Embedded - 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person

Episode Date: December 31, 2014

Jen, Chris, and Elecia talk about the movies that influenced them to go into engineering. Real Genius (imdb, Amazon) Star Wars (imdb, Amazon) Choose Your Own Adventure books (Amazon, wiki) Wargames (imdb, Amazon) Ghostbusters (imdb, Amazon) Star Trek: The Next Generation (imdb, Amazon) 321 Contact, show and magazine (imdb (tv)) The Muppets Show (imdb, Amazon) Sneakers (imdb, Amazon) Phineas and Ferb (imdb, Amazon) Sisterhood of Spies (Amazon) Crytonomicon (Amazon)

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. Given the holidays, the slacking will continue this week. Christopher White, Jen Castillo, and I will be discussing movies that inspired us to go into engineering. Before we get into that, I have a little announcement about conferences. Don't forget about the conference proposal submissions due soon and add one more to your list. The Embedded Linux Conference is looking for participants. Submissions are due January 9th. The conference will be March 23rd to the 25th in San Jose, California. The theme this year is drones, things, and

automobiles. They're excited to discuss some new areas where embedded Linux is really taking off. I would like you to know that they wrote that pun, but I left it in. I would like to point out that the Embedded Linux Conference was also the first place that I spoke, and it was a great place for first-time speakers. Cool. Back to the movies. The idea for this episode started with the rant Christopher had about Scorpion and their three-mile-long runway, which was not as long as

the 200-mile one from Fast and Furious, we know. It was also the show where we gushed over Andy Weir's book, The Martian. So we decided to do a holiday show to talk about the movies that led us to engineering. And I gather from things I've heard from the two of you, we did not stick to movies, moving to other fiction and even to nonfiction. There are other shows, other podcasts that have done this. So we're going to do it draft style, I think is what Christopher said, where everyone has a list, but we choose them in order and each person gets to talk about it for a minute or two. And then we'll discuss that one and then we'll move on to the

next. We're all about the same age, so I expect our movies to reflect our common timeline. The last bonus round will be retconned inspiration. I'll make Christopher explain what retcon is for those of you who don't know. So with no more further ado, let's get started. And since Jen, you're the guest, you go first. Great. Okay, so the first one on my list that I would say had the biggest impact on me was Real Genius. And that came out in, was it 82 or 84? What I loved about this is I honestly thought that this was the way

college was going to be. I thought it was going to be ice skating rinks in the hallways. Yours wasn't? Uh, no. Well, there was that one time where we put a bunch of popcorn in between the door

and we just taped it up over paper and then the RA opened it and they just buried the paper but that's not what we're talking about here we're talking about real genius which is you know doing these awesome like projects and goofing around and using science all the time and and finding the hot girl who would knit me a sweater, whether I wanted one or not. Actually, that's not exactly what I... But anyway, the point is that I really thought that this was the way college was supposed to be. And the only other movie that you had at the time

that was kind of touching on that was Revenge of the Nerds, which I guess is kind of an influence, but looking back, what the hell did I know? I thought everyone was supposed to be in a fraternity, too. But anyway, so the point is, real genius, Val Kilmer, genius boy using basically Star Wars, the Reagan-era Star Wars project to vaporize a target from space. I mean, what more could you ask for?

Oh, and the bunny shoes. Yeah, the bunny shoes are classic. That one was actually the first on my list too so it can't be first on your list you saw that one before college it was 1985 was when it came out thank you internet movie database um and it was instrumental in helping me choose between liberal arts and science. When did you see it? You saw it when it came out? I must have seen it when it was out on video.

I remember watching it junior, senior year in high school. I saw it specifically on HBO. They had a making of because they wanted to talk about the popcorn scene. And then the Tears for Fears song was like all over MTV at the time. So for me, it was just constantly. Yeah, I hadn't seen it at the right time for it to be in my list. I don't think I saw it until college. And at that point, it seemed to map pretty closely to the experience I was having, you know, the accurate way they sort of, well, the close to accurate way they portrayed lab science at a school. So, the, well, and when you talk about the team aspect,

you're not talking about the actual team that was working on the laser, you talk about the team that was trying to foil it. like mitch yeah mitch and chris knight and what's uh what's laszlo holly yeah and actually i was really looking forward i'm like wow if i could have like that kind of like way secret tunnel thing and then you know statistically just have my side project of like entering frito-lay contests so i can get all the prizes because that was the other thing like you know when you were a kid you're like oh I'll just put in this card and maybe you know I'll probably win or something well our labs

were underground a lot of them especially for the CS labs so it always seemed like going into the steam tunnels you went to Harvey Mudd yeah in California where it's really important that you not have to walk through the snow or you know well keep in mind they had limited space oh so they just built down because they couldn't get the

the license to build up not sure but so the only thing that was underground so i went to university of illinois um and the only thing that i remember explicitly being underground besides the steam tunnels that you could go between the buildings on the quad was the undergraduate library, which actually went down like three or four flights. Well, I have to, getting back to the movie, I have to admit Real Genius was critical to me attending Mudd. Yeah, because it was. It was irreverent and it was socially conscious engineering. And before that, I had only been introduced to socially conscious writing, and journalism and whatnot.

And I didn't realize that you could be an engineer with the idea that you wanted to stop evil we fight for good I don't know but it was it was very definitely one that pushed me into engineering instead of anything else because I thought I want to do that and I loved the team aspect that I could be on a team of other people who were smart and fun and had all of that and mud really was sort of like that so i i was under the impression that the they were basing this on the universe was it um caltech yeah yeah that's what i had heard i... Mudd and Caltech share a rivalry. They actually filmed some of it, I think, at Pomona College, which is right next to Mudd. And I thought some at Caltech, possibly, but, you know, it seemed like recognizable environments. But the thing that also I'm just reminded of was not just the engineering aspect, but doing engineering for fun.

Not just doing your classwork, but, oh, you know, we're done with the classwork, but we have this laser sitting around, so let's make it bounce around campus. Yeah, so we can make out with beauticians. Or let's make a quadcopter in our dorm room. And there was a lot of that that I remember from school, people just kind of experimenting with stuff, finding stuff on the loading dock and hacking it together into something. So that wasn't a penis stretcher is what you're telling me.

That was a different one. Oh, okay. You don't remember? Or you know what I also liked? You could get liquid nitrogen, you could cut it, and then use that to fool the vending machine. I said it was partially accurate. It's either liquid nitrogen or solid nitrogen.

