June 24, 2025 • 66 mins
Listen below with the audio player or Click Here for complete show notes and video from the show. Feedback QOTW: You’ve been granted the ability to instantly download any single skill or area of knowledge directly into your brain, Matrix-style. … Continue reading
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(00:00):
Technorama episode 774, the simulation that everyone is talking about.
Hello and welcome to Technorama, the show that takes a lighthearted look at
tech, science, sci-fi, and all things geek.
(00:21):
Or we do our best. Many, many things. A few things geek. Alright,
there's not really much geek in here at all.
Okay. We're just going to talk about whatever... wait.
If you are joining us for the first time, welcome to the show.
We appreciate you giving us your time.
And if you're returning, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
(00:42):
And I am Chuck Tomasi from sunny Phoenix, Arizona, where it is boiling hot.
It's summer in full force. And joining me from that side of the screen is Craig Step. How are you?
Yes. It's Slightly elevated warm here, so it's not as bad as you got it,
but yes, I know I'm doing okay.
It was perfect weather for the pool party. Everybody wanted to be in the pool.
(01:03):
I bet so. The misters were working and I was singing songs by Mr. Mister. Get it?
Yeah, Mr. Mister. Oh boy.
That's actually happened. I was working on the misters and I heard music by Mr. Mister.
Wow, the universe is telling me something. Okay.
(01:24):
We ask a question of the week on every episode, and sometimes we get to it in
a week, which is one of those fortunate times like right now,
and we are going to dig into that virtual mailbag and see what our answers are.
Letters, oh, we get letters, we get your letters every day.
Mailman, mailman, mail today.
(01:46):
Music.
Let us dig into our question. Question of the week last time was you've been
(02:11):
granted the ability to instantly download any single skill or area of knowledge
directly into your brain. Think about the matrix.
Plug that cable in and away you go. I know Kung Fu.
What do you choose and what's the most absurd, non-practical way you'd immediately use it?
So we had a couple of comments. I apologize. I posted this kind of late on Sunday
(02:33):
before we recorded, so I didn't get any responses, but we did get a couple.
One from Stephen Weshe. He said, I'd likely download all the medical knowledge I possibly could.
If I had to focus on one specific skill, I'd likely go for anesthesiology.
I'd use this skill to make a lot of money quickly and retire early.
(02:56):
Sorry this is a boring answer i'm sure you could make up some
joke about getting paid to knock people out happy father's
day gentlemen thank you yeah i
we do this podcast it's very similar we put people
to sleep yeah we're
an anesthesiologist uh anesthesiologist
(03:16):
by trade put that
on the linkedin profile now podcaster and anesthesia
i cure insomnia real well yeah and
our buddy kyle he's also listening on the show uh tonight he's on the live stream
um cooking like a five-star chef um just take that instant skill and no need
(03:39):
to make it absurd there you go oh no you gotta cook like a five-star chef but
then you make burnt toast or something,
Yeah. Burned toast. You only make grilled cheese sandwiches.
Actually, I thought of one. Yes. That I was really talented at chewing gum and fighting crime with it.
(04:00):
Like you can throw it and stop a criminal by throwing it under a shoe.
I don't think that's a skill you're going to get from the Matrix.
Well, aiming. You got to aim. Tank is looking through his cards going,
sorry, man. I'm fighting crime. What?
Let me see what I can whip together in Python. Yeah. What about you? Do you got one?
(04:26):
You know me, I always want to know every language in the world.
So I want to speak and understand every language on the planet,
and then I would use it to tell dad jokes.
There you go. Okay. That's a good one.
That's a good one. All right. shall we move on
that's all we got oh email we had an email that came in I think it came in well
(04:55):
around the time we did our 20th anniversary show and I apologize I forgot to
put it in here but Avner Braverman a long time listener,
he said happy 20th birthday Technorama and happy belated 60 Chuck one third
of a lifetime is a lifetime.
(05:16):
And he said thanks Chuck and Craig for taking me on this journey with you yeah
oh my gosh I've been podcasting for a third of my life,
although if I was 20 it'd be my whole life but be a little tough to podcast
when you're newborn yeah well we're glad you came along for the journey too Abner,
thank you 20 years we've seen many teenagers go into their 30s.
(05:43):
I keep thinking, we got some of those little IDs from people's children,
and now they're finished college and are married or something. Uh-huh.
Yeah. Yeah, we're not going to talk about old again.
We'll need to start a new podcast, the Old Man Podcast, where we talk about
our injuries and our medications and our latest surgeries.
(06:06):
Yeah. What was in the AARP magazine this month?
You know, I lost the tennis ball off my walker. You know, Ralph Macchio is 63.
I do know that. That's amazing. He was in the, he was in the latest AARP magazine.
He said, yeah, my mom read this article.
Okay then. He, he does look amazing for his age. I mean, he looks like.
(06:30):
But he doesn't look as goofy and dopey as he was when he was a kid.
Well, maybe not, but he doesn't look dissimilar. Like, you know,
some people, they don't age very well.
Right. He looks about like he always has, for the most part.
Yep. All right, now we're done with that part. Let's move on to the history.
Oh, by the way, we look mostly like him.
(06:52):
You had a gray beard when you were 18? Maybe.
Music.
(08:43):
Isn't this just smashing? We can dance for 20 minutes.
That same date in 1981, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, the first operational aircraft.
Music.
(13:10):
Look forward to seeing you there. All right. On with the news with a random cyan-colored button.
Aren't you going to say, good news, everyone? Oh, I just said that for Fry's benefit.
Oh, I hear Farnsworth's voice, and I go, do I need anything for the parade?
Good news, everyone. The parade is over. That's one of my lines. You can go home now.
(13:34):
Yeah. I was telling somebody just the other day, when we do the parade,
the magic of it is you can go about 10 feet. and use the same jokes again.
Just like a Disney exhibition. Those animatronics are just saying the same lines
every 30 seconds. New people walk in.
Yeah, the one thing I was trying to do, and sometimes it works,
(13:58):
especially when you get into the thicker crowds that are on each side.
I try to get each one to yell louder than the other side, but we're kind of
moving forward. So you have to really run from one side to the other.
I'm already getting tired thinking about it.
The older you get, the harder it gets. And the hotter it gets,
the further into the parade you go. Oh, yeah.
(14:20):
Yeah, I'm sitting there with a pizza box. Everybody scream, make some noise.
And they go to the other side, make some noise. And sometimes they do,
and sometimes they don't.
Right. All right, first article comes to us from Earth.com. That states,
a thousand-foot megatsunami could erase parts of the U.S.
Scientists say it's happened before.
Wait, that's ominous. We need that more. I don't even know if I have the reverb
(14:41):
on this channel anymore.
It's happened before. Nope. Okay. Well, I am clearly not using the right profile.
You know what I think it is? Hang on.
No, I don't want to change it mid-show. I think I know exactly what it is.
I think I know exactly what it is. I'm on the live stream profile instead of
the podcast profile. Right.
(15:02):
Half hour into the show later. I got it. I got it.
Yeah. All right. Well, back to the thousand foot tsunami. Yes, they can happen.
There have been localized ones like in Latuya Bay in 1950.
Oh, what year was that? You know, I was hoping our cruise ship would go by Latuya Bay, but it didn't.
(15:23):
Latuya Bay. 1958, when a big landslide came down, went right into this kind
of narrow bay or fjord and caused a huge wave,
1,700 feet high, just erased all the trees and topsoil from the hillsides.
We did not go by it. But if you look on Google Maps, you can still see this
(15:44):
differentiation in the old trees versus the newer trees.
Newer trees now coming up on 70 years old.
And there's been other instances when geologists look at like the Cascadia range.
Just the whole West Coast from California up to Canada, where we've got the
(16:07):
subduction going on, that can cause tsunamis or even the 2011 earthquake,
the one that took out the Fukushima nuclear power plant. That one.
They send out big ones, but there's evidence that the tsunami,
the headline says the tsunami can erase part of the coastline or part of the land.
(16:31):
What more often happens is as the plate is subducting, the other plate that
it's going under is gradually lifting. And then when it releases, it sinks rapidly.
So that's why you see like all these sunken houses in Alaska from the 1964 earthquake.
(16:53):
It's that the land has almost reset back to its natural state rather than being
uplifted by the pressure.
So it's happened. You get reverberations in the displacement of water and it causes tsunamis.
Yeah. If there was a major underwater landslide or uplift, like we saw in 2004.
(17:17):
Um, in, in, not the, in that, not Taiwan,
um, Thailand area that, that was, um, well, like a 40 foot thrust fault that
just went along hundreds of miles.
Uh, yeah, you can, you can get some immediate stuff going on.
(17:39):
So I think the one, the one you were talking about from Alaska,
I was just looking at this and said it was, uh, it reached a hundred or 1700 feet.
In Latuya Bay, yeah. Yeah. Yep. That is crazy. There were three people.
There were three boats out there in the harbor that day.
Two of them got knocked over, but one of them had time to turn their bow into
the wave and actually kind of rode it out and survived.
(18:02):
Gosh. Can you imagine seeing that? It's like on, you saw Interstellar, right? Dad?
You know, Dad's driving the boat the other way and the boy's fishing off the back end going, Dad?
Yeah. Hey, shut up, son. I'm trying to fish.
Hand me a beer. You saw Interstellar, right? Yes.
(18:23):
Yeah, Interstellar, remember they were on the water. They landed in water,
and they were like, the horizon doesn't look right.
It's like a huge tsunami. It's probably bigger than this. It's huge.
A lot of the article focuses on
the West Coast of America, but this could happen in other places as well.
They also said that many of these places now have advanced earthquake,
(18:46):
seismic, and tsunami warning systems in place.
So we're better equipped than we were, but when you look at something as recent
as 2004, and they were caught off guard, because that's not a common place for
tsunamis, it makes you go, hmm, maybe we need a more global system in place.
Because you just because the earthquake happens in one place the tsunami is
(19:10):
going to happen in another place right,
exactly okay next article.
We are starting to get pictures back from Hayabusa
2 well actually the the uh the satellite
that landed on Ryugu a few years ago a couple years ago 2018 2018 yeah 2018
(19:34):
they dropped out I don't know what took them so long to release these photos
but hey we're starting to get them and you're breaking up a little bit there
what was it a couple years from now we're going hello yeah hi,
can you i think we lost chuck no i'm still
here i'm still recording audio and i can hear you right well yeah you're breaking
(19:55):
up you're falling off that's okay the audio recording is fine that's all i care
about yeah that's all like go ahead okay so continue on satellite uh mission went out to the meteor.
Where do we go? Hayabusa 2 dropped toward the surface of the asteroid Ryugu from 135 meters up.
(20:15):
They took pictures on the way down and the little deployment satellite was called Mascot.
And on the way down, they took pictures. And now they're showing us these pictures
and go, So, wow, this looks a lot like carbonaceous chondrites for you geologists out there.
(20:37):
There's some bluish rubble. There's some reddish rubble. There's some whitish rubble.
So, I don't know why it took them so long to release these photos.
I don't know either. I was trying to figure out that because it is a current,
well, oh, wait. I'm sorry.
I just see that it was published in August of 2019.
(21:00):
This article that you got from.
