Decipher SciFi

The Dark Crystal -> Labyrinth -> Mirrormask : a spiritual trilogy. Jim Henson. Beverly Crusher’s choreography.

Our difficulty with fantasy again, and further difficulty specific to dreamland stories. Nothing makes sense, cause and effect cannot be counted on, and essentially nothing is on the line. Yet Labyrinth is still delightful (because nostalgia!).

Identifying with adults now more, since we are adults.

Dreaming. Animal models. Rats and humans and dreaming during non-REM sleep.

Minotaur, reverse-minotaur. Plus, a succinct and accurate retelling of the story.

Humans are okay. Rats are okay. Dogs, not so much. “Ecocentric cognitive mapping.” FMRI and navigation in virtual reality.

Irreparable putrescence. Not something that is on you, but something that infuses your very flesh to continue to be stinky. Or, magic.

Robert E. Howard and pulp fantasy.  His life  and death.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appreciation hour. Training. Work ethic. Hustle. The American dream. Grizzled old beardy Conan the Conqueror. Arnold’s blooper with the wolves:

“Antedeluvian” history. Chroniclers keeping record of the exploits of historical figures. Genghis Khan.

Iron, steel, forge technology. How not to make or use a sword.

Horsemastery. Wind vs slave power. More Genghis Khan.

Cannibal cults. Human cookery.

Steel, flesh, swords made from the blood of one’s enemies. Our Warrior Dash video.

Our different aptitudes for processing fantasy. Fantasy tropes, internal consistency, Patrick Rothfuss.

Telegraphs, internets, owls and agentive magical paper airplanes. Other things too!

“True name” magic in Harry Potter. IRL examples. Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, Jewish mysticism, Aronofsky’s Pi. Rothfuss again.

Wizard Hitler!

Magic bullet machine gun enchanted buckler wizards. Enchanted riot shields with a wand-hole in them. Other innovations.

The fascististic headmistress, Ballatrix, Luna, and other characters we wanted to note.

Issues before, issues during, issues in the final cut. So many issues! How the movie lost much of the depth of the book.

Sciencey veneer over a big pile of fantasy. Maybe steampunk?

Recognizing that dark matter makes no sense as an explanation for dust. Considering the public conception of dark matter way back when the book was written. Discovery and modern evidence. Bullet cluster. Baryonic matter. Dark energy or the cosmological constant.

Familiars and daemons and souls. Dualism. Consciousness uploading. Metaknowledge.

Polar bear evolution. Shrinking habitat. Hollow hairs and skin color and other adaptations. Blubber and keeping cool.

Svalbard! Aurora. The many-worlds interpretation.

Human aliens in Norway c 709 A.D. The “Prometheus Problem.”

Old norse and 12th century Icelandic. The Icelandic sagas.

Brain implants, language learning, and nosebleeds.

Whales are big!

Berserkers and their magic mushrooms. Specific training methodologies between vikings, space marines, and dragon-fighting.

The movie turns into Predator. Elephant-lion-crocodiles. Apex predator population scales.

Frequency of bioluminescence. Adaptation. Wavelengths. Is bioluminescence expensive?

He’s a linguist! And a conlanger, technically.

His website: Nick Farmer Linguist

His Twitter: @nfarmerlinguist

AKA linguistic relativity, and why it is a very very wrong thing. A warm and fuzzy idea that turns out, after facing science, not to reflect reality well. Nick really really wants to set the record straight on this matter.

Considering the possibilities. Different modalities. Language need not be sound-based! ASL. Frequencies of sound.

Heptapod B! Bending over backwards to figure out a way for alien languages to break the linearity of time.

The complexity of deciphering alien writing systems. Extradimensionality. Stephen Wolfram wrote the software to create the logograms. Human language analogies. Mapping ideas and words and concepts is REALLY complicated.

Eliot shares how Kevin Kelly, Stuart Brand, et al advised the filmmakers on how the future ought to look. The movie’s prescience makes a lot more sense now.

Intrusion creep. Giving up your privacy knowingly. Testing users.

Is it a thought crime? Or just determinism?

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Policing, advertising. Oakland and other cities.

The rather rosy picture painted by Minority Report and its realism. How it seems more reasonable now than it may have at the time.

Feedback cycle between our fiction and real life.

Could such a system be dismantled! It’s hard to just part with a murder rate of zero. Eliminating murder vs civil liberties.

Ship materials construction. Anti-gravity technologies. Tesseracts. Shadows looking into other dimensions.

Superdimensionality. Imagining alien understanding of maths and physics. Different perspectives forcing different approaches. The physics of alien arrivals.

The strong version of the  Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not backed by good evidence. Superdimensional alien languages. Gaining new perspective into the reality of the universe.

Military secret-keeping. General Whitaker’s Morpheus operandi: “I cannot tell you what the matrix is. I have to show you.”

Our love for Star Trek and how this does or does not fit.

Drone swarm tactics. Realizing they’re robots.

It is all manners of unpleasant.

Christopher’s revelation. IRL real-time translation software. Skype Translator.

And bad design.

Breaking phsyics. Weaponization.

Definitions. Victorian science and protest movements. John Hunter and the John Byrne Irish Giant. Behaviourist views of animal feelings.

Coming to terms with our place in nature in Wells’ time. Natural selection vs selection by Moreau.

More vivisection. Human body modification and evolution.

The “father” and the “laws.”

Chris plays the amoral scientist monster every time we ask this question.

Moral of the story: Moreau really should have bred a race of herbivores. Would have side-stepped a lot of issues.

Strategies in evolving humanity and combining with our replacement life form.