Episode 621: A Block of Wood

This week, we bounce from questionable kindergarten teaching techniques and a tour through old movies to a pile of upcoming sci-fi and superhero projects. Then, in Future or Now, AI gives hurricane forecasters a potentially huge advantage, NASA pulls off another bit of engineering wizardry to keep Voyager 2 alive, and the cast of The Pitt boldly goes where plenty of actors have gone before.

Steven is officially over summer. Heat, summer schedules, summer in general—it's time to move on.

Meanwhile, Ben has been watching OLD MOVIES, including Kindergarten Cop. Ben calls it an "exceptional film," but watching Arnold Schwarzenegger take control of a classroom in 2026 raises some questions. How would Detective John Kimble's teaching methods stack up against modern school employee safety training? How many policies would he violate before lunch? And perhaps most unsettling: just how old are all those kindergarteners today?

That sends us down the inevitable road of examining an old movie through the lens of people who now have entirely too much experience with how schools actually operate.

Steven also has a pile of upcoming genre television and movie news to talk about. Neuromancer is headed to Apple TV, while Blade Runner 2099 is coming as a limited series on Prime Video. San Diego Comic-Con also brought news about Ghost Rider and Black Panther 3, along with more X-Men casting news involving Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, and Professor X.

Trailer Links:

Neuromancer: Watch on YouTube Blade Runner 2099: Watch on YouTube

Devon has been doing some family movie watching, working through the Jumanji movies and eventually arriving at Zathura. Technically part of the larger Jumanji family, Zathura doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. It doesn't help that Dax Shepard's character has to exist in the shadow of Robin Williams, which leads to the assessment that Shepard comes across as "a block of wood" by comparison.

Things get considerably darker with The Long Walk, based on Stephen King's novel originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. Devon found the adaptation interesting and well done—but extremely bleak. That conversation somehow takes a detour through Time Runner before eventually landing on Hokum and its supernatural layer.

Ben brings us a potentially enormous development in weather forecasting. Google DeepMind's WeatherNext AI system has demonstrated an ability to improve hurricane forecasts, potentially giving forecasters and emergency planners an additional day of warning.

The system predicts both storm tracks and intensity and can rapidly generate thousands of possible scenarios. During Hurricane Melissa, it reportedly identified major intensification earlier than conventional forecasting models. That's potentially life-saving extra time for communities preparing for a major storm.

But there's an interesting wrinkle: like many sophisticated AI systems, exactly how the model reaches some of its conclusions isn't always clear to the scientists using it. That makes WeatherNext another fascinating example of AI producing useful results while simultaneously raising questions about how much we need to understand a system before we're comfortable relying on it.

And despite the improvement in modeling, humans aren't leaving the process. Meteorologists still have to interpret the information, communicate uncertainty, and turn forecasts into useful warnings for the public.

Read the Ars Technica report on DeepMind's hurricane forecasting breakthrough

Nearly half a century after leaving Earth, Voyager 2 is still going, and NASA engineers are once again finding creative ways to keep it alive.

In an operation nicknamed the "Big Bang," engineers simultaneously shut down power-hungry hardware and transitioned to lower-power alternatives while carefully keeping the spacecraft warm enough to survive. Voyager's dwindling power supply has forced NASA to make increasingly difficult decisions about which systems can remain operational, making every additional bit of usable energy precious.

It's another remarkable chapter in a mission launched in 1977 that is still returning scientific data from interstellar space.

Read more about the Voyager 2 operation at ScienceDaily

Explore NASA's Voyager mission

And while we're talking about space, we check back in on New Asgard and ask the important question: is Devon still going to space?

Finally, there's an unusual crossover coming for fans of The Pitt and Star Trek. Noah Wyle and members of The Pitt cast are participating in a Star Trek table read benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.

It's not a new Trek series and it's not some bizarre medical-drama crossover episode—but it is an opportunity to hear a completely different cast tackle Star Trek material while supporting the foundation's programs.

Read more about The Pitt cast's Star Trek table read at TrekMovie

From aging action comedies to AI-powered hurricane forecasts and a spacecraft that refuses to die, this week is a reminder that the future has a funny way of colliding with the past. Join us next time for more science, sci-fi, and whatever unexpected detours we stumble into along the way.