Decipher SciFi: the show about how and why

Decipher SciFi: the show about how and why


Latest Episodes

Isolated BS: 3D tracking, Doom on EVERYTHING, and game juice
August 04, 2020

3D tracking Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscr

X-Men: superhero evolution, wolverines, and what lightning does to everything else
July 28, 2020

Comic book movies X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and

Isolated BS: social engineering, spotted dick, and proper beaver representation
July 21, 2020

Hacking The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media. Free Software Free as in speec

Sonic: the console wars, allocoprophagy, and tiny blue Godzilla
July 07, 2020

Cashing in Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl. Console wars Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a

Isolated BS: art restoration, ahistorical viking grooming, and preposterone
June 30, 2020

Millhouse isolation Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery. Masks Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for

Watchmen - Tulsa, nostalgia, and victorian spacesuits
June 23, 2020

Tulsa Massacre The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar. Ozymandias Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceshi

Isolated BS: tasty Pi, robot vacuums, and our saddest failure
June 16, 2020

Computing Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs. Raspberry

Upload: living forever, digital personhood, and hacking your own reality
June 09, 2020

Self-driving cars Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hackin

Isolated BS: hip thrusts, Dragons, and linguistic POV
June 03, 2020

Fitness Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands. Gaming Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. G

Underwater: deep drilling, nitrogen narcosis, and astronaut helium voice
May 26, 2020

Deep water drilling It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We dri