You can't have both. That's true. Maybe the triple point. Look, I was like whatever age I was back then. I wasn't even 10, I don't think, when I saw that movie. Wow, you guys were lucky. Yeah. I was older, but yeah, it was a good movie.

So, Chris. Moving on from that? Yeah. Can we move on from that? if we want this to be less than two hours we want it to be less than two hours okay well I'm going to do the obvious one get it out of the way

it's funny we normally record in our office which you've already interrupted me and I haven't even started but today we're in our living room and I suspect that is related the movie is Star Wars You interrupted me and I haven't even started. But today we're in our living room and I suspect that is related. The movie is Star Wars, which some people might refer to as Star Wars Episode 4 or A New Hope, which are completely incorrect names.

The movie is Star Wars. And this was the first movie I can remember seeing. And my dad had gotten a VCR sometime in the late 70s. And it was this giant top-loading contraption with buttons that you had to depress. And wheeled it in on a cart with the TV. And he had a completely legal copy of Star Wars on VHS. Are you sure it was VHS? 100% sure.

Yes, we were VHS. We picked the right one. At least I have a working beta in our house. It's probably worth nothing. I still have lots of episodes of the monkey's eye. Anyway. Star Wars. I still remember sitting in the living room of the house and watching this movie on what was probably a 20 inch

TV back then and being just amazed at how real everything seemed. And I know Star Wars is not, quote, sci-fi. I know it's more science fantasy, and it's more like a fantasy film set in space, space opera, that kind of thing. There's not a lot of real science in it. Chewie here tells me you're looking for passage

to the Alderaan system. Yes, indeed. If it's a fast ship. Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? Should I have? It's a ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. Even though as an adult you realize this isn't really accurate science or anything, as a kid all that stuff looked so real. You had these machines, they looked like they were

used and old and some of them were sort of broken. And you had, you know, these people fixing stuff, even though they used gobbledygook words to describe it. It just looked like a world where science had progressed enough to where these amazing things were just completely boring and broken down like your old car. And there were hyperdrives and blasters and lightsabers and all these amazing things and it just i think it left a huge impression on me watching that and seeing seeing something that looked so real and believable and yet so far advanced I like Star Wars I don't think it hit me the same way

but I also know that one of the reasons why I've heard this excuse one of the reasons why people like Star Wars versus Star Trek is because of that grittiness that you know the dirty hardware

the dirty honest scorch marks yeah yeah you know that things aren't perfect that people are putting things together there's a certain amount of earnest um directness as opposed to in the you know in star trek's world where everything's just kind of beautifully done and perfectly clean there and it's always clean yeah it just seems so impractical yeah it was lived in. Yeah. And you definitely got that idea that you had... Oh man, I just realized there was one I didn't put on here. That's so awesome.

Okay. You got this idea that they were poor, that they just had to build up everything on their own, and that was that. And that they could. Yes. That you could build that stuff. The robots seemed believable.

It didn't seem like this giant leap from where we were, even in the 70s, to having R2-D2 driving around on wheels. He was kind of, you know, he wasn't that sophisticated a device, except he was smart. So now you guys have hit number one and number two on my list. Um, so Star Wars was absolutely critical for me too. Um, and so I mentioned being in our living room. We have seven Star Wars posters in this room and one Apollo 13 which is a little lonely

and they're good posters and they definitely dominate the room and they aren't all Christopher's the first time I had a crush on a boy was second grade and I knew that it wasn't gonna work work out because for my birthday, he gave me Princess Leia. And I was a Chewbacca person. I mean, Chewbacca was by far the coolest character. He could fix anything. And he was, you know, don't mess with Chewbacca. He was the best.

So, yeah, Star Wars. I think that in the scene where Luke's picking up the droids and there's just a collection of junk, but Luke knew how to fix things and he was in that garage tinkering with stuff, basically soldering. He was like, oh, you can make stuff. You can take stuff that isn't working and you can make it work.

Yeah. Although R2-D2 is not really very compliant. No. Well, that's like most electronics. It is sort of. I mean, is that how we get into firmware? We understand that these things aren't going to do what we want no matter how hard we try. When you make self-aware firmware, then yes.

I guess that's it. No, it's only only gonna be worse then so i i just i just want to throw in my little tidbit of geek two things one i did see it in the theaters when it originally came out because my dad we lived in germany at the time and it you could not remember this oh yeah i remember it came out in 77 yeah so we were in germany at the time and the first time we went you know it you know there's like a whole lapse of like six months to a year before it actually got out to the bases there and my dad you know took you know we took me and he's holding me and he goes to the end of the line the first time we went and he's like we're not going to make it in and we left and then later

on we went back in this is back when you could still see cartoons at the beginning of the movies for the kids so they could pass out and the the adults would watch that's how i saw midnight cowboy and dune and a bunch of other movies the other thing was like during this time in the 80s when you know when you're all getting ready for empire strikes back and return of the jedi we did we had a vhs later but we also had that beta max we also had something called the rca disc oh god and we had all of them on rca no they weren't laser disc no analog they were record they hold about 30 minutes yeah of data on each side and you literally you slide it in for one side and when it was done you you slide it in flip it over and slide it on the other side you were literally flipping an analog record sometimes

i'm glad we didn't have the latest and. And it would get scratched, and it would get dust on it, and it would, you know, so sometimes, you know, Chewbacca would be like, uh-uh-uh! We did have it on Laserdisc. That was the one format we never got. You had to flip sides on those, too.

But somehow it wasn't quite so bad. Yeah, but it would hold more. I mean, that was, yeah, Star Wars. And I, you know, obviously continued being into it. I think the second movie I remember seeing in a theater was Empire Strikes Back. That was the last movie I remember seeing with my parents in a theater. That was also, wasn't that also still the same summer that Temple of Doom came out too? Temple of Doom was a couple years later.

I think Raiders of the Lost Ark came out around the same time as Empire. Yes, that's true. Yeah. Okay, okay. Which is not on my list because there was no science. But only barely.

He's an archaeologist. That's true. Wow. If we were professors, that would be high on my list. I want to live the life of not teaching class very often, having all my students adore me, and then I get to whip people and things.

That's too much information. It's like me becoming Devo. Okay. Okay, so on my list, number three. Okay. So I really tried not to put any books on because we started talking about movies here. And then there were some discussions about how movies wouldn't cut it. But I was like, no, I'm not going to go with any books because there's just too many. And I was always a bookworm. So're just too many and yet i am going to go not with one book but with a whole series and uh and i'm totally not building suspense here am i uh the choose your own adventure books excellent oh that's a great idea uh they were the ones that got me interested in programming because I remember reading them and wanting to try all the paths. And something made me somehow connect this with a computer. And, you know, looking back, okay, that is totally reasonable.

