decipher SciFi : the show about how and why

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Transcendence What: In the movie Transcendence: Johnny Depp pretty much becomes the lawnmower man. On the show: we run off into the weeds and ramble about the singularity.

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Interstellar (Part 2) What: Interstellar gives us lots to talk about again! Here we discuss the second part of the movie: the part with all of the physics! Directed by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Michael Caine, Casey Afflek, Wes Bentley Recommended and Related Media Carl Sagan and the Fourth Dimension from Cosmos omg Carl was the best The Science of Interstellar w/ Kip Thorne Kip Thorne literally wrote the book on the subject. The book that makes our podcast episode unnecessary. Yay! Show Notes Gravity and Black Holes More Kip Thorne. Wormholes. Detecting gravitational anomalies. Time Dilation Einstein. Train rides. Relativity. Frames of reference. Frame dragging. Time as an expendable resource. Crazy Planetary Adventures Water planet is the stuff of Christopher’s nightmares.  Frozen clouds! So Many Dimensions Abstraction of extra dimensions into fewer. Tesseracts. Carl Sagan’s genius powers of explanation. Time Travel Paradoxes Predestination paradox? Self-consistent single timelines. Love Multidimensional beings and the power of love. Social utility and bonding, etc. Space Settlement O’Niell cylinders. Another call-in from Liam Ginty of Voices From L5. Goodbyes See you on the other side, Coop. See you there, slick. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Interstellar (Part 1) What: Interstellar has lots to talk about! In this episode we cover the stuff that is mostly not physics. In the movie: the world is ending and we have to mobilize! Directed by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Michael Caine, Casey Afflek, Wes Bentley Show Notes Memories of Carl Sagan’s Contact Kip Thorne does movie science again. Carl Sagan’s Contact. Mathew McConaughey plays two opposing roles. Corn, Corn, and Corn Monocultures. Blight. We talk about anthropogenic climate change even though it isn’t mentioned in the film. Reduced population. Governments. Explorers and Pioneers Scientific mindset. Humanity’s will to expand. Good science parenting. Robots TARS. 2001. Humor settings and the best robot locomotion. Goodbyes Don’t let me leave, Murph. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Surrogates What: Old Bruce Willis wears a young Bruce Willis suit; has to save the day. Directed by: Jonathan Mostow Starring: Bruce Willis, Rosamund Pike, James Cromwell, Ving Rhames, Jack Noseworthy, Radha Mitchell Recommended and Related Media DEKA “Luke” Arm Really interesting things happening in prosthetics these days Game Over from A Life Well Wasted/99% Invisible This part of an episode of A Life Well Wasted is an interesting look at the emotional connections that can come from virtual communities. Listen to the 99% Invisible episode Show Notes Areas of progress Areas needing a lot of progress to lead to the world of Surrogates: robotics, materials science, network bandwidth and latency, human-machine neural interfaces, legality and ethics. Effects Violent crime nearly nonexistent, productivity, pseudonymity, anonymity, merito cracy. Level playing field for people with disabilties. Soldiering by proxy. Human connection The loss of it. The resistance.  Surprisingly bad solutions. Goodbyes Look at yourselves. Unplug from your chairs, get up and look in the mirror. What you see is how God made you. We’re not meant to experience the world through a machine. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Forbidden Planet What: Leslie Nielsen and crew stop on an alien planet to investigate a previous mission and find only two survivors. With secrets. Directed by: Fred M. Wilcox Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis Featuring guest co-host Chris Noessel, User Interface Expert from Sci-Fi Interfaces Recommended and Related Media Chris Noessel Our guest co-host does a bunch of really interesting work! His wonderful website Sci-Fi Interfaces And his book “Make it So” iTunes | Amazon The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman The best possible intro to the general principles of design. I know we’ve talked it up before, but it’s just so good. Get the thing iTunes | Amazon Show Notes Robbie the Robot Prop design. AI language understanding. Super strength and a matter replicator. Bad reactions to conflicting orders. Like a mechanical calculator dividing by zero! Morbius He’s totally Zod! Philology. Engineering. Dangerous tech designs. Gender Stuff Cutting edge sexiness in the 50s. Innocent virgins. Blaming the victim. To the captain go the spoils. The deleted scenes that explain the animal behaviour: Decoding the Krell Best attempts at judging Krell biology from their technology and architecture. Their “plastic educator.” Deciphering their language. Using alien Wikipedia on microfilm. Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The alien arithmetic problem. Self Destruct A comparison of scuttling procedures in Alien and Forbidden Planet. Speculation about Krell hearing and sight frequencies. Goodbyes Farman: I wouldn’t mind being Robby in certain ways. Uh, that’s only in *certain* ways, of course. Altaira: I can see that was probably very clever, but I don’t seem to understand it. Farman: There’s no rush. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon The Dark Knight What: Christopher Nolan’s grittydark Batman faces anarchy in gotham created by the joker. Directed by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Michael Jai White Recommended and Related Media Pete Holme’s Batman Sketches They’re all fabulous. This one is a good intro. Watch them all in a playlist Youtube Batman: The Animated Series The excellent Batman series of our youth. Here are some of the feels from the Mr. Freeze episode, “Heart of Ice” Stream it iTunes | Amazon Show Notes Is Batman science fiction? Short answer: yeah, sure. Featuring a voice clip from Liam Ginty, space nerd. Batman’s detective work CSI bullet reconstructions. The trappings of science. Batman’s Bondian Gadgetry All kinds. The skyhook. Sonar Phones Prerequisite technologies. Zero day vulnerabilities and phone hacking. Distributed computing to combine the massive data. Google’s Project Tango. Law, Fairness, and Chaos Batman and his enemies in the film. Goodbyes He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon The Fifth Element What: Bruce Willis helps Leeloo Dallas Multipass save the world. Directed by: Luc Besson Starring: Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker, Ian Holm Recommended and Related Media The Divine Language A site documenting the pretty neat project that is the “divine language” spoken by Leeloo in the film. The story behind it, lots of materials from Luc Besson, and dictionaries in either direction. Check it out DivineLanguage.com Affordances and Constraints in the Fifth Element by Chris Noessel Chris Noessel, upcoming guest co-host and interface design expert, made a cool video a while ago on the user interfaces in the film. Really worth a watch for a hint of the sort of thing we’ll talk about when he’s on.

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Man of Steel What: Superman comes to terms with who he is, defends earth from a genocidal maniac. Directed by: Zack Snyder Starring: Henry Cavill, Michael Shannon, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Christopher Meloni Recommended and Related Media Christopher Reeve Superman The classics. Reeve was so charming. Superman (1978) iTunes | Amazon The Fleisher 1940s Superman Cartoons These fixtures from my youth had really great style. They may look familiar, because their animation inspired the truly wondeful Batman: The Animated Series. This one was my favorite as a kid Watch them all on Youtube All Star Superman This short series/graphic novel is a modern adaptation of the golden age Superman. Recommended by our co-host from episode 28, comic creator Miles Greb as a really good way to get into Superman. Get the thing iTunes | Amazon Show Notes Krypton is Imploding No refuge! Except for all the different refuge options. Harvesting the planet’s core something something oh no it’s collapsing! Zod is the Good Guy On Krypton at least. Sure, he sounded a little bit like Hitler, but look what happened when they didn’t listen to him – no more Krypton! And then Kryptonian Prison Rehab They seem to put some serious resources into their criminal rehab system that barely gets used. Mundane black hole tech. Dildo butt plug space ships. The Codex and the Genesis Chamber Kal first natural birth in centuries. Clearly Kryptonians were multistellar once upon a time. Wonder what happened. Super Awakening Lessons in how not to handle a kid having a panic attack. Humans actually do pretty well adapting to new sensory input. Clark’s compensation and self control. Yellow Sun Superpowers Disagreement over the exact function of Kryptonian power armor and the nature of the yellow sun/superpower relationship. Simulated Consciousness Russel Crowe hologram simulation. So the Kryptonians reached the singularity basically, but don’t seem to be impressed enough. Defeating Zod Super strength, super neck bones, super despondent military leaders with nothing to protect. Goodbyes A good death is its own reward He acquitted himself well Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Signs What: Mel Gibson has a crisis of faith and then ALIENS attack. Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan Starring: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin Recommended and Related Media The Signs Demon Theory Post by redditor ZorroMeansFox This is the first time I ever saw it, at least. Read the post on Reddit Joaquin Phoenix’s Forehead Face I can’t ever not laugh at this. You are Not So Smart A great podcast about with great books all about our cognitive biases. Get the thing Podcast | Books Show Notes Shyamalan Christopher loved his direction in this movie. “Twists.”  Appears in all his own films. Crop Circles Crop circle hoaxes. Not a great method of communication. Two Groups of People People who think there is meaning, and people think the universe is deterministic and unconcerned with us as individuals. Benjamin Franklin’s pragmatism re religion. Our own perspective. The Aliens A list of unreasonable presumptions from the movie about alien life. Recon forces. Encryption. Goodbyes Swing away. