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Terminator Dark Fate: surprises, developing humanity, and CORAL puns w/ Joe Ruppel

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Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun!

Meta

Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always.

Opener

No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines.

Human upgrades

Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts.

Robots taking our jobs

Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us.

Terminators, revisited

New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise.

Legion

Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms.

Humanity

Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative.

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Men in Black International: Eiffel, backfilling memory, space hacking

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Eiffel

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 interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.”

justin: dude
Danzig lives next door to me in l.a.
down the street
and he is the worst neighbor ever

justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard
and the house looks like an evil pixar house
so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.”
and danzig was pissed
so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig
and finally one day
i see danzig outside
in his front yard
and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!”
Just super loud
to no one in particular
for two hours
it was amazing
like, i couldn’t even think about other things
because it was so amazing

me: oh my god
this is amazing

justin: dude
it blew my mind
because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner

Space security

Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes.

Stars!

Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales.

Memory

The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really.

Links

Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam ginty: Decipher SciFi
Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators

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Setup

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. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%?

Scales

Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe.

Links

The Orville: iTunes | Amazon | Hulu

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Godzilla King of the Monsters: acoustic wildlife tracking and moth superiority

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Titans

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 episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths.

Creature combos

Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art.

Links

Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org
Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb: Decipher SciFi

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Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel

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The curse of the Terminator

Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies?

VFX

Twelve months to make a fake Arnold.

Time travel

Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything.

Skynet

Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “”Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again.

Terminators

A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was?

Kyle Reese

Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath.

Who wants to go do my mom

– John Connor

Arnold

build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various messy strategies for re-encasing your robot arm in flesh.

Mortal Kombat 11 Kombat Pack – Official Terminator T-800 Gameplay Trailer: YouTube
Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys by Red Letter Media: Youtube

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Terminator Salvation: body donation, realistic time travel, and the legal shmegal defense w/ Joe Ruppel

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Is this a sequel? A prequel? Our progress in covering the entire Terminator series. The possibility of the future war trilogy, dashed.

Body donation

Donating your body to science. Body donation vs organ donation. Size and BMI standards. Medical education via cadaver. “Body brokers.” Why do blast testing on bodies? Are we learning to cure “acute dynamitism?”

Lethal injection

How to make a body unsuitable for whole-body donation. Donating to Terminator-science. Executions as disincentive. The role of the medieval executioner. How the guillotine was an early example of the robots taking our jerbs. Execution showmanship. The Ultimate Warrior was nuts.

Time travel

The only sorta realistic time travel in the whole Terminator series: pausing your exiistence and turning back on in the future! The nature of self, and the “legal schmegal” defense.

Terminators

The most human Terminator yet? Robocop vs Wolverine? Head transplant or body transplant? Terminator production volume and just-in-time delivery.  The first T800. A T600 review. Austrian bodybuilders always make good Terminators.

Skynet

Technological anxieties over time through the Terminator series…. but not really in this one? Or are just jumping straight through to concern with AI takeoff? The Skynet-iest movie in the Terminator series, so far. Personifying Skynet. Explaining the human prisoner project with the design of the T800.

Madness

Amazing alternate endings that Chris is sad didn’t happen! Skinning John Connor, for fun and profit.

Links

Terminator Salvation: iTunes | Amazon
Terminator Salvation the Machinima Series: YouTube
Decipher Media’s re-jiggered Pateon: Patreon

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Species: alien bio-containment, the Arecibo message, and Von Neumann trolls

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Species

Wow there some really good movies in 1995! Geiger alien designs. Not “Alien,” but “alien.” This time, with nipples.

Ptosis

Forrest Whitaker. Chris’s history of eyelid laziness variability. Being either a dolphin or a flamingo. Eye farts?

The Arecibo Message

The limited utility of sending messages to aliens 25,000 light years away. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 toward the M13 globular cluster. A cluster containiner millions of stars. 1679 bits: not a lot of bits!

Bio-executable Von Neumann machines

Von Neumann trolls. Self-assembling bootstrapping biological systems. What if DNA is very common across life in the universe?

Containment

How to combine biological containment and prisoner containment. Lots of “fire” buttons. Biocontainment protocols. Integrating what we’ve learned from prison-escape movies. Considering the Magneto-vault.

Cocoons

Vulvic wall-pods. What the hell even is up with cocoons anyway? Cocoons are basically alien material already. The “soup method” of metamorphosis.

Fat-bergs

Links

We redid our Patreon tiers! Check it out!: Patreon

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Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines: hacking cars and supercomputing Skynet FLOPS w/ Joe Ruppel

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Meta

James Cameron blank checks and record-breaking budgets and payouts.

Arnold

Getting re-jacked to your original shape at 56 years old. Screening your movie at Saddam’s palace.

Terminators

The broadness of the term “nanotechnology.” Upgrading your liquid-metal nanotechss32 robots.

Data Collection

Placing this movie in the data collection timeline: after the dawn of big data digital government spying, but before smartphones when we willingly began to give up all the data. But there’s a Terminator movie for that too!

Hacking cars

Direct linkages in car systems. Driving by-wire. Hacking automobile computer systems. Wired hacking and modern wireless car hacks.

Technology progression

Finally, a Terminator in the age of the ubiquitous cell phone! Still not smartphones yet, but it’s a start! Hydrogen fuel cell failure modes and the danger of tiny hydrogen bombs. MRI dangers.

Skynet

AI escape scenarios. Supercomputing at “60 teraFLOPS” and wth is a “teraFLOPS” anyway? Computing power  measurement and FLOP precisions. Recognizing the actual utility of supercomputers only becoms apparent with very paralellizable tasks.

Links

Decipher SciFi: Decipher Media
Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on a Highway by WIRED: YouTube

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