You can do a choose your own adventure with all of the paths, you know, breadth first search or depth first search. Let's try both. And it made me look at all of the other choose your own adventure books that way. And it went from where I was like, you know, putting my finger on a page on a decision point and then reading one all the way through and then going back to that decision point and go, you know, the road not taken with the Robert Frost poem except in books. And I loved those books. They really were influential to me.

So this was your first hacking is what you're telling me. You used to hack the books. Because that's definitely what we would do. You would like find the right, you know, the good ending, not the one where you die horribly. Oh, that's backwards? And then you go. Really? I never did it backwards i guess i mean i guess that would be like your earliest debugging exactly did you guys have these in school because i remember in our classroom we had a whole like you know bookshelf full of them and you know if you were good or you're done with your assignment

or something you could go and you could read one. And, you know, I remember going and picking one out and sitting there, but I also had them at home. But what I remember more is sitting there in class and reading them. And your comment about the computer program is interesting because I never really thought of it this way, but the first computer programs I tried to write as a kid, a lot of them were, you know, text adventure games or kind of Dungeons and Dragons things where you had this, you could define rooms and you had a path to go to this one or this one. And the thinking was always the same. And I would do just completely naive and stupid stuff like, you know, if this, then this, and then printf this, and you'd have this huge long program that

would be, you know, a series of steps. It would be basically a choose your own adventure done in basic with printfs and a couple of if statements. that's i wonder if subconsciously i was also influenced that way there there was there was it was so big it was i mean it was such a big deal i mean remember all the scholastic you know the scholastic order form we everyone would order that i didn't have many of them i think i had like space vampire something in the hundreds and one of the unicorn ones. But you can look at I think they're still all on Amazon, Kindle books, you can still download them. Who's the guy? Doogie Howser. So if you haven't, you know, if you haven't seen how much of an influence these books have been, if you look at Neil Patrick Harris's biography, it's also in the choose-your-own-adventure format. Oh, really?

Yeah, it is. So, I haven't looked into the history of why these books came about, but during that time, I think also the text adventure games, as you had already commented upon, were quite popular. I can't help but wonder if one influenced the other i suspect uh the adventure games influenced the books because the first adventure game was in the late 60s i think the crowther and woods adventure or whatever whatever that was wumpus and then i don't For me, my first text adventure game was the handbook, the Galaxy one, which was it? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Which I never quite got out of the airlock, but I was seven, so give me a break. And I even had the hint book and all that jazz. I did not play Zork until much, much, much, much later. And I think I played Leisure Suit Larry before I played Zork. So I'm cheating here and I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry for the author. And he wrote the first book of the kind in 1969, but it wasn't published till 76.

That's Edward Packard, right? Yeah. He wrote like almost all of them. So amazing. Yeah, so, okay. Jen, you're up next. Okay, so my list, oh man, I keep thinking of really awesome ones, but I have to kind of take it back to the geek realm very directly.

I'm going to put down War Games. Damn it! Damn it good or damn it bad? Damn it, that was next on his list, I bet. You know, Chris, I don't know why you're married to Elle. Clearly, you and I are simpatico. Quit hitting on my husband. You've got your own now.

So back to war games. For me, in my household, we had computers. And this was computer porn on an epic scale about what you could do, all the trouble it could get you into. Actually, will you summarize it? because that one is a little niche and so well i mean it was on my list too so so i'm trying to remember first of all i have to erase war games 2 because that was what that's not a thing that's a thing that exists but don't worry your pretty little head over it what what is you know this kid who you know has this computer and he hacks into he didn't really know what it was but he is some sort of dod installation and he he decides to check out all the games the wares that are on there and he accidentally finds global

nuclear war which turns out to be actually tied into the, you know, the government facility that actually is in charge of all the missiles for the United States. And it's, you know, it's totally messing things up. And I'm trying to remember what else. Oh, yeah. And then there's the, was it Salk? What is the name of the professor that had his son? Falcon. Falcon.

Yeah. was the name of the professor that had his son? Falcon. Falcon, yeah. Put his son into the computer and he's interacting with the sun. Sort of. It's kind of AI. Yeah. I don't know. I didn't care about that. You know, I was really, I was in the single digits at that age.

But, you know, we had computers at home and, but the, you know, Matthew Roderick had the modem that we all wanted i think that was the thing we all wanted that moto it was so fast and um so anyway so uh you know in the graphics oh my god the graphics so a little known thing was uh um my partner he he we were talking about war games in preparation for this and he said like oh i wanted to make a map of the world and uh he ran out of memory when he got to south america so he couldn't do the rest of the map because that's how little memory we had on these computers but in this in this movie you know we didn't even think about memory that much we didn't you know it was just so like fantasy in terms of like hey i just happened to get this phone number and i happened to like

get access to the server um and and and i checked out this, and it was really fun. Little did I know that I was controlling the world or throwing us almost into nuclear war with the Russians. Oh, my God. Everyone's nightmare in the early 80s. And this came out in 1983. Yeah. So it was very Red Scare Central. That and The Day After are like...

It was Red Scare Central, but it wasn't a movie like Red Dawn, which came out around the same time, or Top Gun, where it's us versus them. It was a really anti-war movie in a lot of ways. That was not a message that was

popular, I think, in movies in that era. So it was kind of an interesting thing to watch as a kid and get a little bit of a different perspective than maybe what you were getting from everybody else. And the thing I loved about this movie was they didn't screw around with the computers to try to sex them up. They were just, you know, some 8-bit Altairs or whatever

that he'd scrounged up or managed to get his parents to sex them up. They were just, you know, some 8-bit Altairs or whatever that he'd scrounged up or managed to get his parents to buy them or found surplus, you know, with the big floppy disks, not your five and a quarter, mind you, but the big eight-inch things. And everything about it seemed totally plausible to me as a kid who was playing with computers at that age. Oh, okay, I know what that is. I know how that works. Oh, look, his modems, you know, the text is coming on the screen and it's drawing one letter at a time kind of slowly. Oh, he's got like a 1200 baud modem.

And this was also a time when I was starting to mess around with BBSs and dialing into stuff. So it was like, oh, this is right up my alley. That's how I was getting hints to some of these text-based games was going on BPSs and asking people. And there was that one scene where he hacked the phone to get long distance, which was reminiscent of what people were doing. Yeah, I didn't crunch.

