding out you’re a robot and also, somehow, simulation hypothesis. Mortality “To die is to be human” and other stupid nonsense. YOLO. “I’m gonna live forever ha-haaa. Wasting deaths in Star Trek. Borg Small-scale good-guy Borg. Dunbar limits and smaller collectives. The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: YouTube Support the show!

Not just bread anymore.. But also mayonnaise! Definitively “The Best Sauce.” Coolio’s Ghettalian Garlic Bread. Japanese mayonnaise appreciation. Miscellany Dune set photos!. Sting’s codpiece. Manly housework. NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6R9NmZO80 Gaming and computing Magic Leap disappointment and waiting for trickle-down from Enterprise. AR vs VR and chaning expectations. Oculus Quest sold-outness. Half-Life Alyx: game changer? Splatmoji. Programming your way into a Bash-hole. Volcanoes Volcanoes! Krakatoa exploded while we were all over here trying to figure out face masks. Remebering our Dracula episode w/ Joe Ruppel where Krakatoa brought on the “year without a summer.” Rom Decomps Super Mario 64 Decompilation. Decades later, the smoke fix. Figuring out why game decompilation is interesting. Appreciating harcore nerds. Splatmoji by Christopher Peterson: GitHub NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: YouTube Avatarify: GitHub Support the show!

Books! A larger time investment, generally… but high idea-load! That one time we did a book in the past. And that next one we’ll probably do in the future. Context Chinese science fiction. This book as the first Asian Hugo Award-winner. The difficulty of translating highly technical, crunchy hard scifi. Translation footnotes or the lack thereof in the audiobook. Prior movie adaptation from the same author on Decipher SciFi: The Wandering Earth. Adaptions, failed or otherwise. Minecraft engine magic. Alien Communications Inverse square law and power and focus difficulties. Reaching out way above our stellar paygrade and reaping the consequences. Scale-accurate “first contact” scenarios. DO NOT REPLY DO NOT REPLY DO NOT REPLY -An alien The Three Body Problem The frustation of having no closed-form solution to your planet’s gravitational situtation. The value of the scientific method. Recognizing that there is always a model. The complexity of a model may not be veyr connected with the complexity of the results it yields. Civilizational advancement Targeting the loci of technological advancement. Figuring out how to prevent that advancement in opposing far-away civilizations. Math! What if math… didn’t work anymore? Adrian’s initial frustration with this book. How totally exciting it is to discover math is broken when you’re not being tortured by aliens. I am the best mathematician that has ever existed. There is no one better. Put my name on a mountain! I did it. Adrian Falcone The Wandering Earth: altered goldilocks zones, Earth's heat budget, and smuggling pickles in your pants: Decipher SciFi Three Body Problem the Minecraft animated series: Season 2 @ YouTubeSeason 3 @ YouTube Division by Zero by Ted Chiang: Fantastic Metropolis Support the show!

What if Memento, but with nanites? Movies post pandemic Everything is either postponed or straight-to-streaming now. What do we expect the film industry to do after this debacle? Comics! The 1990s comics bubble. Chromium gimmick covers (Bloodshot was the first?). Nano! The difference between the magic of “nanotechnology” in 1993 and now. Being spoiled by Hollywood nanotech superpowers. Being impressed by self-mending t-shirts. Brute force superhero combat - no tactics whatsoever! Flour Just a heads-up, flour burns when spear in the air: Exploding Flour @ YouTube. Support the show!

Just a conversation in isolation! Things “Free time” for parents working from home with children. Catching up on movies and video games. Stress. Running marathons with bikes. Remote learning, remote work, and video meetings. Bunnies and allergies in springtime. Skyrim! And immunotherapy and poisons. Bread Making bread while locked down! Peanut butter and jelly (jam!). Sourdough cultures. Making bread from actual ancient Egyptian yeast! Seamus Blackley bakes actual Ancient Egyptian bread: Twitter Support the show!