I guess it showed up in my feed. Well, it's timely because one of the other
missions is to bring back some of the rock samples, which is coming up in 2020,
late 26. Is that what it was?
Yeah. I love looking at these pictures, though, because it looks like they took
a picture of the ocean floor.
(21:22):
It has that kind of feel about it.
But there's, like, no sediment.
It's very granular. Yeah, I don't think this one is quite as loose as the previous
one we went to and brought samples back.
I was listening to an astronomy cast, and they were saying, I think we need,
because this one landed, bounced, and then landed upside down and was able to right itself somehow.
(21:47):
And I forget if it was Fraser or Pamela that said, we just need to have self-writing
mechanisms on all satellites now.
Yeah. So when they tip over, you know, I think about those little cars that
you drive, the little RC cars that you drive around, if they tip over,
you've got that like curved arm that would pop out of the roof to push them
(22:08):
back up onto their wheels. Yeah.
Or how about the NASA rover that went and it bounced.
It was in that thing and it opens up and no matter which direction it is,
the, the leaves that would open up would actually write it, you know, you know, pop it over.
But yeah, it should be able to do it.
(22:32):
It's due to return to Earth late next year. Well, if this is in 2019,
probably already came back.
Yeah. That's us. Timely news. Only five years out of date.
Hey, I just saw the pictures and I was like, oh, wow, this is cool.
I thought the date was newer, but I will.
Something that's not out of date, we'll move on to Fortune magazine or fortune.com,
(22:53):
is you may have known that recently Bill Adkinson, famous developer,
passed away on June 7th. You're going to skip the Adam one picture?
What time? We have a story. There's a story in between them.
We do. The photo of the first ever photo of a single Adam.
You snuck that in on me. It's been there. Oh, okay. Well, I didn't get a chance
to read this. Why don't you cover it?
(23:14):
All right. So physicist David Nadlinger of the University of Oxford,
he captured the first ever picture a photograph
of a single atom eight years ago and yes
this is a current article not but he
won it was winning he ran a top uh top award for
for this photo and it looks amazing it looks like a almost like a top or something
(23:37):
like a toy or something it doesn't look quite right the photograph does not
show the atom's nucleus but rather the electron cloud surrounding it which interacts
with light uh to create the little gold spokes.
I think that's what i was just saying the i thought
the blue part was the electron cloud that would be the astronium was uh astronium
(24:01):
was chosen uh astronium was the material uh for sustainability and quantum physics
experiments particularly for cooling and it's multiple isotopes for comparative
studies. I don't know what the...
It may be dug somewhere in the article, but I don't remember what the arms are for.
But it just looks mesmerizing a little bit, I think.
(24:25):
What do you think? This guy looks like he's going to try and pick it up.
Yeah, he's trying to. He dropped it. Oh, crap. My boss is going to kill me.
This kind of looks like a corporate logo. Yeah, a corporate logo, yeah.
Actually, remember we did a skit here on Technorama. With the iPod Femto?
(24:53):
Yeah. Pico, whatever it was. Yeah.
Femto, I think. It was so small you couldn't even see it.
Yeah, and then the guy accidentally drops it in the carpet at the – I'm sorry.
Good memories, man. Good memories. All right. Now we move on to Bill Atkinson.
Yes. Sad news. He passed away.
(25:14):
So, interesting programmer. He joined Apple in 78 when they were a couple of
years old and actually declined their first offer.
He said, nah, I don't think I want to do that. But then he met with Steve Jobs
for about three hours and he was talking to him.
He said, imagine being on the tip of a wave.
(25:35):
Do you want to ride? Do you want to surf that wave or do we be paddling behind
the wave where it's boring and dull?
Where they have sugar water. It's exhilarating. And then join Apple and make
your dent in the universe.
I mean, Steve was a pretty charismatic and convincing guy. Mm-hmm.
So Bill joined, and this is when the Apple II was still the main product, which became the 2E,
(26:02):
the 2+, the 2C, the 2C+, blah, blah, blah, and then eventually onto the 3 and
the Lisa and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But partway into this, Bill says, yeah, basic's all right.
And Steve was going, yeah, that's all we need for a programming language.
It's what everybody else uses. he said but it's not
you're not thinking about the future i think
(26:25):
i think we need to think bigger and he goes well convince
me you've got six days yeah so bill
goes off and writes a pascal compiler
in six days which is nothing
short of miraculous i don't know if he got any sleep during that
time or he already had one in his back pocket that he was
(26:45):
able to port hey or he just
said this code we'll compile it and then he goes here's the compiled
code he asked he he went to the future and
asked gen ai to create right it just
takes two days round trip to get there and back yeah
so he was able to do this and then he earned a lot of respect
from steve job so apparently you have to do a herculean effort to
(27:07):
win steve's favor that's right and um yeah he designed and implemented the hyper
card yes it's very very popular um and yeah i mean this has got a lot of a lot
of uh achievements here it's pretty pretty amazing as far as apple goes the guy was 78,
(27:28):
no what how old is he.
Oh, he was 74. I'm sorry. 74. That's right. Yeah. I'm sorry.
I didn't realize what you were asking. But yeah, he was 74. He died. It's not that old.
No, it's not. But you can't judge your life by others, Chuck. Oh, I never have.
(27:48):
There you go. All right. I mean, once in a while I look at it and go,
wow, that guy did all right. He's a CEO and I remember creating his user account.
Or you say, oh, an actor passed away and he was 56. I'm like,
hey, wait, that's how old I am.
Ooh. I look at it like you and I have both outlived Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson,
so we're doing all right.
Yeah. We don't have their money, but we're doing all right. Well,
(28:11):
do you want their money? Actually, they don't have their money anymore.
You can't take it with you.
They don't have it. It's pretty cold. What? Too soon?
I was talking to my daughter, Julie, this morning. Since we're going into that
dark, crazy area. Right.
And somehow we got on the conversation, oh, of like toxic spills.
(28:38):
And I mentioned Love Canal and she wasn't sure what that was.
So she Googled it real fast and I described it to her.
The company that was burying barrels of toxic chemicals up by Niagara Falls.
And then they built a neighborhood over this and suddenly people have green
ooze in their basement and little Billy's getting cancer.
Then it was a major step for the EPA and it was the first super fun project.
(29:06):
Like, okay, nobody's living there anymore.
And then she said, oh, at work, they have a high school intern.
And he had his first like run in with the chemicals, you know,
where you kind of spill it on your hands and you got to run to the sink and rinse off your hands.
Like, oh, should have been wearing gloves. And she said, isn't that cute?
(29:28):
Jimmy got his first toxic spill.
Wow. Wow. How do you play that? Like, that's cute.
You know, you did pretty good for 18, but, you know, Bob over there,
he was 15 when he first got spilled on.
May he rest in peace.
(29:49):
Wow he made it to 24 but you know after about 18 it wasn't pleasant after 18,
goodness we were just we were just going all over the map on this dark crazy
humor it's a good thing ocean doesn't stop by very often,
(30:11):
or I said no you gotta do like a monster's ink Jimmy, Jimmy,
2319, 2319, start stripping down.
We got to shave your head. Even though it's a joke.
You make it a joke. So he's got to walk around with a shaved head for the next year.
And then. That's how he haze our intern. Julie has to say, well,
(30:32):
bald looks good on you. You should have seen how it looked on me.
Oh boy. Yeah. I love having those conversations with my daughter.
Good family times. All right, we move on to Remember When. There we go.
(30:55):
And hover over this thing and it's got a whole bunch of waveforms on it.
Oh, yeah. From Hackaday.com, we have a video and article that talks about the
Kansas City standard for writing data to audio. tapes.
So way back in the 70s and early 80s when you.
(31:17):
Music.
(32:27):
Really thought about this too much. I didn't think it was this complex.
He goes and builds a little circuit with some 555 chips and some op amps to
clean up the signal and whatnot, some inverters, and gets it to work.
Through a couple of janky cables, he plugs a USB into his laptop and hits play
on his circuit, and out comes the basic program for the old Star Trek game,
(32:55):
at 300 baud, because that was the speed at which they did this.
So he said, five minutes later, I got my basic program.
But that's really fascinating, because I knew you could, you know,
you could even go out to some of these sites today and say, hey,
I want to load, you know, some Apple games.
(33:15):
And they will send you the audio file and says, okay, press play,
go to your computer, hit load.
Yeah. Oh, neat. and good luck finding a phone that has a headphone jack anymore,
but with some clever hoo-ha, you can get that converted.
But he said, on the next video, I'm going to show you how to encode.
(33:39):
So that'll be interesting. That's interesting.
I have a lot of memories of reading and writing my programs from cassette on the Commodore.
I never had to do that. I got started with floppy drives. I mean,
outside of punch cards for the Fortran programs.
It was okay. But, yeah, you would run into the eventual problem that sometimes
(34:02):
you need to have a bad cassette. I mean, it happens.
And so your program doesn't come back. So I'm trying to think how did I test. I think...
I think there was a test. Was there a test function? You can kind of double check.
Anyway, and of course, there's been a couple of times when I overwrote one program
(34:29):
with another and it wasn't at the beginning and didn't wipe out the entire,
like it was shorter than the program that I overwrote.
So it was like, when am I getting all this other extra crap?
Yeah. So yeah, I would, you know, I have fond memories for screwing around with
that stuff. I certainly don't want to go back. I hate tapes.
(34:50):
This podcast is being saved on cassette, by the way. Oh, gosh.
And you got to FedEx it to me so I can post it. Yeah. Well, you're going to have to decode it.
Decode it. Because I'm not just sending you the waveform. Yeah.
It's on paper. I'm sending you.
No, I wouldn't just record the waveform to cassette and send you.
(35:12):
That'd be too easy. I record the audio to the computer and then encode all the
binary files to the cassette.
Hey, have you ever listened to a program on cassette? Yeah, it sounds kind of like a modem.
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, it does sound different. I think it's because of the
bit rate and you don't have all the error checking and hand checking and stuff.
(35:34):
But the program itself, it sounds similar to the phone, you know, like a dial-up.
It's similar because they only use those two frequencies.
And the other thing I found very similar is they had start bits and stop bits, just like a modem.
So no parity. No parity. So it was 8N2, I guess that would be.
(35:59):
Yeah, I guess, something like that.
Fun stuff, if you want to go take a look. I thought it was fascinating if you're
interested in how they did things back then.
These guys, it looked like they literally sketched out the protocol and said, there, we're done, go.
I'm sure it was a little more formalized than that, because I think the sketches
were looking at this particular engineer drawing. I think I saw a coffee stain on the corner.
(36:24):
Could be. I'll tell you, though, that was a nightmare. You work really hard.
I'll tell you what. All right.
I used a floppy for a long time, but early on, I had a cassette and I just remember writing programs.
Some of them were, you know, you copy them out of a magazine or it's a game
or something or writing your own, saving it.
And then I would save it on another cassette just in case the first one didn't
(36:48):
work. You know, it's like save it twice. Backup copies.
Yeah. Sometimes I would do that. Sometimes, you know, you just go, okay, one's enough.
The dumb people would flip the cassette over and go, now I'm going to be a backup
on this side. No, when you flip it over, you got foreigner.