I forgot what, blue boxes I think they were called or something like that. Yeah, blue boxes. This doesn't work now on on touch tone but you know you needed the the the older um what was it rotary dial rotary dial to to simulate that that's the other thing that's so funny looking back at that movie all the rotary dial and i'm just i'm remembering now how the you've mentioned it but you know he had the computer magazines with the ads and i don't i don't know how many people used to subscribe to computer magazines back then. Byte Magazine.

Yeah, all these fantastic ads. These crazy little companies would make up to try to sell what was essentially incredibly boring niche stuff. But, and that's how he, I think that's how he got the number somehow, to dial into the government. He misdialed it. But yeah, no, great, great influential movie for me.

Absolutely. So I have to ask, what computer did you have? We had an Apple II Plus at that time. Oh, man, you're so she-she. Yeah, with the Amber TV. Amber Hedger. We had a bunch of them. We had a Sinclair.

We had a VIC-20, We had a Sinclair. We had a VIC-20, a Commodore 64, a 128. We still have the Amiga. Jen's house sounds like the computer history museum. It is. When my dad comes out, he's like, oh, yeah, we had that and that. And I built that part. That didn't work out so well.

It really was like that. I mean, not to overstate it, but I wouldn't have seen any of these movies if my dad didn't take me to them or didn't point them out to me. So, thanks, Dad. Did you have any comments on them? No, it was on my list, but I think I saw it later than most people,

than you two did. I thought it was amazing. I thought it was cool. I didn't have as many computers, and we definitely didn't, BBS wasn't something that I was on. Yeah. But I knew that they existed, and I wanted to do that. No, it was a great movie.

It's still a great movie, actually. It did lead me into significant long-distance charges, which eventually got me into a great deal of trouble. That does not show. That reminds me. There was somebody who was working on a documentary about all the phone freaks. And I saw a talk by this person.

I don't know if it ever came out, but it was an incredible, the history of phone freakers. And it just talked about all those little tips and tricks. We'll look it up and put it in the notes. Yeah. One last comment on this, and I want to contrast it with Real Genius and even Star Wars, was the female character was not well developed it was kind of sad uh she was she seemed like kind of a hanger on and oh what's this and contrasted with real genius where oh yeah you had you know somebody who was a jordan jordan thank you who was i'd almost called her but that was teen wolf yeah there's a lot of movies in my head right now.

Who was, you know, a total peer to everyone else and smart and a scientist and she was contributing. But on the other, in regards to, was it Sherry Nugel in Real Genius? She was kind of that hanger on. She was looking for number one. Yeah. Yeah. But at least there was somebody in that movie. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Anyway. It was an ensemble. Yes. All right, so you're next, Christopher. What's on your list? Oh, my. I'm going to have to choose here because people... Pokemon.

That's not on my list. I'm going to go with Ghostbusters. That movie about a startup. Well well that is part of the point that is a movie about a startup it is one of the somebody said recently on Twitter it is the best or one of the best movies about forming a small company

I don't know why this affected me so much but it was the startup aspect and the kind of putting, but it was the startup aspect and the kind of putting... I know it was totally ridiculous technology and it had ghosts and all sorts of anti-science, pseudoscience stuff, but

they had all the gadgets and they built them themselves and they made a company out of it. And then they had camaraderie and team. They all loved what they were doing and they were fighting the government. It was a great collection of things and for a young kid to see hey you know here are these guys and they had this idea and they had some know-how and they had this one guy who could put together advanced technology and they could make a go of it and sometimes technobabble is all you need

sometimes technobabble is all you need but it was pretty good in that and sometimes technobabble is all you need sometimes technobabble is all you need but it was pretty good in that age of technobabble it was good technobabble you have to admit total protonic reversal my my sense is also that this is also would be on the top of your list for libertarian movies uh it it is a very libertarian movie in some sense i think the writers actually admitted that that he wrote it with that slant. But certainly the EPA individual was not well representative. However, the government of New York was, so I don't

think that's necessarily... I felt like everything in New York was represented in that movie. That and the sequel. I don't... What sequel? I never really thought about it. The one with the pink ooze. That was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We're not acknowledging a sequel here. Yeah, that's probably for the best.

I don't, you know, it was just, it's probably not the best science movie, but it definitely isn't. But it just hit at that right time when going from messing around with stuff to thinking about, okay, what do I want to do? It's like, I'm in academia. I have an idea. Let's monetize it.

Exactly. Isn't that what our lives are about? Monetizing. So is it important that the villain in Ghostbusters, which is the EPA guy... I thought it was Zool. Yeah. But we'll go with the EPA.

Is also... I thought it was Zool. Yeah. But we'll go with the EPA. Is also... I thought it was Rick Moranis. The same character... No, the same actor. Same actor who was... Well, and sort of character, who was the bad guy in Real Genius. This is true.

Was it? Yes, it was. William Atherton. William Atherton played both the EPA guy and... He had a beard in Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah, that's right. He was scruff Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah, that's right. It was scruffy. You know, I don't want to bring this up because I'm assuring you this is not on anyone's list.

We're not going to bring up Howard the Duck, right? I never saw that movie. Oh, that's probably for the best. Never saw that movie, no. The best part about that movie was the song. The credits. Was the bad guy in that movie was caught up, was brought up on child pornography charges, who's actually also the principal in...

Ferris Bueller. Yes. Which was not on my list. So any other further questions? Nobody else is going to ring in here on Ghostbusters I feel like I'm on a ledge here it didn't make my list

that's fine it didn't make my list but I could see how it would I don't think I saw it until later much later it doesn't feel like a movie I saw childhood or early teen years. See, that's another one I remember distinctly seeing in the theaters.

I'm surprised. I mean, the song colors some of my high school times. The song? What was going on in your high school? It was full of ghosts. No, just, you know, the song came up, but the movie itself, I don't think I saw it until I got to college. I think I didn't really think about how much I remembered about Ghostbusters until I saw it in the movie Be Kind Rewind. Oh, right.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters. My. Yeah. Yeah. So, Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters. My second choice. Yeah. So, moving down my list, Star Trek The Next Generation, the TV show.

Ooh. It was, I don't know. You know, where Star Wars was sort of gritty and dirty, Star Trek, they had it all figured out. And they went off to explore worlds, and it was awesome. And I'm sure I saw the original reruns, but they were camp. And my mom loved them, and you know, you've got to rebel some way. So I was definitely the next generation. And it wasn't any particular character.