First contact Aliens. Alien intelligence. Alien vessel shapes and what it says about the show you are about to watch. Moebius ships? CETI Crystalline FTL space antennae. The realities of lightspeed communication and why The SETI Institute doesn’t do “Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.” Unexplained FTL comms. Fumbling about space When your crew is this good, you really should just send a ship without the humans on it instead. MapQuest in spaaaaaace being confounded by gravitational lensing. Dark matter… blocks your view sometimes? Rogue planets and how very very very dark it is in between star systems. Robinson Crusoe oxygen rocks (or crystals). Battlestar Galactica: iTunesAmazon Battlestar Galactica: curse words linguistics, formal code verification, and robo Jesus: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Josh

Current events Our world is on the brink of some possibly extreme unpleasantness. Known unknowns threats to civilization. Humanity is bad at planning for statistically-likely-but-not-definite disaster. Bullshit The anti-scientific garbage that starts to overflow in the face of a public health crisis. Goop. Alex Jones. Snake oil. Homeopathy. Price gouging. Levels of understanding and respect for the severity of the current pandemic across age groups. Epidemiology R0, or basic reproduction number. Vulnerable sub-populations. Prisons. Social distancing. Hoarding toilet paper and… meat? The nipah virus. Human behaviour Social distancing. Hoarding steak and toilet paper. Epidemiology Historical pandemics. Rate of spead and pandemic reach in the premodern and modern worlds. Propaganda and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. Wildlife as natural disease reservoirs. Wildlife farming and infectious disease overflow. Disease-spread mitigation. Getting germs in your holes Wash your hands! Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: JHU.edu Why new diseases keep appearing in China by Vox: YouTube Medlife Crisis: YouTube Planet Money Podcast: NPR.org The Indicator from Planet Money: NPR.org Self-experimentation in medicine: Wikipedia Support the show!

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

A review We don’t normally do this, but… Memory Priming. Retrieval cues. Memory encoding, sotrage, and retrieval. Context-dependent memory. Getting drunk and finding your keys. Digital memory retrieval Facial recognition heuristics. Recognition vs reproduction. Xenoarchaeology Living amongst the runes. More AI! Deciphering alien technology. Altered Carbon: Zoltan Istvan on transplant immortality, identity, and consciousness uploading: Decipher Scifi Support the show!

Asteroids etc Revisiting: asteroids vs meteors vs meteoroids vs meteorites vs who knows. Still confusing! How much space stuff hits Earth? Like, not just dust but things big enough to be impressed by. Who gets claim to Earth-impacting space rocks? Panspermia The idea that life can spread between worlds. Or maybe even stars (maybe not.)? The “soft hypothesis” of panspermia and the utility of primoridla ooze. The possibility of panspermia bringing life to primordial Earth. Cowboy scientists just leaving alien goo everywhere. Periodic table of the elements Chemical relationships via the periodic table. Actually-useful alternative periodic tables. Selenium toxicity, testosterone, and Brazil nuts. Arsenic. Marveling at 19th centtury arsenic popularity. Matcha! It's so tasty.: Wikipedia Support the show!

In which we discuss the first three episodes Picard We missed you Jean-Luc! Picard as the moral center of Star Trek, and the greatest of its captains. Romulan supernova Romulans. How to tell a Vulkan from a Romulan? Exploding stars. Detecting supernovae. The death cycle of a red supergiant. The reliability of physics across timelines/universes. The dangers of cleaving planets. Federation Economics “Post scarcity” with holodecks and replicators, and the realization that there is still a limited resource: energy. Star Trek Kardashev levels. Synthetic life Data. Lore. Data’s “daughter” from that one time on TNG. Bio-synthetic intelligent life. How important is embodiment? Star Trek Beyond: drone swarms, teleporters, and decompression w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi Star Trek First Contact: transhumanism technology and ant behavior w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi Star Trek IV – The Journey Home: whale margarine, transparent aluminum, and time travel: Decipher SciFi Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators: Decipher SciFi Galaxy Quest: the best Star Trek movie: Decipher SciFi Star Trek TNG: Netflix The Picard Song by DarkMateria: YouTube Support the show!