Journey or something. Flip it over, it's right protected. Yeah.
(37:09):
Good times, man. Builds character. Yeah, it makes you a lot more aware of protecting your data.
Yeah. Where is it? How many copies do I have? Is it retrievable?
Disaster recovery or fault tolerance. A lot of those concepts were ingrained
in you as a young programmer.
(37:31):
The other one that I liked was that you were very limited on memory on a lot
of those early computers.
So you had to be a little more creative and efficient in the way that you'd
design some of that stuff.
One of the games we used to play was called Robot Wars. And you had to fit everything.
Into like 255 bytes or something ridiculous.
So you couldn't make this fancy robot or it'd be too slow.
(37:54):
So if you said, move, look, read, shoot, move, look, read, shoot,
another robot would just come along and go.
I'm just going to sit in this corner and go, look, shoot, look,
shoot, look, shoot. And it pretty much destroyed everything else.
Right. Well, I wrote, we've talked about this before.
I wrote my own bulletin board system. And I wasn't really thinking about the
(38:18):
memory footprint. It was all in basic.
I was writing the whole thing. And I remember getting to the point,
I was focused on functionality more than I was on how big my program was getting.
And it got to the point where I just, I don't remember what the actual effect
was, but I just remember getting to the point where I couldn't,
(38:41):
um, you know, write anymore.
I had to go back and make some of the things, uh, shorter so I could fit all the code in. Yep.
Yeah. I had too many lines of code and I was like, why didn't I learn assembly?
You know it'd have been a little different but it was
funny how i remember hitting that wall at
(39:04):
one time with my with the clipboard the
famous then you start taking some of those slower routines and writing them
in assembly so you can call them from basic i
probably should have that's that's what we ended up doing on our bulletin
board only it was started in pascal so a lot of the underlying
routines were in well part of my problem i
had uh part of the reason i was eating up so much memory is i was i had printed
(39:29):
out you know or had to print out a clipboard as part of the memory the menu
system so it looked like you you were handed a clipboard and had the menu on
it so i was drawing out all the characters trying to make it look like a,
clipboard i had in my room i remember the clipboard too just tried to make it.
Curved at the top speaking of printouts every every once
(39:50):
in a while i would do a full printout
of software that i would write especially the ones that was that
was a backup mechanism too it was also a good way to scan and go is there anything
i can move is there anything i can improve upon so you could kind of do a code
review of the code before it went out but that got a little ridiculous after
(40:10):
i didn't have that kind of qc i was just writing this for myself,
Hey, when it's your job, you take it seriously.
I didn't say it was my own endeavor.
All right, let's move on to the patrons.
We're winding it down. So we want to give a huge thank you to our patrons who donated.
(40:31):
They went over to patreon.com slash technoramapodcast for as little as a dollar a show.
They support this. They keep us financially in the green.
So far, we're a little in the black, but that's because we had some unexpected
expenses and took some time off for family travel.
We're in green. We're in green.
(40:52):
Black is good. Red is... We're in... Counting in school.
The numbers have parentheses around. That's bad, right? Yeah.
Thank you. Alexis Duran, Amber Elstad, Amy Bowen, Abner Braverman,
Ben Vaughn, Brad Miller, Brian Brown, Chris Martinez, Chris MC, Dan B.
(41:14):
Mancoyer, Dean Jensen, Denise Inglis, Gary Lindos, Jason Pollard,
John Clifford, John Noble, Yorgish Rowan, thank you Crazy Joe,
Kyle Nishioka, Leon, Mark Kilfoyle, Mike Wills, Saturday morning media,
Stephen Weshy, Steve Cody, Steve Therrien, Steve Webb, Steve London, and Tim Cook.
They. all went over to put it on the screen craig i'm working on it and getting
(41:36):
there patreon.com slash technorama podcast good thing we don't pay you by the hour,
it's a good thing we don't pay you i think i'm tenured now let's just stop there
it's a good thing we don't i've got i've got tenure here now uh 10 years is
about as long as it takes too,
(41:59):
So thank you very much to all those people for keeping us going.
Now we get into the part of the show where Craig and I talk about things we've
watched, read, seen, heard about, started rumors, accused people of. Yeah.
I'm going to start because I got four, you got three. That means I'll start and end. Go ahead.
(42:19):
So the first one that I mentioned earlier is on Netflix, just came out on Wednesday,
Titan, the Ocean Gate Disaster, where they talk about not only what happened, but why.
And why it was such a bad idea. And I actually saw a follow-up on this on one
of the YouTube channels that I follow called Ocean Liner Designs.
And they said, yeah, no, this was just somebody not paying attention to the
(42:42):
lessons learned of the past.
Since the 1930s, we've been using spherical containers for our submarines.
And this guy, spherical steel, titanium, alloy, or whatever it was,
but it was always spherical.
And the most you could ever fit in there was about three people.
Well, this guy goes, well, I need to fit more.
(43:03):
So I'm going to go with a cylinder and make it out of carbon fiber.
And everybody went, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. But he didn't listen.
Actually, they may have been okay if they not use carbon fiber, right?
Well, what we learned from Virgin, because Richard Branson made something similar
out of carbon fiber, the deep flyer, I forget what it was called.
(43:24):
But he said, it's good for one use, because every time you go down,
you're stressing it more and more and more. You're basically breaking the fibers.
Right. And this wasn't the first time that guy had been down there,
right? It's not the first time, but every time gets more and more dangerous.
And they put in acoustic sensors, so you could hear this thing going, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
(43:47):
And I would have been out as soon as I heard that started to happen,
regardless of whether it was the first mission or the last.
Right. They're also bolted in. You're not getting out of this thing.
Like many submersibles, unfortunately. Oh, they screw you. Yeah. Hard close it.
But the acoustic sensors were touted as one of the safety features.
(44:09):
Like, oh, we will use this data to know when it's unsafe.
Because even though it's starting to wear and tear, you don't know when that moment is coming.
It's a bit like, oh, we're getting some seismograph readings.
The volcano's about to blow. But you don't know when the volcano is about to
blow until it actually goes.
I don't know. Right. I don't know. And that's kind of what happened.
(44:33):
And Stockton got a little cocky and created a culture of listen to me or it's my way or the highway.
And some people did go. Infecting his, not his lead engineer,
but the guy in church of operations. I can't remember his name.
But he spoke up. He left. And then he carried a lawsuit against him going, look, do you...
(44:55):
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Then there was a countersuit and they ran out of
money, so he had to drop it.
And he's kind of the hero in all this going, look, I tried to tell you,
I tried to tell you, I tried to warn everybody, but the acoustic sensors were basically ignored.
So the one feature that they had that said, oh, they're luring people in for
(45:17):
a quarter million of a trip, you're like, it's safe, no problem.
And if they started, they also did not certify the thing.
It has to be rated and they skipped that because if you want to carry passengers
for money, you have to have it rated and certified to a certain amount of depth.
(45:38):
So they sort of skipped that step and went, oh, these aren't passengers,
they're mission specialists.
It was just hokey on all levels and i feel bad for the people who lost their lives.
Okay yeah it's terrible i would know i was uh i was just i knew that you said that,
carbon fiber should not go down more than once but i was just saying that wasn't
(46:02):
the first time that he went down right so i imagine it was pretty starting to
get stressed there was also an element of like the Challenger disaster where
they left it out in Canada all winter and they said, no, this, and the lead engineer,
the lead engineer is going, you cannot let this freeze.
If there's any moisture in there, it's going to really, you know,
(46:23):
destroy this thing. Why would they put it there?
They were, they were supposed to bring it back to the Seattle area and they
did not because of cost considerations.
So taking it to Canada was cheaper. Yeah.
Storing it in St. John outside was another dumb move. So anyway.
With a tractor, you know, sitting beside the tractor out there.
(46:43):
Oh, it'll be fine until next week. Two years ago.
I remember when that broke like it was yesterday. Anyway, what have you been watching?
All right. So I thought I would go through Netflix has a lot of Hitchcock films started this month.
So I thought I would watch some that I haven't seen or hadn't seen in a long time.
Uh i had not really watched rear window
(47:05):
so i watched it and that was a lot
of that was it was a good movie uh like i like
jimmy stewart and he is
a news photographer that broke his
leg and so he's kind of laid up in a
chair with a a crazy large
cast on becomes a peeping tom and kind
(47:26):
of becomes a peeping tom and he he suspects this guy uh
murdered his wife so then the shenanigans kind
of go along and you can watch the you know he starts
watching everybody and he knows everybody's routines and we're filming a reality
show get over it yeah you know what i thought was interesting and that you know
this movie take uh i guess it takes place but it was filmed like in the 50s
(47:47):
and i never really thought about this but you're watching how much.
Suggested sex was happening.
Now, they didn't really show it, but it was like, oh, that guy's in this older lady's room.
You know what he's wanting to do and what they're going to do.
And then that kind of stuff, I was like, I just thought that was although they
(48:13):
were tasteful about it, it just seemed a little out of place.
I never really thought that they suggested that kind of stuff,
that much stuff in movies back then.
I saw shadows on the shades. There were shadows and arms and legs everywhere.
I swear they were getting busy.
(48:33):
You know, all the real bear chicka wah-wah kind of stuff.
And I did think it was funny when his girlfriend was going to stay over,
and everybody was like, even his friend that came by was like, does the landlord know?
Like the landlady. Like he had to have some kind of permission from the landlady
to have an extra guest over.
Just, you know, that was kind of laughable. But hey, sign of the times.
(48:57):
But it was a good movie. I enjoyed it. Oh, we're getting shamed from the chat.
Mike says, no shout out for the few lucky listeners. Yes, we will give you a
shout out. We got Mike and Kyle out there.
Thank you for joining us. We do this show Sundays at 9.30 Eastern time.
If you'd like to join us, set your watch, set your clock, set your computer, set your calendar.
And we look forward to seeing you there. You can be part of these shenanigans
(49:20):
as well. Just look for Technorama Podcast, wherever you find podcasts, videos.
You'll find us. We'll be there most weeks. All right.
Let's get on with it. I've been watching more disasters and bad news stories.
The Oklahoma City bombing, American Terror, also on Netflix.
(49:41):
Obviously, there's been other documentaries about it.
This was sort of a chronological time by, you know, moment by moment with stories
that were of people that were buried in the rubble and recovered.
Oh, wow. Yeah, the, you know, this lawyer and that investigator and this cop and,
(50:02):
you know, there was a heartwarming moment in there when the town really pulled
together and said, look, we got lines around the block for people that need to donate blood.
We've got people coming in with food and blankets. And, you know,
it was, there was some good that came out of this.
There were a few recordings of Timothy McVeigh. It was kind of interesting to
(50:26):
revisit this from a standpoint of, you know, Timothy McVeigh,
losing the actor's names, Terry Nichols was in there.
And then Michael Fourier, I think was the other guy who was somewhat involved,
(50:47):
only insofar that he had prior knowledge. That was his crime.
And he didn't say or do anything. He knew what they were up to.
So just crazy stuff.
And what was it? There were some people that said he probably shouldn't have
(51:09):
got the death penalty, but he should have got life so that he could suffer.
And I'm saying, no, because then he would be spouting rhetoric from prison that
would inspire other people.