It was just they were going out researching stuff. They were scientists that shot things a lot. I love Next Generation. Okay, so I'm not going to be able to tell you every little detail of Next Generation. But reasons why well reasons why i hated it i could i was basically forced to watch it because my dad would not give me a ride to my cousin's house until we were done with the show because he would not let be interrupted that's clearly abuse yeah so i think that's part of the reason why i like it but not

because of the abuse because i was kind of forced to watch it the other thing is that I love the holodeck I cannot wait for that to happen as far as I'm concerned hurry up Jerry exactly Jerry you are bringing the holodeck to us whether you realize it or not I also really like data

I don't know what it is about robots or androids who are just, they're always trying to find their humanity. They're trying to be more human. They're always trying to dissect humanity in some way so they can become it. I always find those stories very, very interesting. And even though, you know, Wil Wheaton got all kinds of shit

for playing Crusher, Wesley Crusher, it was nice to see that there was this young guy there who was struggling through sometimes being awesome and sometimes screwing up. I liked that. I was, of course, disappointed about the way they wrote him out. With him becoming godlike and Q-like, whatever. And I liked Data. I think I identified more with Data than, you know, was actually healthy. And I really liked Geordi, too. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Because you had, like, the—I mean, I only really knew him from The Reading Rainbow, but the banana clip on the face. But I liked the fact that he was differently abled and that that was actually really very good. Even though there was some sort of equality in the future, it didn't require sameness see yeah okay so i i like star trek the next generation now having watched the whole series in my adulthood when it first came out i was not impressed that's because you probably watched

season one i did well i watched it when it first came out. It was Star Trek. And it grew a beard. I don't think I started watching until about 85. Oh, no, it started in 87. Indiana put on pants. And I remember doing the early ones. It just seemed like the love boat in space.

But I love the love boat. The holiday. Why do these people have all this entertainment gear? They never do anything. And Picard and Patrick Stewart is a wonderful actor, but he hadn't figured it out in the first season. No one figured it out in the first season. It's just, as a kid, seeing that for the first time,

it was really off-putting. And I'd seen all of the original series, and that was something that my brother and I had both kind of grown up on in reruns. So it just didn't feel the same. Who are these people? Where's Captain Kirk? Where's the swagger?

And as a young boy, it was all about laser guns and swagger and the double-fisted punch and stuff. And so it just didn't feel right, and my first impression wasn't great. But having watched it again as an adult, where you get more appreciation of what they're trying to do, because as a kid,

you're not picking up on the social stuff. You're not picking up on the political statements. You're not picking up on the utopian part. I mean, as a 13 year old, maybe you did. You're giving me a glare, but I mean, I didn't even, you know, okay, Jordy's got a visor and he's blind okay i i was really lucky my my dad really broke down sci-fi for me

very quickly he basically said sci-fi writers are using the future as a way to describe social problems now. Yeah. And having that constantly echoing in my brain always made me aware of what they were trying to do from a very young age. Yeah. Even Star Wars. And I think that I didn't really understand that, so sci-fi was an adventure. But that said, he did make me go to Star Trek, the first Star Trek movie. I'm sorry.

My aunt walked us out of that movie. But number two, two gave me nightmares, so that's okay. Oh, yeah. Great movie. My ears still itching. I cannot see an earwig without wanting to scream. All right, I'll just take that one off my list then. So I think one of the things I liked about it was one of the things you didn't

is that sometimes they over explained the emotional crap. You know, Deanna would come in and explain why such and such was happening and perhaps it goes back to my over identification with data but I needed to have some of that explained to me like why people are doing the things they're doing when it didn't make sense because that was certainly happening all around me in my life so that i could figure out things very logically it would drive me nuts when people would drive a non-optimal path to get something or do things in an order that was inefficient.

And so Star Trek Next Generation probably was one of those things that made me a little more human. I think one of the things I had trouble with, and this is something I have trouble with with Star Trek continuously, is they have trouble deciding what they want to be. They have the military side of things and they amp up the adventure with war against the borg or the or the uh the romulans or the klingons or what have you and then they try to have the exploration and science factor and the next generation they kept trying to claim we're explorers or explorers

we're explorers and then they kept shooting things and then the cliffhanger episode was some massive battle and it was hard for me as somebody who's a kid who's kind of into military stuff and read military history and you know played tabletop avalon hill games and things it's like okay why is there a psychologist on what is the warship because these people families why are their families on this thing there's a warship it's It's armed to the teeth. Yeah. You know, in the first episode, they show it blowing stuff up. So it always seemed like they're trying too hard to appeal to both sides. And that's why I think I like Deep Space Nine in the next generation sort of era. That's actually my favorite series because they kind of, they just picked something and stuck with it. And it was sort of, okay, this is a spy political thriller show

with some military stuff, but we're just going to stick with that. And I would love there to be an actual Star Trek that was just exploration, but that would be hard to write. Well, okay, so which was the one with Janeway? Voyager. Voyager. Voyager was interesting in some way. I ended up having to watch a significant number of Enterprise.

I'm sorry. The best thing about that was Porthos. Actually, the best thing about that was when the transporter would screw up and you would get transported into the floor, dying instantaneously. I had to watch it because i was working on set top box and it was the only thing available yeah that was the channel that was available um so that's how i ended up catching up on that otherwise i was sd and i was stuck with the golden girls for most of the day so um that's not on my list golden girls is not on my list what is next on your list?

this one's actually kind of look are we going to try to stick just with movies? no she already just did Choose Your Own Adventure I know but here's the thing and then I did TV so I'm the one that's off list I'm kind of well because the next one on my list is actually a magazine is it Sassy?

no is Sassy on your list sassy talk me just about computers by the way um okay okay um i'm gonna put i'm gonna i'm gonna switch switch the order of what i have here around a bit and i'm gonna put down a view to a kill this is your last pass is it my last it is your last pass before the retcon before the retcon okay so now that you've told me that this is your last pass is it my last pass? it is your last pass before the retcon before the retcon okay so now that you've told me that this is my last one

I have a whole big old list here that's never going to be released go ahead tell us the whole list so the list is 321 contact magazine which is where I got which is where I learned

all my programming from from the wee ages of 7 there's gem in the holograms which which I know sounds which is where I learned all my programming from, from the wee ages of seven. There's Jem and the Holograms, which I know sounds... Where I learned everything I know about fashion. No, everything I know about fashion, I learned from Fashion Plates, the toy. But what I learned from Jem was, one, I like the bad girls and not the good girls,

but that's not techie. What I liked about it is she had a supercomputer that would magically transport her into gem not jerica yeah and i thought that was awesome because that's also in line with the holograms and for the record i have no idea what you're talking about and and but you've been in a band so if you want to know anything to know you know anything about band promotion you should watch gem and the holograms wherein at one point the misfits are flying around the city handing out flyers not with their hands but somehow the flyers are just flying out their asses because i guess the the the animation house was kind of lazy i think if i could fly i would not use that power to hand out flyers

flying in the city with my ass from the sky. And then, also on the list is Superman 2, which, if I remember correctly, is the one

where Richard Pryor is the computer programmer and they had Zod and they're supercomputers and Superman's dealing with some stuff. Anyway, and then the other one

is A View to a Kill, which is where James Bond is trying to prevent Zoran from flooding Silicon Valley. So there's like all these, you know, semiconductor companies and tech, what have you. I don't remember that one at all. And Grace Jones is in it. I don't think I saw that one.

