Decipher SciFi
432 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 34 ratingsDecipher SciFi explores the how and why in science fiction with conversations about technology, humanity, and the future. This is not a review show, nor will you see much criticism or snark. It is a rationally optimistic look, through film, at where society and technology are and where they are headed. Also, butts.
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Episodes
Stank waffles, VR development, and Venusian cloud datacenters
September 22, 2020 06:43 - 38 minutes - 30.9 MBClouds 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 ...
Raised by Wolves: exoplanets, eating rats, and fake-karate floaty physics
September 15, 2020 06:22 - 47 minutes - 37.7 MBHappy 5-year anniversary whoooooo 🥳🎉 Subluminal interstellar travel Accelerating for half of the ride, and braking for the other half. The advantage of avoiding squishy human cargo for high acceleration. The difference between the Alucard and the Alcubierre drive technologies (hint: a miserable pile of secrets). Special floaty physics, magnets on your feet, and fake karate. Exoplanets Exploring the growing options for Earth-like life in the solar-system. Kepler 22b. Where did the m...
Isolated BS: nuclear bananas, unreal simulations, and buttplug archaeology w/ Josh
September 08, 2020 06:23 - 50 minutes - 40.8 MB“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. Th...
On Decipher History - Titanic! rich people, bad luck, and ever-increasing hugeness w/ Joe
September 01, 2020 06:20 - 1 hour - 80.2 MBProduction 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, especi...
Proactive prostheses, facial recognition, and correlating diarrhea
August 18, 2020 06:05 - 24 minutes - 19.7 MBFawkes mask in post image Multipainkiller Studio CC-BY Prosthetics Proactive prostheses in our future? Recognizing that we routinely do this with major joints, and with for a full cyberpunk limb-improvement future. Big brother etc Machine learning facial recognition. Fawkes machine learning facial image “cloaking.” The possible value of poisoned data sets. Placing individual bricks in the wall that is our ability be private and protect our data. Google correlating diarrhea. Emulati...
X-Men First Class: nuclear panic, destructive resonance, and woolly mammoth piñatas
August 11, 2020 06:56 - 39 minutes - 32.1 MBFear 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 time...
Isolated BS: 3D tracking, Doom on EVERYTHING, and game juice
August 04, 2020 06:52 - 54 minutes - 43.7 MB3D 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 learn...
X-Men: superhero evolution, wolverines, and what lightning does to everything else
July 28, 2020 06:17 - 40 minutes - 32.5 MBComic 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,...
Isolated BS: social engineering, spotted dick, and proper beaver representation
July 21, 2020 06:03 - 52 minutes - 42 MBHacking 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 an...
Sonic: the console wars, allocoprophagy, and tiny blue Godzilla
July 07, 2020 06:23 - 47 minutes - 27.6 MBCashing 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. Consistenc...
Isolated BS: art restoration, ahistorical viking grooming, and preposterone
June 30, 2020 07:50 - 47 minutes - 38.5 MBMillhouse isolation Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery. Masks Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥). Viking grooming That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical...
Watchmen - Tulsa, nostalgia, and victorian spacesuits
June 23, 2020 06:45 - 35 minutes - 28.3 MBTulsa 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 ...
Isolated BS: tasty Pi, robot vacuums, and our saddest failure
June 16, 2020 06:22 - 37 minutes - 30.3 MBComputing 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 ...
Upload: living forever, digital personhood, and hacking your own reality
June 09, 2020 06:45 - 45 minutes - 36.7 MBSelf-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 neur...
Isolated BS: hip thrusts, Dragons, and linguistic POV
June 04, 2020 00:23 - 41 minutes - 32.9 MBFitness 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 m...
Underwater: deep drilling, nitrogen narcosis, and astronaut helium voice
May 26, 2020 04:28 - 41 minutes - 33.2 MBDeep 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 gett...
Isolated BS part 3: ancient tattoos, zombie satellites, and running sandals
May 19, 2020 04:02 - 31 minutes - 24.9 MBPrank’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! ...
Picard Season 1: mortality, great filters, and synthetic life w/ Jolene Creighton
May 12, 2020 04:44 - 46 minutes - 37.3 MBNostalgia 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...
Isolated BS part two, the mayonnaisening – volcano edition
May 05, 2020 05:50 - 44 minutes - 35.9 MBNot 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: […] The post Isolated BS par...
Isolated BS part two, the mayonnaisening - volcano edition
May 05, 2020 05:05 - 44 minutes - 35.9 MBNot 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? Splat...
The Three Body Problem: mathy math math and first contact game theory w/ Adrian
April 21, 2020 06:45 - 59 minutes - 47.7 MBBooks! 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...
Bloodshot: overdoing nanotech, comics bubbles, and flour bombs
April 14, 2020 06:45 - 30 minutes - 24.1 MBWhat 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!...
Isolated BS: coping with copious amounts of bread
April 07, 2020 06:50 - 34 minutes - 27.6 MBJust 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 Egypt...