So I'm not saying one way or the other that the death penalty is a good thing
or a bad thing. But we've seen it time and time again. When you let people linger,
they're just going to get a following.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if there's a right answer there, to be honest with you.
(51:34):
So, all right. So the next thing I watched was Predator, Killer of Killers.
That sounds intriguing.
I watched it last night. You're familiar with the Predator series, right?
Not the series. I know. The only Predator I've watched was the original movie.
Yes. Okay. So there's one I
would recommend to you if you're interested at all in this kind of
(51:57):
stuff is predator prey and that one
came out a few years ago i
forget when but the predator was had come
to earth uh in the past you know
not he wasn't time travel but it just he had
come in a time when the indians were on the land
and he was attacking this one one
(52:17):
and the the indian lady was fighting you know was successful in fighting anyway
so this kind of picks up from there a little bit and there's three different
time periods this is a anthology kind of series there's three stories and they
come together at the end there's you know they're all tied together.
(52:38):
And uh it was animated it was fantastic it was there there was hardly any dialogue
in the entire movie it was probably
about a handful of lines just a lot of grunting and snorting or the you
know, the kind of sound that the predators make, but it, but it wasn't,
it was, it was amazing.
(52:59):
The story they were telling without any words is the thing.
So there was some dialogue in a couple of stories, but it wasn't a whole lot.
And so you see the predators doing their thing or three different predators,
three different time periods.
And again, it comes together at the end and it's really cool.
And I'm not going to say anything more because it will spoil it. but it just came out.
(53:23):
So, um, but if you liked the predator mythos, it's good.
And this also leads into, um, there's a predator badlands that comes out in
November. It's a live action movie. And this kind of, um, feeds into that. Nice. Yeah.
All right. I'm sticking with the Netflix theme once again. I watched a documentary
(53:45):
called- Your money's worth out of Netflix.
I am. It's been a while. It's been a lot of YouTube lately.
But this one's called Britain and the Blitz. So I learned a lot.
I didn't realize, A, it was eight months that the Germans were bombing England.
(54:05):
And I also learned how extensive it was. I didn't realize it was that long.
Yeah, I thought it was like a couple of weeks.
No, it went on and on. And how far inland they penetrated.
I thought, oh, they bombed London, turned around and went home,
or maybe some of the cities on the south coast.
They were as far as Glasgow, up in Scotland.
(54:27):
Yeah. They were hitting targets in Wales, which is weird because when they started
bombing London, a lot of the families sent their kids out to the country.
And some of them went to Wales and they were not really received well there,
because the Welsh were going, you're dumping your kids on us.
(54:52):
We already have families and it was during the coal strike. So they're not exactly
in economical stability to support more mouths to feed.
And then they get picked on in school and one kid was saying,
I'd come home to my temporary mom and she'd go, what's the matter with you?
(55:14):
You get kicked out of London and now you come here and pick fights. Like, wow.
Well, nice supportive mother or stepmom or whatever. What's your problem?
So it was a tough time all around. And I also didn't realize that initially
the government did not open up the underground, the tube for shelters. Yeah.
(55:36):
People were having makeshift shelters wherever they could. Were they worried
about it collapsing to her easily?
Collapsing, maybe disrupting service. I don't know what the rationale was,
but a group of people went into, it wasn't Harrods.
It was the Savoy, the fancy, swanky hotel that had a shelter.
(55:58):
So they just kind of took over and went, we're going to stay here for a while.
And the police came by and said, you can't stay here. Then give us an alternative, like the tube.
And that's when things kind of turned around. I think Mike is referring to this,
the lack of air conditioning. Something about the lack of air conditioning.
That's been up there for a while.
That's been up there for about eight minutes. Okay. I'm not sure what he's talking
(56:21):
about. Yeah, it was a while ago.
So Britain and the Blitz, if you want to learn more. And I got to admit,
the footage on this thing is unfreaking believable.
Really? It's colorized. It's
like high def. Some of this you'd swear they took with a phone last week.
There's a picture of a guy using an iPhone to record.
(56:42):
There's a couple of times where you go, okay, that, you know,
this lady's handling coal and the coal is like really shiny black.
And it's something wrong with this picture, but it's the restoration process
that they used. Shining their coal.
Polishing that lump of coal. That doesn't sound right. But there were a few
scenes, but most of it was darn impressive.
(57:04):
The airplane shots, the runways.
Occasionally, you'd see a plane flying through a cloud of smoke.
It's like, okay, the colorization was a little off on that part,
but I'm willing to forgive that because the rest was just superb.
Best restored film I've ever seen. Wow. I'll have to go check that out.
(57:28):
I've seen a lot of people on YouTube restore video using AI or even enhancing
the Deep Space Nine intro because it's not HD.
And so they enhance it, and you're like, wow, that really looks good. Or even Voyager.
Drew has joined us. Hey, Drew. He hasn't been around for a while. Good to see you, buddy.
(57:51):
So the next thing I saw was Fountain of Youth, which is on Apple TV.
And it is kind of like national treasure and maybe a small piece of indiana jones um so,
john krasinski and crew natalie portman
uh her both of them their siblings and then they've got a couple other people
(58:14):
that are with them they go and they they're searching for the fountain of youth
the one guy is bankrolling the whole thing and he said that he has um some terminal
cancer and he's hoping that when they find this fountain of youth,
it will heal him and he can go on his way. Well, uh...
I won't ruin it again. It just came out not too long ago, so I'm not going to
(58:36):
go in too deep with it. But I thought it was okay.
I looked at Rotten Tomatoes had it at 36%. So I was like, I probably liked it
a little bit more now, but it wasn't much.
I'll be honest with you. It was okay. Okay. Yeah.
My fourth one, back to Netflix and staying in Britain for this theme.
(59:00):
It's called Fred and Rose West, a British horror story.
So the story starts in the early 90s with the report of children saying,
you know, dad's always saying you better behave.
They were, they had like 10 kids, not all of them from their marriage.
(59:22):
Rose, he met Rose. Fred West was like 27 and Rose was about 15.
When they met and within a month she was pregnant.
So, you know, they just eventually ended up with 10 kids, some from his previous
marriage and some from them.
And the kids were saying, dad's always saying you better behave or you'll end
(59:44):
up like your sister under the back patio.
And finally the police started listening. They go, we're going to start digging up the back patio.
And they found one of the daughters, Heather, who hadn't been seen in eight years.
So no one's heard from her since July of 1986. And now it's 1994.
(01:00:07):
She's under the back patio. She was buried under the back patio.
They're like, okay, how'd she get there?
She crawled under. What happened? And you find out that Fred killed her. Wow.
But Rose knew nothing about this. And then they said, well, is that all?
He goes, yeah, that's all you're going to find.
But they kept digging, and they found another body and another body.
(01:00:28):
And one guy says, wait a minute, why are they being buried in the backyard?
Unless there was nowhere else to bury them. So they start digging in the house.
It was a convenient spot. They dig up the cellar.
Oh, no. And they found more bodies. And, of course, Fred's going,
that's all there is. And Rose knows nothing about this.
And Rose is going out about, I can't believe it.
(01:00:51):
He would do this to me. and she's protesting her innocence and he's clearly trying to protect her.
And there was one woman... These murders go back like 20 years into the early 70s and late 60s.
So he's clearly a sexual predator...
(01:01:13):
And that, you know, has been killing, but he didn't always kill.
There was one woman who said, I was their nanny in 1969.
You know, they tied me up, they sexually assaulted me, and I got away.
They didn't say how she got away, but she reported that.
And then that's when they said, you know, Fred and... She said,
(01:01:37):
the way they lured me into the car was because Rose was there.
It made it easier for them because just a strange man comes up to a young woman
and says, hey, you want a ride?
But if there's a woman in the car, they become more trusting.
So they were trying to – the prosecution was trying to say, Rose is in on this,
(01:01:59):
even though they're denying this. Rose was in on this.
And then at some point, Rose changed her mind and Fred thought that was a sign
of betrayal. And he said, all right, woman, I'm going to spill the beans.
Woman. You are, you're going down with me.
Well, they couldn't really prove anything until they went back to their first house.
(01:02:26):
This is like, there's nine bodies or so in the, and two in a cornfield out somewhere.
They're up to like 11 bodies.
And they said, hang on. Wow. There's this daughter from his first marriage that
disappeared shortly after he met
Rose, back when they were not on Cromwell Street, but on Midland Street.
(01:02:49):
So they keep bringing Fred back to the crime scene going, Fred, where did you bury...
What was her name? Not Caroline. It was something like that.
And he points at the wall. He buried her in the wall. Oh, no.
She's in the wall? She's in the wall.
They finally put the pieces together and said, wait, when did she die?
(01:03:09):
And they were looking for pictures because they went to this forensic scientist
who was doing these facial analysis.
You have the skull, but they wanted to put the digital face from a picture.
He said, I don't have any good pictures of this girl.
And suddenly this picture emerges where she's smiling. She's looking at the camera.
The lighting is good. And they said, she died while Fred was in prison for this other infraction.
(01:03:36):
That means Rose had to have done it. Yeah.
And that's what they got her on. So they're about to go to trial.
Fred hangs himself, pulls a Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, no.
And, you know, the families are just, the families who suffered are besides themselves.
Of course, you know, Netflix, they're constantly cutting back to sister of victim,
(01:03:58):
mother of victim, friend of victim.
And eventually Rose does get like a life sentence.
Uh but it just it
was gruesome and sad but yet
still fascinating in a way if you're looking for a good
true crime story and i again this
all happened over in the uk we don't get stories about your
(01:04:21):
serial killers unfortunately uh at least
not back in the 90s so somehow this one slipped by a
lot of the american press or at least what i was watching wow
so i like i like catching up on this going you just never
know it was in uh gloucester which is
you know nice quiet town and everybody's going this can't
have happened here especially when they go
(01:04:42):
well there's one murder and then they go well there's six murders there's nine
there's 12 what 32 so yeah this guy was unhinged and he was when he was being
interviewed he was just stating things like matter of fact, it was really cold.
Okay, on that happy note, we're over an hour again. Apologize.
(01:05:06):
I just want to hang my head now.
Brings us to our question of the week for you before we bow out of here.
What's the most absurd internet of things gadget you can imagine existing in
the near future? The smell-o-meter.
The smell-o-scope.
(01:05:26):
Smell a meter, you hang it on the wall or something, you know?
And it tells you the bathroom needs some Febreze.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Warning, do not enter. It dispenses the Febreze. Yeah.
Why does that thing go off every time I walk by? Yeah.
All right, you people use your imagination. We'll be back in a little bit to ask you about that.
(01:05:48):
We'll have it posted on social media, hopefully a little bit in advance of two
hours in front of the show so you have a time to respond.
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us another way,
something you heard, something you saw,
something you'd like to report to us, an incurrection we made that you'd like
to correct, call us on the listener line, 707-530-2428.
(01:06:11):
We'd love to hear from you. or email us at technorama at chuckchat.com.
Both of us will get it.
You might even read it on the air
if it's spelled right. That's the only qualification, just spell it right.
It's AI-generated, maybe not. We can see through that. We know when AI is generating
letters for you. Don't do it, people.