Importance Nostalgia: wow Halo has really been around for a minute. Hundreds of hours of that one level of local multiplayer but never playing the story. Turning an RTS into a TPS and then an FPS and then getting that Microsoft money. Figuring out the importance of Halo CE in the history of gaming. PC gaming master race. Tank-controlled console FPS games. Unseating Goldeneye. Establishing a timeline of FPS quality on consoles and PC. First Contact Humanity honing its warfare skills by just being jerks to other humans. Settling 800+ planets! “Glassing” enemy alien planets. Put a ring on it Ringworlds! But less a ring “world” and more a ring “weapons platofrm that also is fairly liveable.” The Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox through the lens of Halo. Armor Master Chief vs Doom Guy. Measuring Hell energy. Mjolnir armor - a half ton and costs as much as a destroyer to produce. “Smart” and “dumb” AI delineations. Neural exoskeleton integration. PRedictive algorithms. Relating Master Chief to Upgrade. What about just putting an AI and some batteries inside of the Mjolnir armor? Falling from space. Halo Foward Unto Dawn: Amazon Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com Support the show!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles An incredible indie success story. Pizza Pizza popularity in the US post-WWII. Pizza classification arguments. Bread sauce cheese vs bread cheese sauce and the DRASTIC difference between the two. NYC Pizza ftw. Wtf is a turtle Turtles, tortoises, terrapins, and the difficulty with colloquial names. Putting them in the water to see which ones drows. Telescoping vs hinging necks. Toxic ooze Realizing the horrifying reason “toxic sludge” was in all of our childhood media. Joe’s story about that one superfund site that I can’t spell. Creating better ooze monsters. Honey badger? Mantis shrimp? Nuclear waste Short term nuclear waste storage and the problem with active maintenance. Long-term nuclear waste storage and keeping things safe after humanity. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages. The limits of language and pictograms. Designing for “bad vibes.” This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. TMNT decayed costume nightmare fuel: Twitter Why danger symbols can’t last forever by Vox & 99pi: YouTube 10 Thousand Years: 99% Invisible Support the show!

This movie Yo dog, I heard you liked simulations. Server-room LAN rave parties. choosing your simulated period for fun, profit, and lack of complications. Simulation Plato’s shadows on a cave wall. Maybe shadows all the way down, and turtles all the way up! The simulatability of our perceived reality. The argument The simulation argument made distinct from the simulation hypothesis. Considering possible “great filters” that could prevent technological progress reaching the point where a reality simulation is possible. Difficulties The possible impossibility of simulating a whole universe in what may itself be a finite universe. Video game engine-corner cutting analogies for the reality sim. Kardashev scales and simulation ability. Reality But is it “real” and does it even matter? “I think therefore I am.” Mind uploading and downloading and VR “death. Inception: iTunesAmazon The Matrix: iTunesAmazonYouTube The Matrix - green phosphors, neuroplasticity, and rejecting utopia w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi The Truman Show - objects visible from space, dome megastructues, and reality testing: Decipher Scifi Support the show!

Mythology Taking a simple mysterious mythology and explaining it for fun and profit*. Meta The original Highlander’s original, surprising success story. Deciding to make a sequel. Budgets and revenues and how did we get here, really? Versions Aliens vs time travel. The clincher: neither actually makes any more sense than the other. People Not only Connnor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, but ALSO his best friend who totally just died in the last movie. but hey, lol jk it’s a kind of magic. Ol’ Ironsides hamming it up and honestly stealing the show. Recasting Highlander 2 with characters from The Room. The 80s/90s: when bad guys were really bad guys and just didn’t need a reason. The ozone layer The actual environmental problem that the world actually got together amd potentially resolved! Fixing the ozone layer. The “shield” in the film and blocking all of the visible light in addition to the UV. Scenes Some scenes from this film were truly mind-boggling and/or amazing and it’s hard to tell which were which. Ironsides ham. The car scene, OR sacrificing Yoshi to make the jump. Sean Connery being rogueish/trash on a plane. Scottish fan-death. Offscreen sword-switching antics. * not really very much profit tbh Highlander 2 Fairytale Ending: YouTube Highlander 2 BTS Interviews: YouTube Sean Connery The Musical by legolambs: YouTube Support the show!

No spoilers this week! Just looking at all the scientific discoveries of the past decade and how that has or hasn’t played into the scifi we’ve covered. 1. Privacy & Cyberpunk … and the illusion thereof. Snowden and the shattering of the illusion of privacy in the digital age. The world becoming the less awesome-looking irl version of cyberpunk. Workers as a resources. Torture toilets. 2. Machine learning The biggest huge development in the pats decade which underlies every other things. Wowzers. Realizing the importance of the data going in, so you don’t get racist policing or image recognition. The availability of open tools, compute time, and learning resources. 3. Genetic editing CRISPR! What will eventually result from this one? 4. Space Water on Mars! So much more water than we thought. Greater accuracy in portrayals of space settlement. Increasing private industry in space. 5. Physics Hey, an update on Einstein: still correct! Also… Gravity waves! Higgs-Boson! Imaging a black hole. The contributions of computing and storage technologies. 39. Human history Confirmation of Sapiens and Neanderthal interbreeding in remaining modern humans. Discovering more extinct human varieties. 53. Technology What happened to AR glasses!? The state of wearables. Recognizing that there are senses to augment other than our visual system. Support the show!