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the Blu-ray: Amazon War of the Worlds What: Tom Cruise and his kids try to survive a somewhat badly-planned alien attack. Directed by: Steven Spielberg Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins Featuring guest co-host Joe Ruppel, history nerd Recommended and Related Media War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells The original book! So old that it’s freely available online! Read it for free with your eyes Project Gutenberg Read it for free with your ears LibriVox War of the Worlds (1953 film) The first movie based on the book. Stream it iTunes | Amazon Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast Radiolab Podcast – Could it happen again? And again? The wonderful Radiolab podcast tells the story of the time someone tried to pull off the War of the Worlds radio hoax again – and succeeded. Get the thing Radiolab Show Notes War of the Worlds – the book, the movie Original book. Orson Welled radio broadcast hysteria not as reported. Radiolab report on repeated adaptations. The new developments at the time of writing that informed the book. Alien Attack Methods, research, planning. Trying to explain the buried  death-bots. But Why Are we food? Do they want our resources? Making the most sense of the options. Are liquified people good for fertilizer? Germ Attack They might have done a little more research. Goodbyes SAL: Tadesko can’t move 40 containers in an hour. I need somebody who can do double picks. RAY: I wish I could help you Sal. God damn union regulations. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the DVD: Amazon Bicentennial Man What: Robin Williams-bot makes the journey from man to machine. Directed by: Chris Columbus Starring: Robin Williams, Sam Neill, Oliver Platt Recommended and Related Media Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov The novelette Bicentennial Man was developed into this book, which was eventually adapted for the movie around which this episode is based. Get the thing Amazon Humans A TV show that, despite only having one season so far, was good enough to be included in our Top 5 Science Fiction TV Shows episode. Get the thing iTunes | Amazon Robin Williams – In Motion from Every Frame a Painting The whole Every Frame a Painting channel is just delightful. Do yourself a favor and watch all of the videos. Uncertainty Principle – a podcast by Daniel James Barker Love it! Daniel is our newest Patron and he has a really great show. Science! Show Notes Asimov’s Three Laws Enumerated in spectacular fashion in the film in order to get it out of the way and never speak of it again. Natural Language Processing It’s really hard! Errors in humor and social expectations. Infinite conversational loops. Robot Personification A nurturing environment maybe contributed to Robo Williams’ sentience. Art as awakening. Acting human. Emergence. Robot Slave Class Why don’t we see them? Uncanney Valley Turing tests. Robots, androids, biorobots. Robo Williams’ synthetic organs. What is Life? Actually kind of hard to define. Immortality “Death is an engineering problem.” Goodbyes Sir: Goodnight Andrew: Goodnight Sir: Goodnight Andrew: Goodnight and his Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the DVD: Amazon Frankenstein What: The original 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Directed by: James Whale Starring: Boris Karloff Featuring guest co-host Joe Ruppel, history nerd Recommended and Related Media Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein The book that spawned a thousand adaptations. Featuring a bunch of crazy stuff that didn’t make it into the film. Like a visit to the north pole! Read it with your eyes for free Project Gutenberg Read it with your ears for free Project Gutenberg Young Frankenstein Possibly the best Mel Brooks movie. Probably our favorite Frankenstein adaptation. Brooks and Gene Wilder are just magical together. Get the thing Amazon The Slip n Slide Scene from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the Blu-ray: Amazon Get the DVD: Amazon Dune What: David Lynch made a really odd and sort of incomprehensible Dune movie from the Frank Herbert classic. Directed by: David Lynch Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Patrick Stewart Featuring guest co-host Miles Greb, creator of the comic After the Gold Rush Recommended and Related Media Dune + Jodorowsky’s Dune on Double Feature Podcast This great film podcast, an inspiration for our own, did a really interesting comparison between the Dune movie that was and the Dune movie that could have been. Really cool stuff. Get the episode on their site After the Gold Rush by Miles Greb Our guest co-host this week makes comics! Cool ones, featuring science and rationality front-and-center. The first issue is out now! Get the comic Dune by Frank Herbert The book on which the movie is based. In fact, Miles thinks the whole series is pretty great. A classic of sci-fi. Read it with your eyes iTunes | Amazon Read it with your ears iTunes | Amazon Show Notes This movie is weird David Lynch. Return of the Jedi. Different editions of the film. Alan Smithee. Internal monologues. Dune politics Before Game of Thrones, this was a new level of deep. Game theory and politics. Anti-digitalism Mentats. Eyebrows. Spice Like oil? Drugs? Treatment of Homosexuality Was Frank Herbert homophobic? Considering the man and the time in which it was written. Gods and Cults How the movie and the book had opposite lessons. Making it rain. Goodbyes Paul: Stilgar, do we have wormsign? Stilgar: Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.com Amazon and iTunes links include our affiliate codes. If you wouldn’t mind helping us out a tiny bit, go ahead and use them to buy/stream something. Thanks!