(01:06:35):
You're generating an AI letter? Technorama? Yeah.
Till next time. Give me a big binary high five, Craig. All right, one, two, one.
Technorama episode 774, the simulation that everyone is talking about.
Hello and welcome to Technorama, the show that takes a lighthearted look at
tech, science, sci-fi, and all things geek.
(00:21):
Or we do our best. Many, many things. A few things geek. Alright,
there's not really much geek in here at all.
Okay. We're just going to talk about whatever... wait.
If you are joining us for the first time, welcome to the show.
We appreciate you giving us your time.
And if you're returning, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
(00:42):
And I am Chuck Tomasi from sunny Phoenix, Arizona, where it is boiling hot.
It's summer in full force. And joining me from that side of the screen is Craig Step. How are you?
Yes. It's Slightly elevated warm here, so it's not as bad as you got it,
but yes, I know I'm doing okay.
It was perfect weather for the pool party. Everybody wanted to be in the pool.
(01:03):
I bet so. The misters were working and I was singing songs by Mr. Mister. Get it?
Yeah, Mr. Mister. Oh boy.
That's actually happened. I was working on the misters and I heard music by Mr. Mister.
Wow, the universe is telling me something. Okay.
(01:24):
We ask a question of the week on every episode, and sometimes we get to it in
a week, which is one of those fortunate times like right now,
and we are going to dig into that virtual mailbag and see what our answers are.
Letters, oh, we get letters, we get your letters every day.
Mailman, mailman, mail today.
(01:46):
Music.
Let us dig into our question. Question of the week last time was you've been
(02:11):
granted the ability to instantly download any single skill or area of knowledge
directly into your brain. Think about the matrix.
Plug that cable in and away you go. I know Kung Fu.
What do you choose and what's the most absurd, non-practical way you'd immediately use it?
So we had a couple of comments. I apologize. I posted this kind of late on Sunday
(02:33):
before we recorded, so I didn't get any responses, but we did get a couple.
One from Stephen Weshe. He said, I'd likely download all the medical knowledge I possibly could.
If I had to focus on one specific skill, I'd likely go for anesthesiology.
I'd use this skill to make a lot of money quickly and retire early.
(02:56):
Sorry this is a boring answer i'm sure you could make up some
joke about getting paid to knock people out happy father's
day gentlemen thank you yeah i
we do this podcast it's very similar we put people
to sleep yeah we're
an anesthesiologist uh anesthesiologist
(03:16):
by trade put that
on the linkedin profile now podcaster and anesthesia
i cure insomnia real well yeah and
our buddy kyle he's also listening on the show uh tonight he's on the live stream
um cooking like a five-star chef um just take that instant skill and no need
(03:39):
to make it absurd there you go oh no you gotta cook like a five-star chef but
then you make burnt toast or something,
Yeah. Burned toast. You only make grilled cheese sandwiches.
Actually, I thought of one. Yes. That I was really talented at chewing gum and fighting crime with it.
(04:00):
Like you can throw it and stop a criminal by throwing it under a shoe.
I don't think that's a skill you're going to get from the Matrix.
Well, aiming. You got to aim. Tank is looking through his cards going,
sorry, man. I'm fighting crime. What?
Let me see what I can whip together in Python. Yeah. What about you? Do you got one?
(04:26):
You know me, I always want to know every language in the world.
So I want to speak and understand every language on the planet,
and then I would use it to tell dad jokes.
There you go. Okay. That's a good one.
That's a good one. All right. shall we move on
that's all we got oh email we had an email that came in I think it came in well
(04:55):
around the time we did our 20th anniversary show and I apologize I forgot to
put it in here but Avner Braverman a long time listener,
he said happy 20th birthday Technorama and happy belated 60 Chuck one third
of a lifetime is a lifetime.
(05:16):
And he said thanks Chuck and Craig for taking me on this journey with you yeah
oh my gosh I've been podcasting for a third of my life,
although if I was 20 it'd be my whole life but be a little tough to podcast
when you're newborn yeah well we're glad you came along for the journey too Abner,
thank you 20 years we've seen many teenagers go into their 30s.
(05:43):
I keep thinking, we got some of those little IDs from people's children,
and now they're finished college and are married or something. Uh-huh.
Yeah. Yeah, we're not going to talk about old again.
We'll need to start a new podcast, the Old Man Podcast, where we talk about
our injuries and our medications and our latest surgeries.
(06:06):
Yeah. What was in the AARP magazine this month?
You know, I lost the tennis ball off my walker. You know, Ralph Macchio is 63.
I do know that. That's amazing. He was in the, he was in the latest AARP magazine.
He said, yeah, my mom read this article.
Okay then. He, he does look amazing for his age. I mean, he looks like.
(06:30):
But he doesn't look as goofy and dopey as he was when he was a kid.
Well, maybe not, but he doesn't look dissimilar. Like, you know,
some people, they don't age very well.
Right. He looks about like he always has, for the most part.
Yep. All right, now we're done with that part. Let's move on to the history.
Oh, by the way, we look mostly like him.
(06:52):
You had a gray beard when you were 18? Maybe.
Music.
(08:43):
Isn't this just smashing? We can dance for 20 minutes.
That same date in 1981, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, the first operational aircraft.
Music.
(13:10):
Look forward to seeing you there. All right. On with the news with a random cyan-colored button.
Aren't you going to say, good news, everyone? Oh, I just said that for Fry's benefit.
Oh, I hear Farnsworth's voice, and I go, do I need anything for the parade?
Good news, everyone. The parade is over. That's one of my lines. You can go home now.
(13:34):
Yeah. I was telling somebody just the other day, when we do the parade,
the magic of it is you can go about 10 feet. and use the same jokes again.
Just like a Disney exhibition. Those animatronics are just saying the same lines
every 30 seconds. New people walk in.
Yeah, the one thing I was trying to do, and sometimes it works,
(13:58):
especially when you get into the thicker crowds that are on each side.
I try to get each one to yell louder than the other side, but we're kind of
moving forward. So you have to really run from one side to the other.
I'm already getting tired thinking about it.
The older you get, the harder it gets. And the hotter it gets,
the further into the parade you go. Oh, yeah.
(14:20):
Yeah, I'm sitting there with a pizza box. Everybody scream, make some noise.
And they go to the other side, make some noise. And sometimes they do,
and sometimes they don't.
Right. All right, first article comes to us from Earth.com. That states,
a thousand-foot megatsunami could erase parts of the U.S.
Scientists say it's happened before.
Wait, that's ominous. We need that more. I don't even know if I have the reverb
(14:41):
on this channel anymore.
It's happened before. Nope. Okay. Well, I am clearly not using the right profile.
You know what I think it is? Hang on.
No, I don't want to change it mid-show. I think I know exactly what it is.
I think I know exactly what it is. I'm on the live stream profile instead of
the podcast profile. Right.
(15:02):
Half hour into the show later. I got it. I got it.
Yeah. All right. Well, back to the thousand foot tsunami. Yes, they can happen.
There have been localized ones like in Latuya Bay in 1950.
Oh, what year was that? You know, I was hoping our cruise ship would go by Latuya Bay, but it didn't.
(15:23):
Latuya Bay. 1958, when a big landslide came down, went right into this kind
of narrow bay or fjord and caused a huge wave,
1,700 feet high, just erased all the trees and topsoil from the hillsides.
We did not go by it. But if you look on Google Maps, you can still see this
(15:44):
differentiation in the old trees versus the newer trees.
Newer trees now coming up on 70 years old.
And there's been other instances when geologists look at like the Cascadia range.
Just the whole West Coast from California up to Canada, where we've got the
(16:07):
subduction going on, that can cause tsunamis or even the 2011 earthquake,
the one that took out the Fukushima nuclear power plant. That one.
They send out big ones, but there's evidence that the tsunami,
the headline says the tsunami can erase part of the coastline or part of the land.
(16:31):
What more often happens is as the plate is subducting, the other plate that
it's going under is gradually lifting. And then when it releases, it sinks rapidly.
So that's why you see like all these sunken houses in Alaska from the 1964 earthquake.
(16:53):
It's that the land has almost reset back to its natural state rather than being
uplifted by the pressure.
So it's happened. You get reverberations in the displacement of water and it causes tsunamis.
Yeah. If there was a major underwater landslide or uplift, like we saw in 2004.
(17:17):
Um, in, in, not the, in that, not Taiwan,
um, Thailand area that, that was, um, well, like a 40 foot thrust fault that
just went along hundreds of miles.
Uh, yeah, you can, you can get some immediate stuff going on.
(17:39):
So I think the one, the one you were talking about from Alaska,
I was just looking at this and said it was, uh, it reached a hundred or 1700 feet.
In Latuya Bay, yeah. Yeah. Yep. That is crazy. There were three people.
There were three boats out there in the harbor that day.
Two of them got knocked over, but one of them had time to turn their bow into
the wave and actually kind of rode it out and survived.
(18:02):
Gosh. Can you imagine seeing that? It's like on, you saw Interstellar, right? Dad?
You know, Dad's driving the boat the other way and the boy's fishing off the back end going, Dad?
Yeah. Hey, shut up, son. I'm trying to fish.
Hand me a beer. You saw Interstellar, right? Yes.
(18:23):
Yeah, Interstellar, remember they were on the water. They landed in water,
and they were like, the horizon doesn't look right.
It's like a huge tsunami. It's probably bigger than this. It's huge.
A lot of the article focuses on
the West Coast of America, but this could happen in other places as well.
They also said that many of these places now have advanced earthquake,
(18:46):
seismic, and tsunami warning systems in place.
So we're better equipped than we were, but when you look at something as recent
as 2004, and they were caught off guard, because that's not a common place for
tsunamis, it makes you go, hmm, maybe we need a more global system in place.
Because you just because the earthquake happens in one place the tsunami is
(19:10):
going to happen in another place right,
exactly okay next article.
We are starting to get pictures back from Hayabusa
2 well actually the the uh the satellite
that landed on Ryugu a few years ago a couple years ago 2018 2018 yeah 2018
(19:34):
they dropped out I don't know what took them so long to release these photos
but hey we're starting to get them and you're breaking up a little bit there
what was it a couple years from now we're going hello yeah hi,
can you i think we lost chuck no i'm still
here i'm still recording audio and i can hear you right well yeah you're breaking
(19:55):
up you're falling off that's okay the audio recording is fine that's all i care
about yeah that's all like go ahead okay so continue on satellite uh mission went out to the meteor.
Where do we go? Hayabusa 2 dropped toward the surface of the asteroid Ryugu from 135 meters up.
(20:15):
They took pictures on the way down and the little deployment satellite was called Mascot.
And on the way down, they took pictures. And now they're showing us these pictures
and go, So, wow, this looks a lot like carbonaceous chondrites for you geologists out there.
(20:37):
There's some bluish rubble. There's some reddish rubble. There's some whitish rubble.
So, I don't know why it took them so long to release these photos.
I don't know either. I was trying to figure out that because it is a current,
well, oh, wait. I'm sorry.
I just see that it was published in August of 2019.
(21:00):
This article that you got from.
I guess it showed up in my feed. Well, it's timely because one of the other
missions is to bring back some of the rock samples, which is coming up in 2020,
late 26. Is that what it was?
