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#Pratchat60 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 60, “Eyes Turnwise“, a special episode in which we answer listener questions.

Iconographic Evidence

Watch out for some photos here soon!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title echoes that of #Pratchat30, but this time we’re looking the Discworld equivalent of forwards rather than exclusively backwards.
  • We discussed Small Gods in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones.
  • Steve’s questions aren’t just about Small Gods, but specifically the sequences in that book where Brutha is in Ephebe and learns about the Ephebian gods. They occur around 40% into the book.
  • The Hide Park line up devised by Glitch1958 includes the ones we mentioned in the episode: English Patella Throwing Weapons; Newly Arrived Wood Pond; Tropical Penguins; Pay ‘n’ Park; Unnerved Nana; and The Quite Warm Spicy Vegetables. Glitch also added Twinkle-Up; In Bus Queue; Open square bracket, Insert new monarch here, close square bracket; Nanny Ogg’s Bananananananarama; Flu-Theater; Irritated with the motor; and No way, sis!
  • On that last note: the Oasis cover band No Way Sis do exist, but they’re Glaswegian. The Australian one is Noasis.
  • The quotation “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” is from Men at Arms, about Edward d’Eath. You’ll find it quite near the start, just before Carrot’s finishes his letter home. We the book in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.
  • Chaz’s question is a reference to “The Queue” – that is, the queue to see Queen Elizabeth’s body while it lay in state at Westminster Hall. For five days leading up to her funeral on 19 September 2022, 250,000 people lined up for as much as 24 hours over a distance of up to sixteen kilometres. Lots of people live-tweeted the Queue’s status, including the dedicated account @QE2Queue. Liz mentioned the TikTok musical, which was the creation of English actor Rob Madge. You can find it on TikTok here:
@rob_madge_

♬ original sound – Rob Madge
  • Many of the conspiracy theories around the Queen’s death originate from QAnon, and include things like her body not being in the coffin, that Queen Elizabeth II had been already dead for months or years, or even Princess Diana secretly being alive, and coming out of hiding to become the next Queen.
  • We discussed the idea of “lockdown in Ankh-Morpork” in Eeek Club 2021, our special bonus episode in which topics are chosen by subscribers, for the Glorious 25th of May. We also answered some similar questions in our previous all questions episode, #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“.
  • You can find links to The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s headcanon threads in the episode notes for Eeek Club 2021. If they do one for the Patrician’s queue we’ll link to it here.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld II just over a year ago in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“.
  • So far three podcasts have discussed all 41 Discworld novels – Radio Morpork, The Death of Podcasts and Wyrd Sisters. You can find links to all their episodes, and many more besides, at Ben’s side project, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
  • Here’s the Reddit thread of favourite Pratchett footnotes mentioned by Liz, from the subreddit r/Discworld.
  • We mention the following footnotes while answering Manning’s question:
    • The gold/Glod typo footnote appears in Witches Abroad:
      Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy seraph of Al-Ybi was once cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered.
    • The Amazing Maurice does indeed appear in Reaper Man, but not in a footnote; the Dean complains about being taken in by Maurice’s scam, which had also worked in Quirm and Stopped Lat.
    • The Light Fantastic footnote about the magic shop:
      No one knows why, but all the most truly mysterious and magical items are bought from shops that appear and, after a trading life even briefer than a double-glazing company, vanish like smoke. There have been various attempts to explain this, all of which don’t fully account for the observed facts. These shops turn up anywhere in the universe, and their immediate non-existence in any particular city can normally be deduced from crowds of people wandering the streets clutching defunct magical items, ornate guarantee cards, and looking very suspiciously at brick walls.
    • The definition of the Thaum first appears in The Light Fantastic, and is later recapped in The Science of Discworld III. Here’s the original version:
      A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.
  • We’ve discussed the Long Earth books in the following episodes:
  • We discussed Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“.
  • We discussed Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • We’ve previously discussed Pratchett’s children’s books:
  • Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (not Science Fiction, as Ben misremembers) and Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy are the work of American writer and artist Wayne Barlowe, who also works as a concept artist and creature designer in film and television on works including Galaxy Quest, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Aquaman.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat35 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 35, “Great Balls of Physics“, featuring guest Anna Ahveninen, discussing Terry’s 1999 collaboration with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Science of Discworld.

  • The episode title plays on the classic Jerry Lee Lewis song, “Great Balls of Fire”, in honour of Roundworld’s tendency to shape matter into spheres.