Whoops, a movie review So the movie didn’t put in any cool science things and the only thing left to do is review it and talk about… feelings? Different viewing experiences between opening night and subsequent viewings. Franchises Fan service. Coherent extended story arcs. Reconsidering the prequel triloges in light of the new one. Indie IP ownership with one person in charge vs Disney. Realizing what a truly satisfying job disney did with Marvel. What made Star Wars different? Oy vey Bending over backwards to justify fantasy events, and how movies can deserve this treatment. Bringing in The Emperor at the end. Bringing back Leia with scraps of cut scenes and lots of over-the-shoulder conversation shots. Exagol How to hide a planet. How to hide a planet engaging in major empire-level engineering and construction projects. Hiding your Sith shipyard. Tech Technological stagnation. Miniaturization. Bad ways to encode spatial information. Knife-based wayfinding. People C3PO software limitations and an argument in favor of Free Software. Probably maybe lobotomizing your long-time companion without deliveration. The sith ecclesiastical cult language. Pointless characters. The writer explains how Rose got mostly cut from the film. The Force Force diads. Beavis and Butthead candy sale force-healing math. Adam Driver doing all the acting. The Saga - Star Wars with Tommy Wiseau - The full story: YouTube Support the show!

In this Christmas story, Christopher gets very ill and then we are forced to push back our new Star Wars episode. Sorry! Happy holidays! Support the show!

Science…?! Some things are more art than science sometimes. Structures anchored to geostationary orbit “Space antennas” but what kind of signal would benefit from this design? X-Rays? Why would this not be better off in orbit? The structure sure looks a lot like a space elevator. Space elevators and geostationary orbital masses. Falling from space It’s hard to steer without sufficient atmospheric density. Felix Baumgartner’s jump “from space.” High energy blasting Antimatter nonsense. Our increasing fragility in the face of an unlucky coronal mass ejection. Protecting infrastructure both inside and increasingly outside our atmosphere. Moon settlement Moon surface settlements vs moon gateways vs embarking to The Moon from low Earth orbit. Awesome moon buggy chases. Pirates! Mars settlement Communicating with and from Mars. Interplanetary distance and comms speed. Building settlements within Martian or Lunar lava tubes. The heliopause Finding the “edge” of our star system. Difference in concentration of high energy particles. SETI Looking for signs of life around other stars. Taking pictures of black holes. Planet-sized telescopes. The absurd distances from Earth to other stars. Vegemite in Australia. Absent of evidence is not evidence of absence. Nuclear spaceships Project Orion. Blowing up your spaceship because it doesn’t have a nuclear bomb-ready push plate. Support the show!

VPNs MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube. Venice How to build a whole city on mud. Transplanting alder forests from on some ground to under some other ground. Hard clay is worse than bedrock. Measuring a sinking city’s rate of subsidence with space-based radar and GPS. Climate change sure isn’t helping any. What value should we place on artifacts of human civilization? Losing UNESCO world heritage sites. The MOSE project. Climate change and rising sea levels. What will the world do? VFX Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes. Smart glasses Inward and outward-facing smart glass technologies. Wearable ubiquity. Evolution of “smart glasses” from Google Glass to Echo Frames. Magic Leap? Bone conduction and having discrete interactions with your personal assistant. This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN by Tom Scott: YouTube Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magnetic monopolies w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