Yeah. I love looking at these pictures, though, because it looks like they took
a picture of the ocean floor.
(21:22):
It has that kind of feel about it.
But there's, like, no sediment.
It's very granular. Yeah, I don't think this one is quite as loose as the previous
one we went to and brought samples back.
I was listening to an astronomy cast, and they were saying, I think we need,
because this one landed, bounced, and then landed upside down and was able to right itself somehow.
(21:47):
And I forget if it was Fraser or Pamela that said, we just need to have self-writing
mechanisms on all satellites now.
Yeah. So when they tip over, you know, I think about those little cars that
you drive, the little RC cars that you drive around, if they tip over,
you've got that like curved arm that would pop out of the roof to push them
(22:08):
back up onto their wheels. Yeah.
Or how about the NASA rover that went and it bounced.
It was in that thing and it opens up and no matter which direction it is,
the, the leaves that would open up would actually write it, you know, you know, pop it over.
But yeah, it should be able to do it.
(22:32):
It's due to return to Earth late next year. Well, if this is in 2019,
probably already came back.
Yeah. That's us. Timely news. Only five years out of date.
Hey, I just saw the pictures and I was like, oh, wow, this is cool.
I thought the date was newer, but I will.
Something that's not out of date, we'll move on to Fortune magazine or fortune.com,
(22:53):
is you may have known that recently Bill Adkinson, famous developer,
passed away on June 7th. You're going to skip the Adam one picture?
What time? We have a story. There's a story in between them.
We do. The photo of the first ever photo of a single Adam.
You snuck that in on me. It's been there. Oh, okay. Well, I didn't get a chance
to read this. Why don't you cover it?
(23:14):
All right. So physicist David Nadlinger of the University of Oxford,
he captured the first ever picture a photograph
of a single atom eight years ago and yes
this is a current article not but he
won it was winning he ran a top uh top award for
for this photo and it looks amazing it looks like a almost like a top or something
(23:37):
like a toy or something it doesn't look quite right the photograph does not
show the atom's nucleus but rather the electron cloud surrounding it which interacts
with light uh to create the little gold spokes.
I think that's what i was just saying the i thought
the blue part was the electron cloud that would be the astronium was uh astronium
(24:01):
was chosen uh astronium was the material uh for sustainability and quantum physics
experiments particularly for cooling and it's multiple isotopes for comparative
studies. I don't know what the...
It may be dug somewhere in the article, but I don't remember what the arms are for.
But it just looks mesmerizing a little bit, I think.
(24:25):
What do you think? This guy looks like he's going to try and pick it up.
Yeah, he's trying to. He dropped it. Oh, crap. My boss is going to kill me.
This kind of looks like a corporate logo. Yeah, a corporate logo, yeah.
Actually, remember we did a skit here on Technorama. With the iPod Femto?
(24:53):
Yeah. Pico, whatever it was. Yeah.
Femto, I think. It was so small you couldn't even see it.
Yeah, and then the guy accidentally drops it in the carpet at the – I'm sorry.
Good memories, man. Good memories. All right. Now we move on to Bill Atkinson.
Yes. Sad news. He passed away.
(25:14):
So, interesting programmer. He joined Apple in 78 when they were a couple of
years old and actually declined their first offer.
He said, nah, I don't think I want to do that. But then he met with Steve Jobs
for about three hours and he was talking to him.
He said, imagine being on the tip of a wave.
(25:35):
Do you want to ride? Do you want to surf that wave or do we be paddling behind
the wave where it's boring and dull?
Where they have sugar water. It's exhilarating. And then join Apple and make
your dent in the universe.
I mean, Steve was a pretty charismatic and convincing guy. Mm-hmm.
So Bill joined, and this is when the Apple II was still the main product, which became the 2E,
(26:02):
the 2+, the 2C, the 2C+, blah, blah, blah, and then eventually onto the 3 and
the Lisa and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But partway into this, Bill says, yeah, basic's all right.
And Steve was going, yeah, that's all we need for a programming language.
It's what everybody else uses. he said but it's not
you're not thinking about the future i think
(26:25):
i think we need to think bigger and he goes well convince
me you've got six days yeah so bill
goes off and writes a pascal compiler
in six days which is nothing
short of miraculous i don't know if he got any sleep during that
time or he already had one in his back pocket that he was
(26:45):
able to port hey or he just
said this code we'll compile it and then he goes here's the compiled
code he asked he he went to the future and
asked gen ai to create right it just
takes two days round trip to get there and back yeah
so he was able to do this and then he earned a lot of respect
from steve job so apparently you have to do a herculean effort to
(27:07):
win steve's favor that's right and um yeah he designed and implemented the hyper
card yes it's very very popular um and yeah i mean this has got a lot of a lot
of uh achievements here it's pretty pretty amazing as far as apple goes the guy was 78,
(27:28):
no what how old is he.
Oh, he was 74. I'm sorry. 74. That's right. Yeah. I'm sorry.
I didn't realize what you were asking. But yeah, he was 74. He died. It's not that old.
No, it's not. But you can't judge your life by others, Chuck. Oh, I never have.
(27:48):
There you go. All right. I mean, once in a while I look at it and go,
wow, that guy did all right. He's a CEO and I remember creating his user account.
Or you say, oh, an actor passed away and he was 56. I'm like,
hey, wait, that's how old I am.
Ooh. I look at it like you and I have both outlived Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson,
so we're doing all right.
Yeah. We don't have their money, but we're doing all right. Well,
(28:11):
do you want their money? Actually, they don't have their money anymore.
You can't take it with you.
They don't have it. It's pretty cold. What? Too soon?
I was talking to my daughter, Julie, this morning. Since we're going into that
dark, crazy area. Right.
And somehow we got on the conversation, oh, of like toxic spills.
(28:38):
And I mentioned Love Canal and she wasn't sure what that was.
So she Googled it real fast and I described it to her.
The company that was burying barrels of toxic chemicals up by Niagara Falls.
And then they built a neighborhood over this and suddenly people have green
ooze in their basement and little Billy's getting cancer.
Then it was a major step for the EPA and it was the first super fun project.
(29:06):
Like, okay, nobody's living there anymore.
And then she said, oh, at work, they have a high school intern.
And he had his first like run in with the chemicals, you know,
where you kind of spill it on your hands and you got to run to the sink and rinse off your hands.
Like, oh, should have been wearing gloves. And she said, isn't that cute?
(29:28):
Jimmy got his first toxic spill.
Wow. Wow. How do you play that? Like, that's cute.
You know, you did pretty good for 18, but, you know, Bob over there,
he was 15 when he first got spilled on.
May he rest in peace.
(29:49):
Wow he made it to 24 but you know after about 18 it wasn't pleasant after 18,
goodness we were just we were just going all over the map on this dark crazy
humor it's a good thing ocean doesn't stop by very often,
(30:11):
or I said no you gotta do like a monster's ink Jimmy, Jimmy,
2319, 2319, start stripping down.
We got to shave your head. Even though it's a joke.
You make it a joke. So he's got to walk around with a shaved head for the next year.
And then. That's how he haze our intern. Julie has to say, well,
(30:32):
bald looks good on you. You should have seen how it looked on me.
Oh boy. Yeah. I love having those conversations with my daughter.
Good family times. All right, we move on to Remember When. There we go.
(30:55):
And hover over this thing and it's got a whole bunch of waveforms on it.
Oh, yeah. From Hackaday.com, we have a video and article that talks about the
Kansas City standard for writing data to audio. tapes.
So way back in the 70s and early 80s when you.
(31:17):
Music.
(32:27):
Really thought about this too much. I didn't think it was this complex.
He goes and builds a little circuit with some 555 chips and some op amps to
clean up the signal and whatnot, some inverters, and gets it to work.
Through a couple of janky cables, he plugs a USB into his laptop and hits play
on his circuit, and out comes the basic program for the old Star Trek game,
(32:55):
at 300 baud, because that was the speed at which they did this.
So he said, five minutes later, I got my basic program.
But that's really fascinating, because I knew you could, you know,
you could even go out to some of these sites today and say, hey,
I want to load, you know, some Apple games.
(33:15):
And they will send you the audio file and says, okay, press play,
go to your computer, hit load.
Yeah. Oh, neat. and good luck finding a phone that has a headphone jack anymore,
but with some clever hoo-ha, you can get that converted.
But he said, on the next video, I'm going to show you how to encode.
(33:39):
So that'll be interesting. That's interesting.
I have a lot of memories of reading and writing my programs from cassette on the Commodore.
I never had to do that. I got started with floppy drives. I mean,
outside of punch cards for the Fortran programs.
It was okay. But, yeah, you would run into the eventual problem that sometimes
(34:02):
you need to have a bad cassette. I mean, it happens.
And so your program doesn't come back. So I'm trying to think how did I test. I think...
I think there was a test. Was there a test function? You can kind of double check.
Anyway, and of course, there's been a couple of times when I overwrote one program
(34:29):
with another and it wasn't at the beginning and didn't wipe out the entire,
like it was shorter than the program that I overwrote.
So it was like, when am I getting all this other extra crap?
Yeah. So yeah, I would, you know, I have fond memories for screwing around with
that stuff. I certainly don't want to go back. I hate tapes.
(34:50):
This podcast is being saved on cassette, by the way. Oh, gosh.
And you got to FedEx it to me so I can post it. Yeah. Well, you're going to have to decode it.
Decode it. Because I'm not just sending you the waveform. Yeah.
It's on paper. I'm sending you.
No, I wouldn't just record the waveform to cassette and send you.
(35:12):
That'd be too easy. I record the audio to the computer and then encode all the
binary files to the cassette.
Hey, have you ever listened to a program on cassette? Yeah, it sounds kind of like a modem.
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, it does sound different. I think it's because of the
bit rate and you don't have all the error checking and hand checking and stuff.
(35:34):
But the program itself, it sounds similar to the phone, you know, like a dial-up.
It's similar because they only use those two frequencies.
And the other thing I found very similar is they had start bits and stop bits, just like a modem.
So no parity. No parity. So it was 8N2, I guess that would be.
(35:59):
Yeah, I guess, something like that.
Fun stuff, if you want to go take a look. I thought it was fascinating if you're
interested in how they did things back then.
These guys, it looked like they literally sketched out the protocol and said, there, we're done, go.
I'm sure it was a little more formalized than that, because I think the sketches
were looking at this particular engineer drawing. I think I saw a coffee stain on the corner.
(36:24):
Could be. I'll tell you, though, that was a nightmare. You work really hard.
I'll tell you what. All right.
I used a floppy for a long time, but early on, I had a cassette and I just remember writing programs.
Some of them were, you know, you copy them out of a magazine or it's a game
or something or writing your own, saving it.
And then I would save it on another cassette just in case the first one didn't
(36:48):
work. You know, it's like save it twice. Backup copies.
Yeah. Sometimes I would do that. Sometimes, you know, you just go, okay, one's enough.
The dumb people would flip the cassette over and go, now I'm going to be a backup
on this side. No, when you flip it over, you got foreigner.
Journey or something. Flip it over, it's right protected. Yeah.
(37:09):
Good times, man. Builds character. Yeah, it makes you a lot more aware of protecting your data.