Another Life: visible rogue planets, visible dark matter, and other smart stuff
March 31, 2020 06:46 - 30 minutes - 24.3 MBFirst 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 b...
On Decipher History: 1917 w/ Josh!
March 24, 2020 08:45 - 53 seconds - 806 KBThe taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Josh 💪😉 1917: trenches, trench rats, and modern war w/ Josh Support the show!
Contagion: epidemiology, snake oil, and curve-flattening
March 17, 2020 06:42 - 1 hour - 50.2 MBCurrent 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 reprod...
On Decipher History: Alexander!
March 10, 2020 07:28 - 32 seconds - 433 KBThe taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Ryan Stitt of the History of Ancient Greece Podcast! Alexander: succession, “The Great,” and sooo many Alexandrias w/ Ryan Stitt The post On Decipher History: Alexander! appeared first on Decipher SciFi.
On Decipher History: Alexander
March 10, 2020 06:45 - 31 seconds - 433 KBThe taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Ryan Stitt of the History of Ancient Greece Podcast 🔱 Alexander: succession, “The Great,” and sooo many Alexandrias w/ Ryan Stitt Support the show!
Altered Carbon Season 2: memory, facial recognition, and xenoarchaeology
February 25, 2020 07:45 - 30 minutes - 24.2 MBA 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!
Evolution: panspermia space rocks, periodic tables, and sooo much poison
February 18, 2020 04:02 - 30 minutes - 24.7 MBAsteroids 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 scienti...
Picard: the moral center of Trek, supernovae, and Romulan stormtroopers
February 11, 2020 07:45 - 44 minutes - 35.3 MBIn 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 s...
Halo: first contact, power armor, and how does master chief poop? w/ Daniel Barker
February 04, 2020 07:45 - 47 minutes - 38.3 MBImportance 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...
The Secret of the Ooze: turtles, pizza, and irl toxic sludge
January 28, 2020 07:45 - 58 minutes - 46.8 MBTeenage 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 ...
The Thirteenth Floor: Yo dawg I heard you liked the simulation hypothesis
January 21, 2020 07:45 - 45 minutes - 36.5 MBThis 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 wh...
Highlander 2: time travel, aliens, and complete and utter nonsense w/ Joe Ruppel
January 14, 2020 07:45 - 1 hour - 48.5 MBMythology 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 o...
Decade in Review: privacy, computing everything, and torture toilets
January 07, 2020 07:45 - 43 minutes - 35 MBNo 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 thi...
The Rise of Skywalker: the force, fan service, and blade-based wayfinding
December 31, 2019 06:00 - 45 minutes - 36.4 MBWhoops, 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 ve...
No episode this week – happy holidays!
December 24, 2019 02:35 - 22 seconds - 383 KBIn this Christmas story, Christopher gets very ill and then we are forced to push back our new Star Wars episode. Sorry! Happy holidays! The post No episode this week – happy holidays! appeared first on Decipher SciFi.
No episode this week - happy holidays!
December 24, 2019 02:35 - 21 seconds - 383 KBIn 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!
Ad Astra: nuclear spaceships, the edge of the solar system, and space monkeys
December 17, 2019 07:45 - 49 minutes - 39.5 MBScience…?! 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 no...
Spider-Man Far From Home: Venice, burying forests, and microphone proliferation
December 10, 2019 07:45 - 38 minutes - 30.6 MBVPNs 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 worl...
Thor Dark World: Finnish-ish, amphetamines, and weaponized gravity
December 03, 2019 07:45 - 30 minutes - 24.2 MBBackground 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 bo...
The Mandalorian: modern mythology, space toilets, and hairy rhinos
November 26, 2019 07:45 - 43 minutes - 35.1 MBWestern 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 ownersh...
Venom: comets, Von Neumann goo, and the alien brown note
November 19, 2019 07:45 - 35 minutes - 28.2 MBDecontamination 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 ...
Terminator Dark Fate: surprises, developing humanity, and CORAL puns w/ Joe Ruppel
November 12, 2019 07:45 - 1 hour - 52.1 MBHey 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 Geni...
Men in Black International: Eiffel, backfilling memory, space hacking
November 05, 2019 07:45 - 38 minutes - 31.2 MBEiffel 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 ...
Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators
October 29, 2019 07:45 - 25 minutes - 20.4 MBSetup 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. Tel...
On Decipher History: The Patriot
October 22, 2019 04:36 - 1 minute - 1.38 MBThe 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!
Godzilla King of the Monsters: acoustic wildlife tracking and moth superiority
October 15, 2019 07:45 - 28 minutes - 23.3 MBTitans 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 […] The post Godzilla King of the Monsters: acousti...
Godzilla King of the Monsters: acoustic wildlife-tracking and moth superiority
October 15, 2019 07:45 - 28 minutes - 23.3 MBTitans 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 epis...