  • Anna (and Liz and Ben) know that pharmacists do not just “sell molecules”. Modern pharmacy is the science of understanding and preparing medicines. Pharmacists are highly trained healthcare professionals, rightly held in high regard. But in “Commonwealth English”, “chemist” is a common synonym for pharmacist, hence Anna’s joke and our hyperbolic extension of it. (While we’re on the subject, it’s not entirely true that “everything” is made of molecules, but certainly everything that humans are likely to sell on Earth is.)
  • The story of the science fiction convention, which was held in the Hague in an unspecified year, appears in the book in Chapter 22, “Things That Aren’t”. Jack Cohen gave a longer account of Terry’s involvement, as well as some other background on how the book was written and published, in the Guardian article “Terry Pratchett and the real science of Discworld” by Sam Jordison, published a couple of months after Terry’s death.
  • A Teaspoon and an Open Mind: The Science of Doctor Who was written by Michael White in 2005, and if Ben were feeling uncharitable he might suggest it was rushed out to cash in- er, coincide with the hugely successful revived series that same year. White is an English author and former member of 80s band The Thompson Twins who now writes novels, but has also written a number of acclaimed biographies of da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Tolkien, Asimov and many more. He also wrote The Science of The X-Files – which gets mentioned in the introduction of The Science of Discworld! The Doctor Who book’s title comes from the 1979 story The Creature From the Pit, in which the Doctor, having succeeded where another has failed, quips: “Well to be fair I had a couple of gadgets he probably didn’t, like a teaspoon and an open mind.” This line was almost certainly influenced by Douglas Adams, who was script editor of Doctor Who at the time. A Teaspoon and an Open Mind is also the title of the dedicated Doctor Who fan fiction site whofic.com.
  • Paul Davies is a famous English physicist and broadcaster who has written thirty books, most of them popular science titles which were bestsellers in the 1980s and 1990s. His most famous books are God and the New Physics (1983), The Mind of God (1992), and Ben’s favourite, How to Build a Time Machine (2002). Though less prolific in recent years, he did publish a new book in 2019: The Demon in the Machine.
  • Back to the Future Part II and Part III were filmed “back to back”, meaning that they were produced together, one immediately after the other. This allowed the two to make numerous references to each other and include many of the same actors.
  • In the 2007 Doctor Who story “Blink”, often cited as one of the best, the Tenth Doctor famously explains causality and time travel like this: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”
  • Jack Cohen was a zoologist with a long career in academia, and also advised science fiction authors how to write plausible aliens, including Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven and Terry himself. He died in 2019. Ian Stewart is a mathematician who has written a large number of academic and popular mathematics books. Both worked at the University of Warwick, which granted Terry Pratchett his first honorary degree in 1999 following the publication of The Science of Discworld. (At the same ceremony, Terry made Jack and Ian honorary wizards of Unseen University.)
  • Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest is a 1994 book by Peter Huber which tries to refute the dystopia of 1984, claiming that information technology will always be subverted for good because information wants to be free. Ben was skeptical when he first read it twenty-four years ago, and is no less skeptical now he’s discovered it was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s picks for his public book club in 2015.
  • Thaumaturgy comes from Greek, and means “miracle work” or “wonder work”. It is not only used to describe magic, but also the ability of some saints to perform miracles. In the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, the vampire clan Tremere are descended from a cabal of human mages who transformed themselves into vampires to achieve immortality, but lost their ability to use wizard magic. They developed a type of blood magic based on hermetic principles as a replacement, which they call thaumaturgy. (Ben’s pronunciation is correct.)
  • The Manhattan Project was the US Army’s effort to build nuclear weapons during World War II. As part of the project, the world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built in an old squash court in Stagg Field, a football field and sports complex at the Hyde Park campus of the University of Chicago. It was completed on December 1, 1942, and the reaction started with removal of the control rods the next day.
  • Ben’s old saying about specialists is one that’s evolved a lot over time and likely has multiple origins, as so many of these things do. The earliest example seems to be from William Warde Fowler, a scholar at the University of Oxford, who used a shorter version of the phrase in a review published in 1911. The earliest version to add the bit about “knowing everything about nothing” also included the saying’s witty opposite, from Stanford University’s Robert E. Swain, appropriately enough a chemist, in 1928. He was talking about the difference between scientists and philosophers: “Some people regard the former as one who knows a great deal about a very little, and who keeps on knowing more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. Then he is a scientist. Then there are the latter specimen, who knows a little about very much, and he continues to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. Then he is a philosopher.”
