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PODCAST

Decipher SciFi

Decipher 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.

science film reviews

All Episodes

34:17

Escape From New York: ultralight aircraft, escape...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/06/26

Dystopia New York city post WW3. Crime in the US in the early 80s. Airplane failure recovery The good old days when Presidents could be bald. Plane escape mechanisms. Parachutes vs ejection seats vs ejection pods. Jet injectors Vaccinations by high-pressure jet. Finding out these are real-life. Polio vs Hepatitis. Gliders Large wingspan, light body. The Twin Towers. Clever practical FX for wireframe nighttime navigation display. Comparing budgets with Tron. Fusion Time

en-US

42:50

Universal Soldier: face-kicking cyborg technologies...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/06/19

Cyborgification Remote-controlled cockroaches. Engineering cyborg cats with tape and servos. Search and rescue rats. What counts as a cyborg? Insects with eyebrows. Non-cyborgification Whirring servos and motors. Wearable technology and where to draw the line on cyborgs. The cyborg olympics. Determining the limits of human performance. Thermoregulation Mammalian heat regulation. Humans are the best distance runners AND car-pushers. Pain Pain response and learning. Pain and athletic

en-US

41:06

Enemy Mine : space dogfights, alien wildlifem and...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/06/12

Old-school space dogfighting Stealth and the economics of close-distance space combat. Ship designs for different combat settings. Space vs atmosphere travel. Underwater? Alien planets Hostile, but really lucky to have breathable air and drinkable water. Storms. Periodic heavy meteor showers. Comet tails vs close planetary bodies for meteor shower material. Alien wildlife Space horseshoe crabs. Sarlac antlions. Half-Life 2 interpretations. Antlion larvae. Drac The aliens as portrayed

en-US

44:00

Tron : 70s computing, object digitization, and...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/06/05

Production Early 80s VFX. So much rotoscoping. The dawn of computer generated graphics. Disney and art assets. Computational limitations creating art styles. Late-70s computing Hard drives! Huge ones.Huge mainframes. Pre-internet networks. Anthropomorphised computing Sentient computer antagonists. Legal protections for artificial life. Chess as the soon-to-be-obliterated pinnacle of artificial intelligence. AI Takeovers Master Control program.Skynets. Conflicting interests between man

en-US

57:47

Superman (1978) : Episode 144

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/05/29

Krypton Where did the Superman “S” as family symbol come from? Kryptonian Planetary OSHA. Retroreflective materials. Planet-‘sploding backstories. Shifting orbits. Tidal forces. Planetary superstructures. Space baby Intergalactic space travel. Time dilation. Launching an intergalactic spaceship from your living room.Time dilation and relative experience of time. Hyper-intellectual aliens. Space baby temper tantrums. Space is big, but then the space between the less empty empty spaces are

en-US

44:01

Annihilation : Episode 143

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/05/22

Alex Garland ❤️. Ex Machina. Abominable mutants Shark-gators. Flower-deer. Man-bear-mole-pig. Dr Manhattan-style animal transformations. Big blue tree phalluses. Horizontal gene transfer Micro vs macro. Continuous mutation Plants. The shimmer Exponential understanding. Deciphering the puzzle of Earth life. Clams with human faces. Desctructive/transformative information processing. They’re Made Out of Meat Micro-life in the shimmer Boa constrictors in your gut. Tapeworm run

en-US

46:00

Avengers Infinity War: space mapping, Dyson spheres,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/05/15

Thanos Josh Brolan was so good! And the character itself too! Coin purse chin. The story of how a light flick to the coin purse could have saved the world. Economic modeling Thanos breaks out the Excel spreadsheets. Productively employing the bottom trillionty billion around the galaxy. Ultimate utilitarianism. The upper atmosphere Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia. Space mapping and orienteering Visualizing three-dimensional routes as two-dimensional on Earth-maps. Visualizing

en-US

48:22

Zathura: planetary ring lifecycles, science words,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/05/08

Science words Jumanji in space. Card-by-card science words. Light pollution The night sky “never looked that close before.” The majority of Americans being unfamiliar with a real view of the night sky. Light pollution. Dark sky preserves. The LA blackout and the milky way. Light pollution and the effect on wildlife. And the effects on us. Sky glow. Light pollution! Royal Astronomical Society CC-BY Planetary rings 100% ring rate on gas

en-US

50:10

Lost in Space: supercooling, space imaging, and sexy...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/05/01

Space travel and orienteering Space maps. Star brightnesses and reference points. The ESA Gaia Project. Landing in glaciers. Glacier life cycles. Fjords! Callback to Seveneves. Space imaging Dude, we have video from a comet! How various inputs are composited into attractive imagery. Public data and the opportunities for citizen science and science communication. Spectroscopy and impactor makeup-detection. Detecting invisible glass clouds by how they scatter light. Red shift and blue shift.

en-US

42:21

Westworld: extreme theme parks, first computer virus,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/04/24

