We continue our time travel arc with a discussion of our favorite time machines and modes of time travel. And we run down the week in geek, including the world’s first robot-run marathon, a custom fan-built Megatron tank, details about the inside of the Star Wars AT-AT, sad news about Star Trek IV cinematographer Don Peterman, and Simon Pegg’s one-word analysis of the new Star Trek movie sequel script. If you haven’t yet RSVP’d for this year’s 3rd Annual GWC International Meetup, get on it! It’s approaching fast.
News about the first robot-run Marathon immediately made me think of “The DARPA Grand Challenge”.
It was a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert by competing robot-driven vehicles.
In the first one in 2005, hardly any even made it the whole route. But in the 2007 race, it was a real exciting match with it getting down the wire between just a couple contenders that were way ahead of the pack.
There was also a DARPA Urban Challenge that had robot-driven vehicles racing in an urban setting—with traffic lights, stop signs etc.
NOVA did an awesome documentary about the DARPA challenge.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/
Description about it here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/about.html
Doesn’t look like the show is on the web anymore, but the DVD is out there.
Fun stuff.
The stuff you were talking about with the minor changes to tech in the past reminds me of David Weber’s Safehold series. It’s not really time travel, but the concept behind it was similar.
This group of humans on the planet Safehold was intentonally reverted back to essentially medieval times and held there by a repressive religion, and 900 years later, an android with knowledge up to the establishment of the colony woke up and is trying to break through the religion and allow the people to develop past that point.
The first book is Off Armageddon Reef if anyone’s interested.
As a teacher in a university, and having been a teacher back in 2007 during the Virginia Tech shootings… the idea of students (or whoever) carrying weapons on campus terrifies me. Stay safe, Audra. 
People vetted and licensed to carry, carrying frightens me a lot less then nobody being armed but somebody looking to do ill.
But I don’t want to turn this into a gun debate so meh.
Looking forward to listening! As some of y’all might know, I’ve recently taken a pragmatic look at the risks of time travel as applies to ‘what would I do if it happened to me’ and wrote that app for being able to survive/profit in the past and/or bootsrap technology (as the Saijin on Safehold must do).
After I released it to the iPhone app store, I got really paranoid about the whole ‘how would I power it?’ question someone brought up and just ordered a solar iPhone charger off Amazon. I’ll have to keep that in my jacket, ‘just in case’.
well then… i have some cash for the “chuck mo-hawk fund”… default n i will already b sporting mohawks… so come on gwc, let shave chucks head
I really liked The Time Traveller’s Wife. I geek out over time travel movies and am a sucker for a romance, so this was Reese’s for me. I know the podcast comments were meant in jest, but they really did a good job of avoiding any creepy feeling that might come from him meeting his wife when she’s a child. I loved the fact that when she meets him for the first time, he already knows her … and later on when he meets her for the first time, she already knows him. The idea that his ability was a genetic disorder was interesting and the implications that has for children was developed wonderfully. You guys should see this movie.
Somewhere in Time is the Christopher Reeve movie you were thinking about. I remember liking it when I was younger, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen it that I can’t really review it accurately. I need to put that in my Netflix queue.
Primer has already been discussed, but I believe it merits repeat attention. There are details to this movie that you will not catch the first time through. You should probably watch this movie at least three times with a good pause for discussion in between each viewing. Even then, you might not catch some things.
[spoiler]When I first realized that movie as presented is actually at least the second time one of the main characters had been through the “invention” part, I freaked out. There are many clues. If you don’t mind spoiling yourself further, do a websearch for Primer Timeline and find one that has the seven or eight timelines detailed. This movie was mind-blowing.[/spoiler]
I’d also recommend David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. The device of time travel is simple, but the implications in this story are astounding. Imagine living in a house that is constantly occupied by a dozen or more versions of you from different points along the time stream. It gets more complicated from there.
Anyway, thanks for this time travel arc, I love this stuff.
Ira Flatow’s hosted several interesting discussions on NPR’s Science Friday recently about the perceived attack on science. I’m trying to find the link, but I listened to a woman arguing that people (in general terms) today see science as a belief system rather than a system of inquiry, and therefore put it on the same terms as “religious” belief, i.e. you believe in evolution or you believe in creationism. The guest spoke about the fact that science isn’t about belief, but about the process of creating a hypothesis, the accumulation of data, and being open to revising hypotheses based on new data. Therefore one can find the evidence for evolution to be convincing; it’s not about belief, but rather about the way we view and evaluate the world around us.
Anyways there are a number of interesting stories (about science and the federal budget, about politics and climate change, etc) that you all can check out in their archives.
also try timecrimes… its a strange great lil import of a movie
I can also recommend the Safehold series. I was enthralled at the changes that simple sail design and conical bullet tech did to the war they were fighting. Also the Zero changes the calcs possible in interesting ways.
Just a very fun series to read. THough I wish he’d (Weber) get back to more of the tech changes and less time messing about with all that assassination and backstabbing. Though the Queen is uber cool. I like her charc alot oh and the naked water football with the gender-bending machine with a human soul thing was pretty funny in the first book…but I may be getting off track here.
Somewhere in Time was the time travel movie with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. It was based off Richard Matheson’s novel.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081534/
Time After Time was Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper (David Warner) to the 20th Century.
Has anyone here read any the The Company books by Kage Baker? It’s an interesting take on time travel. Also, the nab who folded himself is one of my favorites, but no discussion is complete without The Door Into Summer, one of my favorite Heinlein juveniles.
Well, from what I saw on his website, he just finished editing book 5, so we should be seeing it by the end of the year (or in my case, hearing it thanks to Audible 
). One catch is, there isn’t too much more tech advancement they can do in some aspects without violating the Proscriptions (no steam power is a huge limitation at this point).
As far as the church s concerned, that ship had probably already sailed. 
Now convincing his allies that the proscriptions arent being violated or are no longer necessary… that’s probably the real goal.
What I learned from the most recent podcast.
Taxes = The end of hope.
Audra wants to time travel in a giant hamster ball.
If we get Sean a couple flaming doctor peppers or amaretto and cokes we can probably convince him to get a mohawk too
Audra: What time does the “manscaping” party start? Bwahahaha!!!
For my leaving do, I actually sported a mohawk…It wasn’t that bad actually
I would have kept it but I was starting my new job on the monday so I had to shave it off the next day.
I have no idea where I would go back into time, I’m not a tradesman by nature but I think I would look into going into something like smithing or something of that nature.
However, the choice of being a black educated male who can read and write would limit my options I would think (My knowledge of personal history is limited). I don’t think I would want to be in America in the past Shrug
I think I would go into the future, just to see what happens.
I wouldn’t want to go back to my teenage years, I did the working in the supermarket and going through the boring parts (Jobs, classes, exams). I don’t want to have to go through 3 Hour aerospace engineering lectures sweats. Would I change things, maybe…However, now that I have a son, I wouldn’t want to do anything to ruin that.
Pendelum rocks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04QpInkz9so&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQA1d0QQvf8u
Another good song by Nero
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE47er6qnqg
Not to everyones taste - Superman Drum and Bass
i like the way u think sir