Background Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella. Language Thor knowing All-Tongue, emitting pheromones, and doing the bee dance. The difficutly of universal language or language understanding. Finnishish conlanging. The cultural and linguistic juxtaposition between Scandinavia and Finland. Alignment of worlds Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.” “Magic” Our difficulties with magical realism. Asgardian “Smagic.” Apparent technology levels and technology so advanced it looks like magic. Bringing swords and shields to a lasergun fight. Battle stimulation Dosing for war. Uppers are very popular. The Finnish soldier who was the “first documented case of a soldier over overdosing on methamphetamines during combat.” Black holes etc “Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes. Vikings “Viking burials” but not like you thought. Tumuli/barrows/kurgans. Horned helmets. Guardians of the Galaxy: Decipher SciFi Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Decipher SciFi Avengers Infinity War: Decipher SciFi Black Panther: Decipher SciFi Avengers Endgame: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

Western The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal. “Real filmmaking” Werner Herzog’s surprising(?) praise. “Real filmmaking” in the wake of the prequel trilogies. Wooden green-screen acting vs sweet puppets and actual human beings. Unreal Engine LED walls and volumetric projection and camera tracking. Our new mythology Star Wars as our new shared cultural mythology the world over. Concern about disney’s stewardship and the private ownership of our cultural heritage. Streamboat Willie entering The Commons. Mandalorians Some past famous Mandalorians, this particular Mandalorian, and martial prowess. Mandalorian history and why the Mandalorians are the only ones who figured out how to fight the space wizards for some reason? Poop! Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds. Freezing in carbonite Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze” Robo slavery Taking the most depressing angle on droid consciousness and freedom (or lack thereof). And then to make it worse: DRM! Baby Yoda Extra-long postnatal development. Big brains and incomplete gestation. Cuteness. Animatronics. Hairy rhinos! Elasmotherium. Whooly rhinos. Hiary…. eggs? Historical rhinos. Rhino evolution. Balut. Elasmotherium prehistoric rhino Boris Dimitrov CC-BY-SA-3.0 Rhino sizes evolution chart DagdaMor CC-BY-3.0 The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk: Decipher SciFi Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

Decontamination protocols NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight. Comets Some of the oldest things in our solar system and maybe the oldest things that we can reach. Leftovers from early solar system formation. The possibility of finding the precursors of life. Delineating between comets and asteroids. Fuzzy definitions. “Extinct” comets. Scales & tails. Von Neumann Goo Sending out of infected ice-balls and hoping someone notices. Like a tree! Just send your reproductive material everywhere and who cares who it lands on or gives allergies to. Evil Jeff Bezos Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity. Sound And magnets! The frequencies in which MRI machines are loudest, and the way that doesn’t line up with Venom’s sonic sensitivities. Resonance frequencies and alien “brown notes.” Symbiosis Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions that is symbiosis and its subcategories. parasitism commensalism mutualism (Venom, but perhaps not his compatriots) Bronson: iTunesAmazon Locke: iTunesAmazon Peaky Blinders: iTunesAmazonNetflix Warrior: iTunesAmazon The Dark Knight Rises: iTunesAmazon Support the show!

Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun! 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 Meta Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always. Opener No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines. Human upgrades Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts. Robots taking our jobs Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us. Terminators, revisited New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise. Legion Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms. Humanity Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative. Support the show!

Eiffel LPT: you can get pommes frites in Europe. Could Eiffel have been an agent? The history of the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower’s science history. Cosmic rays. Wireless telepraphy (radio). Outliving its intended lifespan. Aliens Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO. Space tracking Increasing ability to track nearby space objects. Tracking objects in our solar system’s plane. The difficulty of tracking interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.” A Danzig tale justin: dude Danzig lives next door to me in l.a. down the street and he is the worst neighbor ever justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard and the house looks like an evil pixar house so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.” and danzig was pissed so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig and finally one day i see danzig outside in his front yard and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!” Just super loud to no one in particular for two hours it was amazing like, i couldn’t even think about other things because it was so amazing me: oh my god this is amazing justin: dude it blew my mind because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner Space security Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes. Stars! Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales. Memory The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really. Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam Ginty: Decipher SciFi Isaac Arthur: YouTube Support the show!

Setup Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!? Species The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons? Water The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants. Voyager Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover. Replicators and teleporters The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%? Scales Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe. The Orville: iTunesAmazonHulu Support the show!

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring some over-the-top colonial heroism, etc The Patriot: heroism, invisible slavery, and cutting-edge chair technology Support the show!

