Decipher Scifi : The Show About How And Why

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

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

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 Ho

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 tr

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 Up

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 impor

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, neuroplastic

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

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 ho

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 limitati

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!