Show is live today from 4-6pm eastern. Go here for LIVE stream options.

• MSNBC political commentator and analyst, Rachel Maddow
• Comics writer and illustrator, Brian Wood
• Political blogger, Matt Yglesias
• Actress and web video pioneer, Casey McKinnon
• Blogger, academic and political/sci-fi wonk, Gerry Canavan
  

We’ll also be joined by our regular cast and crew, and as always, we’ll discuss the week’s big items in political and genre-related news.

It’s kind of hard to believe we’ve done 100 episodes. That’s 200 hours or political/sci-fi talk! And we don’t get paid! What are we thinking?!

Tune in live on Sunday at 4:00 P.M. eastern and join our live chat here.

For those of you who miss the live stream, the podcast of the episode will be posted on Tuesday evening.

As the kids say, ZOMG!

Along with missing work and some teaching, I didn’t touch the Internet much, other than email. Here is a smattering of things I did see that I found interesting. Maybe you will too…

• The 101 Muppets of Sesame Street
• Rock genres flow chart
• Best. Superbowl. Photo. Ever.
• How to levitate by standing next to a wet spot on the sidewalk
• Unlink your feeds: a manifesto.
• Dollhouse: a Postmortem.
• Wes Anderson directs Spider-man.
• I kicked in some funds for the VFX work on this cool little short. You should too.
• The many ways that Roland Emmerich (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) will fuck up Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (hint: 3D mo-cap epic).

And finally, Sunday will be Poli-Sci-Fi Radio’s 100th episode. We’re celebrating with some extra special phone-in guests. Listen live from 4-6PM Sunday by going here, or be a chump and wait for the podcast.

Here’s how they arrived at the list, on which Steve is listed as #44 — one higher than Lou Dobbs. I think Steve should consider this alone a personal and professional milestone.

And because all of this has to ultimately be about me, I’ll note that the still they used for Steve is taken from Digital Pamphleteer, the film I made about him back in 2007.

W00t!

It’s astounding that the US is even in the match, having defeated the number one team in the world (Spain) yesterday 2-nil. And even getting to play Spain in the semi-finals was totally unlikely, having been all but shut out of the tournament before miraculously defeating Egypt 3-zip in a game that they had to win by three points in order to continue.

And it’s not like I’m a nationalist who’s been rooting for the US team all along. My allegiances in soccer blow with the wind. Emily and I usually root for whoever the underdog is — it’s just that this time, the underdog happens to totally be my national team!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to dye my hair rainbow colors or become like that Francis McDormand character in Lone Star, and I’m still going to blog about dorky stuff. I just couldn’t let this historic moment (not the game, but the fact that I care about the game) pass without comment.

As you were.

UPDATE: Alert emailers have now informed me that this game of foots-ball will also prevent me from attending the annual political blogger bar-b-que and hamburger summit in Montpelier on Sunday. Two political/nerdy things disrupted in my life by sports, of all things. I’d like to personally apologize to John Hodgman, who certainly expected better from me.

Word on the street is that this is far and away the best Trek movie yet (not too high a bar to reach in this Star Trek nerd’s opinion, STII: TWOK notwithstanding). Rotten Tomatoes has the film rated at a respectable 94%, and even negative reviews — like Roger Ebert’s — admit that it’s a really fun ride.

For as much of a Star Wars geek as I am, my Star Trek roots run deeper. By the time I was 13 I knew the titles of all 79 original Trek episodes. I had (still have) the Starfleet Technical Manual and Enterprise blueprints and lots of paperback novels and novelizations. Trek was a major part of my inner life growing up. Capt. Pike had a horse named Tango. I’m just saying…

The State of Vermont and Star Trek have a history too. Where No Man Has Gone Before — the 2nd Star Trek pilot and first appearance of Capt. James Kirk as a character — was directed by Vermonter James Goldstone. This new Trek film features a Vermont granite quarry. According to the Vermont Film Commission…

E.L. Smith Quarry in Graniteville,Vermont has a role in the new Star Trek movie.  Star Trek, the latest Paramount summer blockbuster film, digitally inserted actors into the quarry for one of the chase scenes. In this scene, a young Captain Kirk is driving a red convertible with a futuristic police officer in hot pursuit.  The scene ends with Kirk dangling at the precipice of the quarry staring down a 600’ drop. (copied from an email – no link provided)

Let the nerdgassing commence in the comments here, but NO SPOILERS please, at least until after Saturday. Look for a detailed discussion about the film on this Sunday’s Poli-Sci-Fi Radio.

If you don’t watch Dollhouse, the above explanation probably makes little or no sense to you, but the discussion we had on the radio quickly went beyond the episode’s plot and became a discussion about the nature of identity w/r/t the SF concept of teleportation. (If you’re curious, this discussion takes place in the last 1/2 hour of the two-hour episode.) Here’s the 50 cent tour…

Suppose someone invents a teleportation device (like the transporter from Star Trek). Bob steps into little teleportation booth in New York, there’s a flash of light as the precise position and orientation of every cell, molecule, atom and quark in Bob’s body is scanned and that information is “beamed” at the speed of light to a similar booth in Paris, where a machine, using some local material, reassembles an exact replica — down to the subatomic structure — of Bob. This perfect replica of Bob (who literally is Bob is every measurable respect) then steps out of the booth and from Bob’s subjective experience, he stepped into a booth in New York and stepped out an instant later in Paris.

Great! The problem is: what happens to the “Bob” that stepped into the machine in New York? His atomic structure was scanned so his body could be replicated in Paris, but all of the material that made up the Bob that stepped into the machine in New York is still there, standing in the booth, wondering what he’s going to eat for dinner in Paris. He is still there, that is, unless the teleportation process kills him.

In science fiction movies and TV shows, at the moment of teleportation, the starship captain dematerializes in one place and rematerializes in a new place, as though her atoms were being physically moved from one spot to another. But from chemistry we know that a carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom — the physical constituent matter that makes us up isn’t anything special — it’s the arrangement of that matter that makes us live, breathe and think as conscious beings. So to build a working teleportation machine, all you really need to do is scan the precise positions of each particle of material and reassemble those bits in the right order in the destination spot using whatever materials are present at the new location (assuming all the right constituent elements are present in sufficient quantities).

So that means that at the moment of “dematerialization,” what’s really happening is that the starship captain’s atoms are being destroyed — she’s being killed by the teleporter — and a new identical version of her is appearing on the planet’s surface. From the perspective of the now planetside captain, everything is hunky dory — one second she was on the transporter pad and the next second she was standing on the planet’s surface. But what about the perspective of the woman who stepped onto the transporter pad and was annihilated? Did she show up on the planet’s surface? Are there two separate consciousnesses or just one? Can she choose to not have her original body destroyed, thereby yielding two distinct people? Should she?

This is only scratching the surface of the implications of such a technology. There’s a bit of a comments thread going on at the PSFR post. For the record, despite not believing in anything like a “soul” and being aware of the fact that my consciousness is merely the result of the collection of physical stuff that is me, I am deeply troubled by this thought experiment and I, for one, would never choose to step into such a teleportation device, not knowing whether “I” would be the copy that stepped out of the booth in Paris or the original that gets destroyed in New York. The commenters at the PSFR blog so far agree with me, but on the show on Sunday Steve and Emily did not. They were just fine with the simultaneous annihilation and creation of themselves in the teleporters.

What do you think? Would you let yourself be “transported” in such a fashion?

For other takes on this problem see…

• The Ship of Theseus paradox
• Four Reasons Why “You” Don’t Exist
• The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
• The Prestige