Oh, wait, is it Grace? Yeah. And then the last one is The Muppet Show. Okay, why The Mupp it crazy? Yeah. And then the last one is The Muppet Show. Okay, why The Muppet Show? Yeah. Because I watched a lot of The Muppet Show. Actually, Monty Python's is on, but it's not techie. The Muppet Show's on there.

But yet The Muppet Show is. The Muppet Show is. Why? Because they were oftentimes having to make a plan B. And secondly, you also had The Muppet Labs with Professor Bunce and Beaker and in particular with Beaker what I learned

from that was that if I was going to be an engineer I wanted to be an engineer and not be in QA like Beaker so clearly was Alright Do we want to declare this last round a rapid fire round and so we all go through a bunch uh go ahead all right okay am i next yeah uh since since jen mentioned 321 contact that was actually the next on my list and i was but i was not going to mention the magazine i was going to mention the TV show. And I watched that show religiously. And I don't

remember details about it that much. I just remember they had just little science stuff and science stories. And they had the Bloodhound Gang who would go and solve ridiculous little mysteries. And it was just a well put together show that didn't insult kids' intelligence. Like a lot of educational stuff, I felt as a you know that that age between being a young kid and being a pre-teen kind of you know i knew i knew stuff but i didn't need to be talked down to uh and that show didn't feel like it did to me so that that was i liked that that you remember that too and i had the magazine as well i don't remember any programming it yeah it was in the back it's definitely in in the back. I did my first maze program

using it. So, we already talked about Star Trek. Battlestar Galactica, which basically the TV show was right around the Star Wars time. Not the recent one. No. The one with the dog. So, that was basically just an offshoot of Star Wars. Robotech.

Oh, that didn't make my list, but it should have. Robotech. I didn't make my list But it should have Robotech You know I didn't watch it You didn't watch Robotech I played the game Minmei Yellow Dancer

You're listing all the things I hated about it Well yeah But mostly it was about The giant fighting robots Giant fighting robots Robotech And they had lots of scenes

Of people fixing stuff What about Voltron then? Didn't watch Voltron No It depended on what Which Voltron? There were two. Oh.

There were the Lions one. The Lions ones. And then there were the ones with the mini ships. Not mini, like many. Lots of ships. Not small ships. I don't know. I didn't really watch it that much.

I just played with the toys. Like Transformers. I played with the Transformers a lot because my dad bought all the Transformers. There were two other shows. Okay, sorry. Newton's Apple which I don't know if any of you saw. It was a PBS show it was hosted by RF Leto from Science Friday. It was a TV

show. It was on for a really long time and he would just talk about science and do experiments and have people on and just do really cool science stuff and it wasn't necessarily a kids aimed show but it was definitely appropriate for kids and that on netflix did you not don't think so you know what i'm really surprised that mr wizard didn't make my list mr wizard was next on my list yes excellent so mr wizard which was a similar

kind of thing except that was definitely more of a kid's show yeah no bill nye the science guy i was way after us yeah way after us how young do you think we are i i've never heard of this newton thing it sounds pretty me neither i hadn't heard of the newton thing yeah newton's apple i was gonna ask you if you had hallucinated it. No, no. Ira Plato. Ira Plato, yeah. And he seemed old to me then. Oh. Sorry, Ira. I'm sure Ira listens to our show.

Apologies will be, apologies in emails. I'm nearly certain he was at least 10 years younger than me now. They were old then, but not now. Okay, that's it for my lightning round. You're up with a lightning round. I actually stuck five and we covered them all so discipline uh laziness um so retconning you taught me that word so well we're using it totally inappropriately right retconning is traditionally used in comics when they've had a comic going for so long that they're bound by continuity and they can't figure out how to write anything else. So what they'll often do is they'll

rewrite history through some device or some, you know, oh, well, that really didn't happen that way. That person was lying or time, you know, time travels, another great way of retconning things. The Star Trek, the new Star Trek movies are a fantastic example of retconning. They just go in and blow away everything you know about star trek by going back in time and changing everything so in our context retconning is we're going to pick something as if we were younger and it could have influenced us so maybe something from the last 10 years or 15 years uh and so the words are retroactive continuity. And this came up because we started chatting about the movie episode with some other friends.

And somebody said, no, that movie came out too late. I think you're retconning your inspiration. And I thought that was hilarious. We actually should, to some extent, recognize the shows that came a little later than we did. So we're kind of merge-pulling. Wow. Ow. My brain just exploded.

I'm sorry, I forgot the mic wet. So, do you want to go first, Jen? So are we doing it one at a time, or are we just... Just same pattern as before. Same pattern. Okay. So you only get one. For right now, Sneakers, the movie.

Why do you hate me so much? You guys retconned the same movie? That's cute. All right. Go ahead. Well, okay. No, no, it's fine. It's fine.

Okay. So my dad took me to this movie. He's like, hey, do you want to go to this movie? And I'm like, what's it about? He's like, it's about, you me to this movie. He's like, hey, do you want to go to this movie? I'm like, what's it about? He's like, it's about these hackers. I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting. So to me, this is the most real hacker movie that there is, mostly because you see them kind of fail. You kind of see their thought processes behind doing this, that, and the other.

It's not glossed over really compared to, let's say, Hackers or some of the other movies. The Net. The Net, yeah. And everyone's a character. There's definitely that dysfunctional element to each one of them that is so common amongst us nerdy types. That came out in 2004? No, it didn't. Sneakers.

Sneakers came out in 92 or 91. It was right around high school graduation. 92. And my little side story on that is, so I went to go see what my dad, and as the lights came up, the computer club was there, and they saw me. And little known fact is I went to high school with one of the founders of PayPal, who I will not mention. And they were all there.