Disney Westworld is some Disneyworld-level theme park logistics. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Westworld ticket prices. The Wild West The mythos. Cowboys shootin’ and rootin- tootin’. The time period. The expansion of settlement exceeding governmental reach and the perception of lawlessness. TV vs Movie Deep questions about consciousness and self and where they really really aren’t. AI in the 70s Depictions of artificial general intelligence in the period and how awesome 2001: A Space

en-US

43:16

Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/04/17

Will Smith He’s the best! Alien life And the forms that it takes. Arthropoids. Cephalapoids. The names we give the aliens and the names they give themselves. Aliens and stimulants Coffee! Humanity’s beverage history And in particular how wonderfully wonderful caffeine is. Dwarf Fortress and ale supplies. Depressants vs stimulants and the shape society. The “real” Men in Black Frustration with being made a joke. Human gestation and intelligence Evolution, hip size, and cranial

en-US

42:05

Snowpiercer: entomophagy, what caused the hole in the...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/04/10

Climate control CW7 climate change-fixer compound. “Artificial cooling.” Climate manipulation. The end of the world. “Snowball earth” capped by massive volcanic activity and leading into life explosions. Weather manipulation vs climate manipulation. Radioactive hurricanes and sharks with frickin lasers. Micro-life survival. The ozone layer What is that for. Chlorofleorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion. Cold The frozen arm punishment. Cooling rates and atmospheric density. Christopher’s

en-US

01:00:25

Stargate: pyramid builders, ancient Egyptian...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/04/03

Pre-historic Egypt The notability of the introduction of a massive metal space-portal 10,000 years ago, when Egyptian were still just barely getting down with agriculture. Egypt and the pyramids When was the Bronze age anyway? Pyramid time scales. Familial pyramid-building competitions. The progression from small-scale burial mounds to “great” pyramids. Egypt vs meso-American pyramid research. Seasonal construction recruitment. Stone and copper tooling for stonework Stone tools. Copper

en-US

41:57

Timecop: carbon dating money, confederate gold coins,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/03/27

JCVD Green screen etc. Time machine carrying capacity Red smear memorials. Time travel in tiny, sweaty drug subs. It all comes down to laser machine guns. Confederate gold Get rich quick slowly schemes. Smuggling from the past Cost of moving mass through time. Burying your pilfered gold for pickup vs time traveling it to the present. Inefficient black market time travel business models. Carbon dating And how you can’t carbon date gold itself. Depression Profiting Sicilian

en-US

01:00:35

Pacific Rim: square cube law, giant death robot, and...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/03/20

Brain-controlled machines Brain-machine interfaces. EEG. The advantage of the group over the individual. Humans in tandem with AI and the closing window of human cognitive superiority. Computational offloading. Wetware/hardware integration and explaining the “excessive” neural load of Jaeger drift. Drifting Localized neural “loops.” Neural load and body mass. Chasing the rabbit. Multiple input control vectors. Meatsack adaptations and proprioception. Human biofeedback and ambulation vs

en-US

40:42

Johnny Mnemonic: data couriers, brain storage...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/03/13

William Gibson Cyberpunk! Data couriers When to move the data physically by human. CYA. The impression of security. Offline attacks. quantum supremacy. RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service). Storage doubling And exceeding limits. The lack of connection between physical brain material and storage of particular sorts of memory, especially temporal sequences. Data encryption and uploading

en-US

38:59

Zardoz: eating only meat, awkward sexual experiments,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/03/06

Weeeeeeeeeird stuff Pulling a James Cameron. Sean Connery is down for anything. Weeeeeird stuff. A list of some of our favorite things Zardoz’ mustache Zardoz’s speeches both and and out of stone head Sean Connery’s everything Psychic attacks Bullets in the air One of the worse ways to celebrate. Coins off of a skyscraper. Mass and volume and drag. Bullet lethality reductions with different trajectories. Eating only meat The benefits and drawbacks. The inuit diet

en-US

53:07

The Cloverfield Paradox: NASA bone loss, simulated...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/02/27

The Cloverfield Formula Cloverfield -> 10 Cloverfield Lane -> The Cloverfield Paradox -> Overlord Find a script Add monsters … profit Artifical gravity. With a twist! Like, literally a twist. Balancing huge gyroscopes on a central stem. Spinning buckets. Bucket size Combating bone and muscle atrophy with the ARED. How the ARED works. The danger of jackedstronauts coming back from space to take over the planet. Particle colliders Anatoli Burgorski took a proton

en-US

40:49

Mad Max Fury Road: salt flats, parabiosis, and the...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/02/20

Wow this is pretty good Chris’ varied experiences of this film over time. Color grading and the Black & Chrome edition. Roads! Roads are awesome. The US highway system is awesome. Eisenhower’s road trip. Road trips are awesome, too. Deserts! Lack of roads in the outback. Accidental un-deserting. The Namib desert. The Namib dessert is 55 million years old! The Great Salt The oceans? No way. Red salt planet in The Last Jedi. Evaporating the oceans. Blood bags War Boys stealing

en-US

42:14

Transformers The Last Knight: the size of the cosmos,...

Decipher SciFi ·

2018/02/13

Michael Bay The spark of life Unicron and the spark of life between worlds. War in The Dark Ages Trebuchets. Traction trebuchet vs counterweight trebuchet. Siege weapons vs anti-personnel. Army sizes in the early middle ages. King Arthur Legend vs myth vs folk tales. Staff-bearer selection methodology. Humans all look the same to Transformers. The classic definition of myth, legend, and folktale is William Bascom’s 1965 article “The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Bascom

en-US

269 results

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