Titans Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound. Pre-civilization civilizations The Silurian hypothesis thought experiment, especially as part of our Atlantis coverage. The increasing disappearability of the details of civilization as they raise their technological level. Moths Moths: way better than butterflies! Echolocation defense mechanisms. Corresponding bat appreciation in our A Quiet Place episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths. Creature combos Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art. Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

The curse of the Terminator Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies? VFX Twelve months to make a fake Arnold. Time travel Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything. Skynet Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again. Terminators A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was? Kyle Reese Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath. Who wants to go do my mom John Connor Arnold build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various messy strategies for re-encasing your robot arm in flesh. Mortal Kombat 11 Kombat Pack – Official Terminator T-800 Gameplay Trailer: YouTube Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys by Red Letter Media: YouTube Support the show!

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring gangs fights in 19th century New York, etc. On Decipher History: Gangs of New York: history of The Five Points, immigration, and archaic criminal lingo Support the show!

Is this a sequel? A prequel? Our progress in covering the entire Terminator series. The possibility of the future war trilogy, dashed. Body donation Donating your body to science. Body donation vs organ donation. Size and BMI standards. Medical education via cadaver. “Body brokers.” Why do blast testing on bodies? Are we learning to cure “acute dynamitism?” Lethal injection How to make a body unsuitable for whole-body donation. Donating to Terminator-science. Executions as disincentive. The role of the medieval executioner. How the guillotine was an early example of the robots taking our jerbs. Execution showmanship. The Ultimate Warrior was nuts. Time travel The only sorta realistic time travel in the whole Terminator series: pausing your exiistence and turning back on in the future! The nature of self, and the “legal schmegal” defense. Terminators The most human Terminator yet? Robocop vs Wolverine? Head transplant or body transplant? Terminator production volume and just-in-time delivery.  The first T800. A T600 review. Austrian bodybuilders always make good Terminators. Skynet Technological anxieties over time through the Terminator series…. but not really in this one? Or are just jumping straight through to concern with AI takeoff? The Skynet-iest movie in the Terminator series, so far. Personifying Skynet. Explaining the human prisoner project with the design of the T800. Madness Amazing alternate endings that Chris is sad didn’t happen! Skinning John Connor, for fun and profit. Terminator Salvation the Machinima Series: YouTube Support the show!

Species Wow there some really good movies in 1995! Geiger alien designs. Not “Alien,” but “alien.” This time, with nipples. Ptosis Forrest Whitaker. Chris’s history of eyelid laziness variability. Being either a dolphin or a flamingo. Eye farts? The Arecibo Message The limited utility of sending messages to aliens 25,000 light years away. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 toward the M13 globular cluster. A cluster containiner millions of stars. 1679 bits: not a lot of bits! A colorized visualization of the 'Arecibo Message' sent in 1974 Arne Nordmann CC-BY-3.0 Bio-executable Von Neumann machines Von Neumann trolls. Self-assembling bootstrapping biological systems. What if DNA is very common across life in the universe? Containment How to combine biological containment and prisoner containment. Lots of “fire” buttons. Biocontainment protocols. Integrating what we’ve learned from prison-escape movies. Considering the Magneto-vault. Cocoons Vulvic wall-pods. What the hell even is up with cocoons anyway? Cocoons are basically alien material already. The “soup method” of metamorphosis. Fat-bergs Support the show!

Meta James Cameron blank checks and record-breaking budgets and payouts. Arnold Getting re-jacked to your original shape at 56 years old. Screening your movie at Saddam’s palace. Terminators The broadness of the term “nanotechnology.” Upgrading your liquid-metal nanotechss32 robots. Data Collection Placing this movie in the data collection timeline: after the dawn of big data digital government spying, but before smartphones when we willingly began to give up all the data. But there’s a Terminator movie for that too! Hacking cars Direct linkages in car systems. Driving by-wire. Hacking automobile computer systems. Wired hacking and modern wireless car hacks. Technology progression Finally, a Terminator in the age of the ubiquitous cell phone! Still not smartphones yet, but it’s a start! Hydrogen fuel cell failure modes and the danger of tiny hydrogen bombs. MRI dangers. Skynet AI escape scenarios. Supercomputing at “60 teraFLOPS” and wth is a “teraFLOPS” anyway? Computing power  measurement and FLOP precisions. Recognizing the actual utility of supercomputers only becoms apparent with very paralellizable tasks. Decipher History: Decipher Media Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on a Highway by WIRED: YouTube Support the show!