Yeah. Where is it? How many copies do I have? Is it retrievable?
Disaster recovery or fault tolerance. A lot of those concepts were ingrained
in you as a young programmer.
(37:31):
The other one that I liked was that you were very limited on memory on a lot
of those early computers.
So you had to be a little more creative and efficient in the way that you'd
design some of that stuff.
One of the games we used to play was called Robot Wars. And you had to fit everything.
Into like 255 bytes or something ridiculous.
So you couldn't make this fancy robot or it'd be too slow.
(37:54):
So if you said, move, look, read, shoot, move, look, read, shoot,
another robot would just come along and go.
I'm just going to sit in this corner and go, look, shoot, look,
shoot, look, shoot. And it pretty much destroyed everything else.
Right. Well, I wrote, we've talked about this before.
I wrote my own bulletin board system. And I wasn't really thinking about the
(38:18):
memory footprint. It was all in basic.
I was writing the whole thing. And I remember getting to the point,
I was focused on functionality more than I was on how big my program was getting.
And it got to the point where I just, I don't remember what the actual effect
was, but I just remember getting to the point where I couldn't,
(38:41):
um, you know, write anymore.
I had to go back and make some of the things, uh, shorter so I could fit all the code in. Yep.
Yeah. I had too many lines of code and I was like, why didn't I learn assembly?
You know it'd have been a little different but it was
funny how i remember hitting that wall at
(39:04):
one time with my with the clipboard the
famous then you start taking some of those slower routines and writing them
in assembly so you can call them from basic i
probably should have that's that's what we ended up doing on our bulletin
board only it was started in pascal so a lot of the underlying
routines were in well part of my problem i
had uh part of the reason i was eating up so much memory is i was i had printed
(39:29):
out you know or had to print out a clipboard as part of the memory the menu
system so it looked like you you were handed a clipboard and had the menu on
it so i was drawing out all the characters trying to make it look like a,
clipboard i had in my room i remember the clipboard too just tried to make it.
Curved at the top speaking of printouts every every once
(39:50):
in a while i would do a full printout
of software that i would write especially the ones that was that
was a backup mechanism too it was also a good way to scan and go is there anything
i can move is there anything i can improve upon so you could kind of do a code
review of the code before it went out but that got a little ridiculous after
(40:10):
i didn't have that kind of qc i was just writing this for myself,
Hey, when it's your job, you take it seriously.
I didn't say it was my own endeavor.
All right, let's move on to the patrons.
We're winding it down. So we want to give a huge thank you to our patrons who donated.
(40:31):
They went over to patreon.com slash technoramapodcast for as little as a dollar a show.
They support this. They keep us financially in the green.
So far, we're a little in the black, but that's because we had some unexpected
expenses and took some time off for family travel.
We're in green. We're in green.
(40:52):
Black is good. Red is... We're in... Counting in school.
The numbers have parentheses around. That's bad, right? Yeah.
Thank you. Alexis Duran, Amber Elstad, Amy Bowen, Abner Braverman,
Ben Vaughn, Brad Miller, Brian Brown, Chris Martinez, Chris MC, Dan B.
(41:14):
Mancoyer, Dean Jensen, Denise Inglis, Gary Lindos, Jason Pollard,
John Clifford, John Noble, Yorgish Rowan, thank you Crazy Joe,
Kyle Nishioka, Leon, Mark Kilfoyle, Mike Wills, Saturday morning media,
Stephen Weshy, Steve Cody, Steve Therrien, Steve Webb, Steve London, and Tim Cook.
They. all went over to put it on the screen craig i'm working on it and getting
(41:36):
there patreon.com slash technorama podcast good thing we don't pay you by the hour,
it's a good thing we don't pay you i think i'm tenured now let's just stop there
it's a good thing we don't i've got i've got tenure here now uh 10 years is
about as long as it takes too,
(41:59):
So thank you very much to all those people for keeping us going.
Now we get into the part of the show where Craig and I talk about things we've
watched, read, seen, heard about, started rumors, accused people of. Yeah.
I'm going to start because I got four, you got three. That means I'll start and end. Go ahead.
(42:19):
So the first one that I mentioned earlier is on Netflix, just came out on Wednesday,
Titan, the Ocean Gate Disaster, where they talk about not only what happened, but why.
And why it was such a bad idea. And I actually saw a follow-up on this on one
of the YouTube channels that I follow called Ocean Liner Designs.
And they said, yeah, no, this was just somebody not paying attention to the
(42:42):
lessons learned of the past.
Since the 1930s, we've been using spherical containers for our submarines.
And this guy, spherical steel, titanium, alloy, or whatever it was,
but it was always spherical.
And the most you could ever fit in there was about three people.
Well, this guy goes, well, I need to fit more.
(43:03):
So I'm going to go with a cylinder and make it out of carbon fiber.
And everybody went, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. But he didn't listen.
Actually, they may have been okay if they not use carbon fiber, right?
Well, what we learned from Virgin, because Richard Branson made something similar
out of carbon fiber, the deep flyer, I forget what it was called.
(43:24):
But he said, it's good for one use, because every time you go down,
you're stressing it more and more and more. You're basically breaking the fibers.
Right. And this wasn't the first time that guy had been down there,
right? It's not the first time, but every time gets more and more dangerous.
And they put in acoustic sensors, so you could hear this thing going, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
(43:47):
And I would have been out as soon as I heard that started to happen,
regardless of whether it was the first mission or the last.
Right. They're also bolted in. You're not getting out of this thing.
Like many submersibles, unfortunately. Oh, they screw you. Yeah. Hard close it.
But the acoustic sensors were touted as one of the safety features.
(44:09):
Like, oh, we will use this data to know when it's unsafe.
Because even though it's starting to wear and tear, you don't know when that moment is coming.
It's a bit like, oh, we're getting some seismograph readings.
The volcano's about to blow. But you don't know when the volcano is about to
blow until it actually goes.
I don't know. Right. I don't know. And that's kind of what happened.
(44:33):
And Stockton got a little cocky and created a culture of listen to me or it's my way or the highway.
And some people did go. Infecting his, not his lead engineer,
but the guy in church of operations. I can't remember his name.
But he spoke up. He left. And then he carried a lawsuit against him going, look, do you...
(44:55):
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Then there was a countersuit and they ran out of
money, so he had to drop it.
And he's kind of the hero in all this going, look, I tried to tell you,
I tried to tell you, I tried to warn everybody, but the acoustic sensors were basically ignored.
So the one feature that they had that said, oh, they're luring people in for
(45:17):
a quarter million of a trip, you're like, it's safe, no problem.
And if they started, they also did not certify the thing.
It has to be rated and they skipped that because if you want to carry passengers
for money, you have to have it rated and certified to a certain amount of depth.
(45:38):
So they sort of skipped that step and went, oh, these aren't passengers,
they're mission specialists.
It was just hokey on all levels and i feel bad for the people who lost their lives.
Okay yeah it's terrible i would know i was uh i was just i knew that you said that,
carbon fiber should not go down more than once but i was just saying that wasn't
(46:02):
the first time that he went down right so i imagine it was pretty starting to
get stressed there was also an element of like the Challenger disaster where
they left it out in Canada all winter and they said, no, this, and the lead engineer,
the lead engineer is going, you cannot let this freeze.
If there's any moisture in there, it's going to really, you know,
(46:23):
destroy this thing. Why would they put it there?
They were, they were supposed to bring it back to the Seattle area and they
did not because of cost considerations.
So taking it to Canada was cheaper. Yeah.
Storing it in St. John outside was another dumb move. So anyway.
With a tractor, you know, sitting beside the tractor out there.
(46:43):
Oh, it'll be fine until next week. Two years ago.
I remember when that broke like it was yesterday. Anyway, what have you been watching?
All right. So I thought I would go through Netflix has a lot of Hitchcock films started this month.
So I thought I would watch some that I haven't seen or hadn't seen in a long time.
Uh i had not really watched rear window
(47:05):
so i watched it and that was a lot
of that was it was a good movie uh like i like
jimmy stewart and he is
a news photographer that broke his
leg and so he's kind of laid up in a
chair with a a crazy large
cast on becomes a peeping tom and kind
(47:26):
of becomes a peeping tom and he he suspects this guy uh
murdered his wife so then the shenanigans kind
of go along and you can watch the you know he starts
watching everybody and he knows everybody's routines and we're filming a reality
show get over it yeah you know what i thought was interesting and that you know
this movie take uh i guess it takes place but it was filmed like in the 50s
(47:47):
and i never really thought about this but you're watching how much.
Suggested sex was happening.
Now, they didn't really show it, but it was like, oh, that guy's in this older lady's room.
You know what he's wanting to do and what they're going to do.
And then that kind of stuff, I was like, I just thought that was although they
(48:13):
were tasteful about it, it just seemed a little out of place.
I never really thought that they suggested that kind of stuff,
that much stuff in movies back then.
I saw shadows on the shades. There were shadows and arms and legs everywhere.
I swear they were getting busy.
(48:33):
You know, all the real bear chicka wah-wah kind of stuff.
And I did think it was funny when his girlfriend was going to stay over,
and everybody was like, even his friend that came by was like, does the landlord know?
Like the landlady. Like he had to have some kind of permission from the landlady
to have an extra guest over.
Just, you know, that was kind of laughable. But hey, sign of the times.
(48:57):
But it was a good movie. I enjoyed it. Oh, we're getting shamed from the chat.
Mike says, no shout out for the few lucky listeners. Yes, we will give you a
shout out. We got Mike and Kyle out there.
Thank you for joining us. We do this show Sundays at 9.30 Eastern time.
If you'd like to join us, set your watch, set your clock, set your computer, set your calendar.
And we look forward to seeing you there. You can be part of these shenanigans
(49:20):
as well. Just look for Technorama Podcast, wherever you find podcasts, videos.
You'll find us. We'll be there most weeks. All right.
Let's get on with it. I've been watching more disasters and bad news stories.
The Oklahoma City bombing, American Terror, also on Netflix.
(49:41):
Obviously, there's been other documentaries about it.
This was sort of a chronological time by, you know, moment by moment with stories
that were of people that were buried in the rubble and recovered.
Oh, wow. Yeah, the, you know, this lawyer and that investigator and this cop and,
(50:02):
you know, there was a heartwarming moment in there when the town really pulled
together and said, look, we got lines around the block for people that need to donate blood.
We've got people coming in with food and blankets. And, you know,
it was, there was some good that came out of this.
There were a few recordings of Timothy McVeigh. It was kind of interesting to
(50:26):
revisit this from a standpoint of, you know, Timothy McVeigh,
losing the actor's names, Terry Nichols was in there.
And then Michael Fourier, I think was the other guy who was somewhat involved,
(50:47):
only insofar that he had prior knowledge. That was his crime.
And he didn't say or do anything. He knew what they were up to.
So just crazy stuff.
And what was it? There were some people that said he probably shouldn't have
(51:09):
got the death penalty, but he should have got life so that he could suffer.
And I'm saying, no, because then he would be spouting rhetoric from prison that
would inspire other people.
So I'm not saying one way or the other that the death penalty is a good thing
or a bad thing. But we've seen it time and time again. When you let people linger,
they're just going to get a following.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if there's a right answer there, to be honest with you.