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the Blu-ray: Amazon Get the DVD: Amazon Wing Commander What: 90s heartthrobs dogfight murderous space cats. Something something fabric of spacetime. Directed by: Chris Roberts Starring: Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, Saffron Burrows Featuring guest co-host Dean Martin, podcaster (LSG Media) Recommended and Related Media LSG Media Podcasts You might know our guest co-host from Science Fiction Film Podcast, but he actually hosts a number of shows all under the banner of LSG Media. So check them out! Get the thing LSG Media The Wing Commander Video Game Series Pretty groundbreaking space-flight sim series, best known now for its FMV cutscenes starring Mark Hamill. Get them on Good Old Games The Lost Fleet A favorite book series of Christopher’s, featuring realistic and engaging space battles between large and varied fleets of ships. Just great. Read it with your eyes iTunes | Amazon Read it with your ears iTunes | Amazon Battlestar Galactica (RMG) This was a really engaging show with humanity in a desperate spot, fighting for survival in space. Features lots of really neat space battles! Stream it on iTunes | Amazon Show Notes Video Games As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time. Ground-breaking, even. PC games pre-windows. FMV. * 1990 Wing Commander * 1991 Wing Commander 2 * 1994 Wing Commander 3 * 5 million bux * 1996/7 Wing Commander 4 * 10 million bux * 1999 Wing Commander Movie * 30 million bux Chris Roberts Director of the games was also director of the film! We hypothesize based on zero knowledge of anything how it may have been dif...

Stream the movie: iTunes | Amazon Get the DVD: Amazon Idiocracy What: Luke Wilson finds himself in the future, where humanity has grown lazy and stupid. Then, satire happens. Or so I’m told. Directed by: Mike Judge Starring: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews Featuring guest co-host Adrian Falcone (@AdrianBFalcone), internet nerd Recommended and Related Media The Genius of Idiocracy by David Fear Well, here is the argument for the prescience of the film. Read it on Rolling Stone Idiocracy Is a Cruel Movie and You Should Be Ashamed for Liking It by Matt Novak This takes to extremes a number of things about the movie that Christopher didn’t appreciate. Maybe a bit over the top, but representing the other side. Read it on Paleofuture The Design of Everyday things We all really really like this book. One or two of us might call it life changing. It provides the language and ideas to explain a lot of the human-created environment. Read it with your eyes iTunes | Amazon Read it with your ears iTunes Show Notes Movie Production Issues Lack of studio support. Poor audience test results. VERY small number of screens. Somehow, a cult hit after release. Why Do People Love This Movie? Has internet cult hit status. Why? Appealing to elitism and cynicism? Fart jokes? Love it or hate it. Christopher Has a Problem With This Movie It feels mean, basically. Also the extrapolations it makes are unreasonable as far as I’m concerned. Dumbing Down Society Network covered similar ground in the 1970s. Whose Fault is this Situation? The yuppies for not reproducing more? The “dumb” people? The system? Corporatism, selfishness, etc? Human Evolution Defining terms because people use them in the wrong way too often. How humanity actually evolves. Dysgenics. Why the movie is wrong. Bad Things “Crab mentality.” Self absorption. Laziness. Selfishness. Willful ignorance. Materialism. Design for Idiots Actually there are some interesting examples here. Simplification of UI. “Idiot-proofing.” Automation. How Do We Avoid This Future? Each host gives their plan to save the world. Governor Adrian implements the mushroom marshmallow test. You’ll have to listen to find out! Goodbyes Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Feedback? Please Contact Us contact@decipherscifi.