And after that, they're like, oh, do you like, they were asking me about computers they would talk to me more and i went to i started going to the computer club not that i knew anything about what were they i think they were doing cobalt or i can't remember what language they were they were really into at the time i didn't do that all i knew was basic at that time um so i went to a couple of those, but I couldn't really fit in my schedule. But anyway, I really like sneakers. I think it's, I think it kind of has, it's so multidisciplinary in the way that it goes about hacking and dealing with computers. Yeah, I totally agree. It was on my list, so I have to. Do you want to add anything to that? No, I mean, I thought, I thought what she said, it covered most of my feelings about it too.

And some of the, you know, seeing the equipment they had and, you know, they had electronics that they were, you know, oscilloscopes and stuff. And they were actually using them to do things. And they had that truck full of gear. Yeah. And they were hacking into the phones. You know, now looking back on it, the, you know, the universal cryptography thing was kind of silly. Yeah. Although at the end, they kind of made it clear.

They tried to make it ambiguous as to whether it really existed or not. Yeah. But that was another one where they had, you know, a diverse cast too. They had a blind guy, which is something you don't see in movies a lot. Sidney Poitier was in it. River Phoenix as the prodigy. Yeah, that's right. That they caught.

River Phoenix was in that movie, right. Dan Aykroyd. Yeah, playing Conspiracy Nut, which is perfect for him, apparently. It's perfect, yeah. And Robert Redford. Yeah, it was a great cast. Just really great. Although, if I remember correctly, each character was based on a famous hacker.

Oh, okay. I didn't know that. So, I believe Captain Crunch was one of them. Bubbles was another, was I think the blind guy. Each had a different, interesting little story. Yeah. And Ben Kingsley, adopting the strangest New York accent anybody's ever heard

oh yeah and that was because we all wanted the Cray and we saw Tron before and we really loved Tron but it just made Crays look so much more sexier so is there, do you have a second one,

Christopher? Do you? Yeah, no, I have a, uh, well, since,

uh, two of mine have been taken, I'm going to have to go with a book. Okay. Cryptonomicon by Neil Stevenson, which, uh, I think is probably one of the most realistic kind of views

of what the mid-late 90s computer security scene would have been like, or at least the description of the techniques and tools that were used and things. Does that mean ReamD is what security looks like now? I mean, Neil Stevenson, all of his books. No, Cryptonomicon went in so much more detail than than remd and uh just about codes and ciphers and computers and and security within networks and that kind of thing uh it was a and he did it in such a way that it wasn't totally dry you know he neil stevenson tends to research a little beyond where he perhaps should

and then drop all that research into his fiction. But this was... Don't want to waste it. It was interleaved in a way that made sense and he had two stories

going back and forth in time, one during World War II and one during quote, contemporary time that were interleaved really well

and then they kind of met at the end and it was a really satisfying story and at the same time, it was a really satisfying story. And at the same time, he lets you know that, hey, this stuff is close to realistic. There was all kinds of stuff about touring and Enigma,

and at the same time, taking that forward to the contemporary period and giving you a view of how that had evolved and what was being done at the time he wrote it, which was the 90s. I wish you would expand that to all of Stevenson, because, man, my research was all about intelligent tutoring systems, and then after I was done, I read The Diamond Age, which, that's what that's about.

See, that's one I couldn't get through. And I haven't gotten through Cryptonomicron. Have you started it? Yes, but when he changes characters, I get bored and wander off. He tends to change a lot. So my retconned inspiration is actually more modern than that.

It's a cartoon that we have been watching on and off from Disney. It's called Phineas and Ferb. Have you seen this, Jen? I know of them. I have not experienced them. So they're on summer vacation, and every day they build something. And when they build something, it's fantabulous and amazing and— Improbable.

Improbable. And there's a subplot that is even more improbable that involves Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who builds things that do other things. He builds innaters, the chocolate chip ice creaminator, whatever. And, you know, I'm fascinated by this whole don't just wish you had something, you should just make it. And Phineas and Ferb is like the sneaky way to teach that philosophy to kids. And so that one is one that if I was 10 years old now and we were doing this podcast

in 30 years or whatever that would be that would have been one of my influences because it's such a silly show they never show them playing with something they show them each episode sort of starts

what do you want to do today and then oh I've got this idea. And they build something they're going to play. It might be something fantastical and incredible and impossible, but they start from nothing, and then they end up with something that they eventually end up playing with. It's not, here's some toys I bought, let's play with those. It's, well, I really want a roller coaster, so let's build one.

No, it's a good message. I think it's a little bit not educational, but it's a good message. Yeah. Well, it's not like Star Trek The Next Generation was all that educational. I know all kinds of things about Jeffrey's tubes. I have a dilithium crystal at home. Is that two lithiums? With a key on it.

Well, that actually went faster than I expected. Do you guys have anything else? I have lots of stuff. Just how long was your list? You saw her list. She emailed it to us. Several times. Sometimes by accident.

Well, I have other stuff on my list so okay what else okay i have strange days didn't see it which is a movie that came out in the mid 90s about the impending year 2000 coming which as you remember everyone was very scared about the year 2000 coming for whatever reason. Cobalt. Yeah. And so the deal there is that they have this technology called squid that allows you to record a person's experience and then replay it back later on using what appears to be mini discs.

But you can, you can see how they're feeling. You can see everything through their eyes. What was interesting about it is how they used that to explain how this technology could be used to change society. So first of all, it was considered illegal, this technology. And secondly, it recorded the murder of a particular popular figure. And the people who did it were trying to cover it up. And so it's a very multi-layered crime story centered in this very dismal period in time,

or what we thought was going to be a dismal period in time. It's just very noir, and I think that they use the technology very effectively to really tell you that some technologies can be used for good and can be used for evil. Along those lines, would you put Blade Runner in the same category? That's true. None of us chose Blade Runner. I guess because its story wasn't really about engineering. It was a little bit about the effects.

It was about the cautionary tale of too much technology gone amok. Yeah, we're trying to encourage people to become engineers, not encourage them to leave engineering. Rated R for intense disturbing violence?

I thought it was going to be intense science. No, Strange Days is R. Yeah. I guess maybe if you're 12, maybe you shouldn't see it. There's a lot of sex in it. Doctor Who gave me nightmares. Yeah, Santa Claus is pretty scary.

