Decipher SciFi

He’s the best!

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

Coffee!

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

Frustration with being made a joke.

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

Alien advocates for the ethical treatment of dumb humanity.

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

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.

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

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

Efficiency in energy conversion in food sources. Disgust reactions in the face of starvation. Feed conversion ratio. Indiginous food sources and feeding a growing human population. Competing with dung beetles. Christopher’s adventures in preparing wax worms. Maggot cheese and knowing your limits.

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.

When was the Bronze age anyway? Pyramid time scales. Familial pyramid-building competitions. The progression from small-scale burial mounds to “great” pyramids. Egypt vs meso-American pyramid research. Seasonal construction recruitment.

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

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

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

Inspiring budding Egyptologists and getting suddenly swole.

Stargate discovery. Deep time and the chances of happening upon ready-made technology after an extinction. Permeable wormhole membranes. Stargates vs black holes. EM transmission and accretion disks. Molecular deconstruction.

Bomb disposal space bot. Colonization.

Stargates and our knowledge at the time.

Green screen etc.

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

Get rich quick slowly schemes.

Cost of moving mass through time. Burying your pilfered gold for pickup vs time traveling it to the present. Inefficient black market time travel business models.

And how you can’t carbon date gold itself.

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

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

Time loops. “The same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time.” The indistinguishability of atoms of the same isotope. Quantum word soup. “Touching” by neutron star. The grandfather paradox where you bang your grandma. Ted Chiang anti-time loop deciphering advice. It’s not gay if you don’t touch and as a bonus you also don’t explode in paradox.

“I’m gonna live forever, hahaaaa”

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.

Localized neural “loops.” Neural load and body mass. Chasing the rabbit. Multiple input control vectors. Meatsack adaptations and proprioception. Human biofeedback and ambulation vs “Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments”

Materials and size scales and the inappropriateness of humanoid design for your giiiiiiiiiiant robots. The square cube law. Don’t forget Godzilla and King Kong!

Neural loads and signal speed. Central pattern generators and “butt brains” and how the dinosaurs didn’t have them. Blue ammonia heavy metal blood. Atmospheric pressures.

Metallic construction. Irrational fear of alloys. Possible material engineering choices. Beryllium is the worst.  Graphene and spraying pencils. Incentive systems for robot design. Square cube again. Density.

The subtlety of nuclear reactors vs nuclear bombs. Orion nuclear blast spacecraft. Carl Sagan. Energy density of fuel sources. Nuclear testing for fun and profit. Playing science fast and loose.

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

Cyberpunk!

When to move the data physically by human. CYA. The impression of security. Offline attacks. quantum supremacy. RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service).

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

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

The cyberpunk Amish. “Pants are technology!” Privacy-focused ludditism. Human brain face-detection. Limpy-Frankenstein to avoid person-tracking. Ice T memes.

Snatch back your brain, zombie. And hold it!

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

Pulling a James Cameron. Sean Connery is down for anything. Weeeeeird stuff. A list of some of our favorite things

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

The benefits and drawbacks. The inuit diet. Surprisingly-high carbohydrate intake when all your meat is raw. Micronutrients via organ meats. Food preservation through controlled rot. Using fats and proteins to energy.

Other varieties of humanity that coexisted with homo sapiens. The study of evolution. Fossil evidence and developments in mitochondrial DNA analysis. The multiregional hypothesis -> the out of Africa hypothesis.

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

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

Awkward science. Would you pass?

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

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

Cloverfield -> 10 Cloverfield Lane -> The Cloverfield Paradox -> Overlord

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

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

Anatoli Burgorski took a proton bream to the back of the face. It went surprisingly well for him! Phineas Gage of the nuclear age. Linear vs circular particle accelerators. The Cloverfield Paradox.

Impressively unimpressive food printing. Printing plastic handguns and metal lower receivers. Maybe don’t use a gun on a space station though that’s pretty dangerous.

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

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

Chris’ varied experiences of this film over time. Color grading and the Black & Chrome edition.

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

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

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

War Boys stealing blood from “healthy” donors. Lack of red blood cell production from blood cancer and the need for transfusion in the late stage. Blood loss limits. Adrenaline transfer.

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

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

Berserker mushroom mode. Signalling. Low framerate editing effects.

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

Guitar dude with his hundred-amp truck. Energy consumption of flameguy vs a literal drummer boy. Mobile FM transmitting stations. A bard that can melt your face.

Unicron and the spark of life between worlds.

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

Legend vs myth vs folk tales. Staff-bearer selection methodology. Humans all look the same to Transformers.

The classic definition of myth, legend, and folktale is William Bascom’s 1965 article “The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Bascom defines folktales as prose narratives told as fiction, myths as prose narratives told as true set in the remote past before human history, and legends as prose narratives told as true set in the time of human history. (Bascom does not take up fables, but they are generally considered a type of folktale with animal characters and an obvious moral lesson.) However, folklorists today tend to focus less on the matter of form and cross-cultural classification—any one of these genres can be conveyed in non-prose, non-narrative media—and more on how people classify, communicate, and contextualize their own folk narratives. A sacred text conceived as the true and literal account of creation to one person may be considered an entertaining but completely fantastical account by another, even if the form remains exactly the same. Bascom’s attention to belief in classifying folk narrative remains an important contribution, and folklorists today consider how tellers and audiences of folk narrative negotiate belief and skepticism in the narrative event, offering proofs that the events happened as described (“I didn’t use to believe in ghosts, but I saw it with my own eyes”) or leaving room for some doubt.

Jolene’s friend Steve Stanzak who is a folklorist from Indiana University…

The number of planets in the solar system and the percentage that are “Earth-like” and might harbor life. Our expanding understanding of the richness of the cosmos.

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

Papryus, paper, and vellum. Goat scrotum!

Subverting the trope of useful scientist.