(51:34):
So, all right. So the next thing I watched was Predator, Killer of Killers.
That sounds intriguing.
I watched it last night. You're familiar with the Predator series, right?
Not the series. I know. The only Predator I've watched was the original movie.
Yes. Okay. So there's one I
would recommend to you if you're interested at all in this kind of
(51:57):
stuff is predator prey and that one
came out a few years ago i
forget when but the predator was had come
to earth uh in the past you know
not he wasn't time travel but it just he had
come in a time when the indians were on the land
and he was attacking this one one
(52:17):
and the the indian lady was fighting you know was successful in fighting anyway
so this kind of picks up from there a little bit and there's three different
time periods this is a anthology kind of series there's three stories and they
come together at the end there's you know they're all tied together.
(52:38):
And uh it was animated it was fantastic it was there there was hardly any dialogue
in the entire movie it was probably
about a handful of lines just a lot of grunting and snorting or the you
know, the kind of sound that the predators make, but it, but it wasn't,
it was, it was amazing.
(52:59):
The story they were telling without any words is the thing.
So there was some dialogue in a couple of stories, but it wasn't a whole lot.
And so you see the predators doing their thing or three different predators,
three different time periods.
And again, it comes together at the end and it's really cool.
And I'm not going to say anything more because it will spoil it. but it just came out.
(53:23):
So, um, but if you liked the predator mythos, it's good.
And this also leads into, um, there's a predator badlands that comes out in
November. It's a live action movie. And this kind of, um, feeds into that. Nice. Yeah.
All right. I'm sticking with the Netflix theme once again. I watched a documentary
(53:45):
called- Your money's worth out of Netflix.
I am. It's been a while. It's been a lot of YouTube lately.
But this one's called Britain and the Blitz. So I learned a lot.
I didn't realize, A, it was eight months that the Germans were bombing England.
(54:05):
And I also learned how extensive it was. I didn't realize it was that long.
Yeah, I thought it was like a couple of weeks.
No, it went on and on. And how far inland they penetrated.
I thought, oh, they bombed London, turned around and went home,
or maybe some of the cities on the south coast.
They were as far as Glasgow, up in Scotland.
(54:27):
Yeah. They were hitting targets in Wales, which is weird because when they started
bombing London, a lot of the families sent their kids out to the country.
And some of them went to Wales and they were not really received well there,
because the Welsh were going, you're dumping your kids on us.
(54:52):
We already have families and it was during the coal strike. So they're not exactly
in economical stability to support more mouths to feed.
And then they get picked on in school and one kid was saying,
I'd come home to my temporary mom and she'd go, what's the matter with you?
(55:14):
You get kicked out of London and now you come here and pick fights. Like, wow.
Well, nice supportive mother or stepmom or whatever. What's your problem?
So it was a tough time all around. And I also didn't realize that initially
the government did not open up the underground, the tube for shelters. Yeah.
(55:36):
People were having makeshift shelters wherever they could. Were they worried
about it collapsing to her easily?
Collapsing, maybe disrupting service. I don't know what the rationale was,
but a group of people went into, it wasn't Harrods.
It was the Savoy, the fancy, swanky hotel that had a shelter.
(55:58):
So they just kind of took over and went, we're going to stay here for a while.
And the police came by and said, you can't stay here. Then give us an alternative, like the tube.
And that's when things kind of turned around. I think Mike is referring to this,
the lack of air conditioning. Something about the lack of air conditioning.
That's been up there for a while.
That's been up there for about eight minutes. Okay. I'm not sure what he's talking
(56:21):
about. Yeah, it was a while ago.
So Britain and the Blitz, if you want to learn more. And I got to admit,
the footage on this thing is unfreaking believable.
Really? It's colorized. It's
like high def. Some of this you'd swear they took with a phone last week.
There's a picture of a guy using an iPhone to record.
(56:42):
There's a couple of times where you go, okay, that, you know,
this lady's handling coal and the coal is like really shiny black.
And it's something wrong with this picture, but it's the restoration process
that they used. Shining their coal.
Polishing that lump of coal. That doesn't sound right. But there were a few
scenes, but most of it was darn impressive.
(57:04):
The airplane shots, the runways.
Occasionally, you'd see a plane flying through a cloud of smoke.
It's like, okay, the colorization was a little off on that part,
but I'm willing to forgive that because the rest was just superb.
Best restored film I've ever seen. Wow. I'll have to go check that out.
(57:28):
I've seen a lot of people on YouTube restore video using AI or even enhancing
the Deep Space Nine intro because it's not HD.
And so they enhance it, and you're like, wow, that really looks good. Or even Voyager.
Drew has joined us. Hey, Drew. He hasn't been around for a while. Good to see you, buddy.
(57:51):
So the next thing I saw was Fountain of Youth, which is on Apple TV.
And it is kind of like national treasure and maybe a small piece of indiana jones um so,
john krasinski and crew natalie portman
uh her both of them their siblings and then they've got a couple other people
(58:14):
that are with them they go and they they're searching for the fountain of youth
the one guy is bankrolling the whole thing and he said that he has um some terminal
cancer and he's hoping that when they find this fountain of youth,
it will heal him and he can go on his way. Well, uh...
I won't ruin it again. It just came out not too long ago, so I'm not going to
(58:36):
go in too deep with it. But I thought it was okay.
I looked at Rotten Tomatoes had it at 36%. So I was like, I probably liked it
a little bit more now, but it wasn't much.
I'll be honest with you. It was okay. Okay. Yeah.
My fourth one, back to Netflix and staying in Britain for this theme.
(59:00):
It's called Fred and Rose West, a British horror story.
So the story starts in the early 90s with the report of children saying,
you know, dad's always saying you better behave.
They were, they had like 10 kids, not all of them from their marriage.
(59:22):
Rose, he met Rose. Fred West was like 27 and Rose was about 15.
When they met and within a month she was pregnant.
So, you know, they just eventually ended up with 10 kids, some from his previous
marriage and some from them.
And the kids were saying, dad's always saying you better behave or you'll end
(59:44):
up like your sister under the back patio.
And finally the police started listening. They go, we're going to start digging up the back patio.
And they found one of the daughters, Heather, who hadn't been seen in eight years.
So no one's heard from her since July of 1986. And now it's 1994.
(01:00:07):
She's under the back patio. She was buried under the back patio.
They're like, okay, how'd she get there?
She crawled under. What happened? And you find out that Fred killed her. Wow.
But Rose knew nothing about this. And then they said, well, is that all?
He goes, yeah, that's all you're going to find.
But they kept digging, and they found another body and another body.
(01:00:28):
And one guy says, wait a minute, why are they being buried in the backyard?
Unless there was nowhere else to bury them. So they start digging in the house.
It was a convenient spot. They dig up the cellar.
Oh, no. And they found more bodies. And, of course, Fred's going,
that's all there is. And Rose knows nothing about this.
And Rose is going out about, I can't believe it.
(01:00:51):
He would do this to me. and she's protesting her innocence and he's clearly trying to protect her.
And there was one woman... These murders go back like 20 years into the early 70s and late 60s.
So he's clearly a sexual predator...
(01:01:13):
And that, you know, has been killing, but he didn't always kill.
There was one woman who said, I was their nanny in 1969.
You know, they tied me up, they sexually assaulted me, and I got away.
They didn't say how she got away, but she reported that.
And then that's when they said, you know, Fred and... She said,
(01:01:37):
the way they lured me into the car was because Rose was there.
It made it easier for them because just a strange man comes up to a young woman
and says, hey, you want a ride?
But if there's a woman in the car, they become more trusting.
So they were trying to – the prosecution was trying to say, Rose is in on this,
(01:01:59):
even though they're denying this. Rose was in on this.
And then at some point, Rose changed her mind and Fred thought that was a sign
of betrayal. And he said, all right, woman, I'm going to spill the beans.
Woman. You are, you're going down with me.
Well, they couldn't really prove anything until they went back to their first house.
(01:02:26):
This is like, there's nine bodies or so in the, and two in a cornfield out somewhere.
They're up to like 11 bodies.
And they said, hang on. Wow. There's this daughter from his first marriage that
disappeared shortly after he met
Rose, back when they were not on Cromwell Street, but on Midland Street.
(01:02:49):
So they keep bringing Fred back to the crime scene going, Fred, where did you bury...
What was her name? Not Caroline. It was something like that.
And he points at the wall. He buried her in the wall. Oh, no.
She's in the wall? She's in the wall.
They finally put the pieces together and said, wait, when did she die?
(01:03:09):
And they were looking for pictures because they went to this forensic scientist
who was doing these facial analysis.
You have the skull, but they wanted to put the digital face from a picture.
He said, I don't have any good pictures of this girl.
And suddenly this picture emerges where she's smiling. She's looking at the camera.
The lighting is good. And they said, she died while Fred was in prison for this other infraction.
(01:03:36):
That means Rose had to have done it. Yeah.
And that's what they got her on. So they're about to go to trial.
Fred hangs himself, pulls a Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, no.
And, you know, the families are just, the families who suffered are besides themselves.
Of course, you know, Netflix, they're constantly cutting back to sister of victim,
(01:03:58):
mother of victim, friend of victim.
And eventually Rose does get like a life sentence.
Uh but it just it
was gruesome and sad but yet
still fascinating in a way if you're looking for a good
true crime story and i again this
all happened over in the uk we don't get stories about your
(01:04:21):
serial killers unfortunately uh at least
not back in the 90s so somehow this one slipped by a
lot of the american press or at least what i was watching wow
so i like i like catching up on this going you just never
know it was in uh gloucester which is
you know nice quiet town and everybody's going this can't
have happened here especially when they go
(01:04:42):
well there's one murder and then they go well there's six murders there's nine
there's 12 what 32 so yeah this guy was unhinged and he was when he was being
interviewed he was just stating things like matter of fact, it was really cold.
Okay, on that happy note, we're over an hour again. Apologize.
(01:05:06):
I just want to hang my head now.
Brings us to our question of the week for you before we bow out of here.
What's the most absurd internet of things gadget you can imagine existing in
the near future? The smell-o-meter.
The smell-o-scope.
(01:05:26):
Smell a meter, you hang it on the wall or something, you know?
And it tells you the bathroom needs some Febreze.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Warning, do not enter. It dispenses the Febreze. Yeah.
Why does that thing go off every time I walk by? Yeah.
All right, you people use your imagination. We'll be back in a little bit to ask you about that.
(01:05:48):
We'll have it posted on social media, hopefully a little bit in advance of two
hours in front of the show so you have a time to respond.
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us another way,
something you heard, something you saw,
something you'd like to report to us, an incurrection we made that you'd like
to correct, call us on the listener line, 707-530-2428.
(01:06:11):
We'd love to hear from you. or email us at technorama at chuckchat.com.
Both of us will get it.
You might even read it on the air
if it's spelled right. That's the only qualification, just spell it right.
It's AI-generated, maybe not. We can see through that. We know when AI is generating
letters for you. Don't do it, people.
(01:06:35):
You're generating an AI letter? Technorama? Yeah.
Till next time. Give me a big binary high five, Craig. All right, one, two, one.
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