So let's see, what else did I have on my list? Junkyard Wars. Oh, yeah. That's a great choice. I'm really sad that isn't around anymore. Yeah, why are we not doing this? I mean, in the same ways that we're not RoboGames has been on hiatus

For a bit There's a Kickstarter Fighting robots Along those lines Mythbusters would probably be Yeah that should have been on our retcon list Let's see what else Actually in regards to Junkyard Wars

I heard that they seeded the I mean obviously they had to seed the Junkyard oh yeah definitely and sometimes they admitted that yeah most of those shows are pretty cheated and scripted but you know what are you going to do if it doesn't go right you have no show

so I have to make sure it goes right yeah but I mean I think that that one is like the most directly engineering multiple disciplinary. Well, the guests were usually, and if I remember correctly, the guests were usually engineers or people who had mechanical backgrounds. It just wasn't random people putting together cars. I would not pick people off the street to go do Junkyard Wars. But it was such a hackathon.

It was. It looked exhausting. Did that come out? There's the UK version, and then there's the American version. The UK version, by far, was much better. Oh, that's awesome. Yes. Yeah.

And then, let's see, Connections, which I guess did come out in the late 70s, and then they did a couple times in the 80s. I don't think I saw that i remember the host was it was british right yeah yeah okay and uh connections was basically you'd say like okay you'd be in the modern age how do we get to you know what happens if there was no electricity i think that was the original one what if there was no electricity it was all gone what what would what could we do how would we continue society and then they go back in time to to basically describe how different people came up you know created different inventions and how

they they influenced other people all to the point where you ended up with electricity in your homes that's fantastic and they had a couple series on there i think there's like up to three of them and they all you know they all kind of go through each one. They kind of pick like, hey, you know, let's start with, you know, how do we get cheese? And like they go through like all kinds of things like Copernicus and this and that. But you get two things. One, you get a history lesson. You also get the idea of how people, you know, no idea is created purely in a vacuum.

It's all influenced by different people across multiple nations in many cases. You talk about who was talking to whom. But it also kind of gives you this hope of how you would take two disparate things and create something new. And I thought that was really important in terms of you know making people see how everything's interconnected right because that's the one thing that i don't think we teach very well in engineering school is that it's not just you no it isn't and uh everything has consequences and further repercussions you're standing on the shoulders of lots of people yeah yeah um let's see the uh couple of the other things that I had in here was the IT crowd.

Okay. Would that encourage you to go into a computer? It wouldn't encourage me. Although it was hilarious. It was awesome. Well, I guess if you can identify with that culture, then you would probably want to. I don't know.

I don't know about you, but my first job in college was being the IT person, the person on the last sit-in. Yeah, I think all three of us. And man, people do some stupid things. Yes. And then when you won't let them do stuff, they want to cut off their fingers with the paper cutter. Yes. Yes. And usually all of this happens at 2 a.m. before something is due.

Yes. Yes, it does. And then the last thing that I have on my list, which is going to seem peculiar, is La Femme Nikita. Now that could be either the first version of the series, not whatever happened in 2010, or the original movie where they have a lot of technology and computer hacking and there's a lot of geopolitical and terrorism and stuff that goes in there it came from the the creator of that series also was the creator of the 24 series which is why you see the same actors and many times the same plots but uh i thought lafemme

nikita although but not alias i don't like alias and i wasn't into it i wasn't into it jj abrams just you know if you're gonna do that you might as well talk about the dollhouse And I wasn't into it. I wasn't into it. J.J. Abrams just... If you're going to do that, you might as well talk about The Dollhouse, which is looking at fantastically pretty women in weird situations. I watched that recently. It wasn't as good a second time. No. Yeah.

As long as we're in a free-for-all, can I dump a couple? Yeah, sure. These were ones that I'd kind of forgotten about. And Jen reminded me of the connections at Cosmos, the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan. I remember watching that as a kid. And that's not necessarily engineering, but certainly inspirational in terms of science and getting a picture of how big and weird the universe actually is and beautiful. And that series had a tone of hope too,

even though it had a warning. Yes, Sagan always did. Even though it had warnings for humanity, it also had his hopefulness about where we would eventually end up and that we would eventually get to the stars. And that was really, I think, a good message to get as a kid about science. Especially, you lived in an area that it was more possible if something happened with the Russians, it was all going to go very badly for you. We were all going to be obliterated anyway, but yeah, I lived right next to a nuclear power plant.

Yeah, and I know that that was, I grew up, you know, I watched Red Dawn, but so. But for you, it was a little more real and that hopefulness was probably more important. I think it depends, not to derail into a discussion about nuclear holocaust, but I think it depends on what you're exposed to just in the news and stuff too, because where you lived wasn't any safer than anywhere else. I mean, you were right next to an Air Force base too. I was definitely young kid.

So it could have been on my influence list, not retconned. Oh, if we'd done books, that would have been high on my list. But that was just another great story of people using technology to advance humanity and in a hopeful way. And I like stories like that. I do like the apocalyptic dystopian stuff, but I think we've kind of swung a little too far that way lately, at least in TV, a little bit in movies. And I do like the hopeful stories to kind of sweeten the taste of that sometimes. Yeah, you were the one who tweeted last week the retweet of Slate's article

about how just about everything is getting better. It's not all better, but it is mostly violence, economy. Most of these things are getting better. Yeah, over long periods of time. Well, yeah. Well, should I wrap it up then? guess so unless we want to i have one oh my goodness okay one more book it and it's it's non-fiction which you said i don't know

um it's called the the sisterhood of spies and and what it does is it talks about early u.s um where they would basically hire you know women out of these ivy league schools who you know who couldn't you know they weren't married yet so you know they didn't have anything to do apparently um and they were graduating in mathematics and what have you and what they would do is they would become spies. So this talks about how Julia Child became a spy. And who was the one who invented RF? Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr. It also talks about the women who were doing programming

of some of these computers, early computers, and worked on decrypting the Enigma. And so it basically talks through all of this through the first two world wars. It doesn't come in Kindle. No. Have to wait to get it? If you could borrow mine, I have it in paperback.

Okay. Party of gents tonight. Okay. Well, then that sounds great. Do you have any more of those? Because I always need things to read. We can talk later. Yes, we can talk offline. Well, thank you everyone for humoring my idea here. It was fun. It is. Thank you to Jen and to Christopher for everything.

Not just for recording, producing. And for you listeners, thank you. And Happy New Year. May all of your devices light their LEDs and not light on fire, unless that's its purpose. I do have a final thought to leave you with this week. It's a little long, but hey, the show is still under two hours. Were you looking for confirmation? Yeah, sort of.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies manage to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races aboard her starship,

custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy. © BF-WATCH TV 2021