  • A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is Stephen Hawking’s bestselling popular science book, first published in 1988. Special and general relativity are covered in chapter two, which might challenge a few readers, but chapter four – while less than twenty pages long – introduces mind-bending ideas from quantum mechanics like the “spin” of quarks. Because it sold 25 million copies but contains such difficult concepts, it is often called “the most unread book of all time”. (There’s no shame in this; have another go if you like!) In 2014, American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg used publicly available data on Amazon Kindle highlighting to judge which books were abandoned partway through, a measure he cheekily called the “Hawking Index”. A Brief History of Time appeared as the third or fourth in the list.
  • What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life was originally published as Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life in 2002. Its central thesis is that if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, we need to broaden our understanding of the forms life might take, as our current searches only look for life similar to that found on Earth. “Jack&Ian” appears in the preface as the name of their “collective entity”, though it should be noted that the book is largely based on Jack’s often given lecture “The Possibility of Life on Other Planets”, or POLOOP, which he had originally wanted to call “What Does a Martian Look Like?”
  • It is generally acceptable to reference your own work in science academia…though since the frequency with which a researcher’s work is cited is a mark of respectability and influence, there have been those who perhaps do so too often…
  • We’ve mentioned Arthur C Clarke, famous author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many other influential science fiction novels before. Clarke’s most famous quote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“, was the last of his “three laws”, added to a revised version of his 1962 essay “Hazards of Prophecy: the Failure of the Imagination” in 1973. (The other two are much less famous.) The converse law quoted in the front of the book, “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced“, is attributed in the first edition of The Science of Discworld to Gregory Benford – but while a version of it does appear in Benford’s 1997 book Foundation’s Fear, the original appears to have been written by Professor Barry Gehm, published in the science fiction magazine Analog as “Gehm’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law” in 1991.
  • The story from The Simpsons in which Bart messes up Lisa’s science project, creating a miniature world full of tiny people in a bathtub, is the segment “The Genesis Tub” from the Halloween special “Treehouse of Horror VII” in 1996.
  • We previously referred to the universes hidden inside things in the first two Men in Black films in our Truckers episode, “Upscalator to Heaven“. In the first film, aliens play with a marble which somehow contains the Milky Way galaxy, while in the sequel, our entire universe is shown to exist within a locker in an alien train station.
  • A microcosm is any subset of a thing which is said to represent the whole. Ben’s wordplay “microcosmos” isn’t that clever, since the word comes via Latin from the Greek mikros kosmos, which literally means “tiny cosmos”.
  • Ben used out of old habit he is trying to break the older LGBT acronym, which is now considered incomplete. The longer version preferred these days is LGBTIAQ+, which encompasses lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, asexual and/or agender, queer and more identities. The intent of the acronym is to represent the diversity of experience outside of “traditional” binary gender and heterosexuality. While not everyone likes it or identifies with the term, “queer” is commonly used as spoken shorthand for the acronym.
  • The first clear fossil evidence of dinosaur feathers was found in the 1990s, and palaeontologists have only found more since then.
  • The luminiferous æther – not to be confused with the class of organic compounds called ether – was a proposed “medium” of some kind of matter that filled space, and explained the transmission of light waves. In 1887, scientists Albert A. Michelson (who made some of the early precise measurements of the speed of light) and Edward W. Morley (famous for measuring the precise atomic weight of oxygen) conducted an experiment to detect the motion of the Earth through the æther. It failed, leading to the end of æther theory, and paving the way for others, including Einstein’s special relativity.
  • There are currently 118 chemical elements that have been identified. New elements are acknowledged by a Joint Working Party formed in 1999 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). It can take years between the first experimental discovery and formal acceptance of a new element, as initial claims are often disputed. The most recent four were acknowledged in 2015 and officially named in 2016, but were first synthesised years earlier. In order of their first recognised synthesis, they are:
    • Oganesson (Og, atomic number 118, named after Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian) in 2002;
    • Moscovium (Mc, atomic number 115, named after Moscow) in 2003;
    • Nihonium (Nh, atomic number 113; named after Japan, Nihon) in 2004; and
    • Tennessine (Ts, atomic number 117, named after the US state of Tennessee) in 2009.
  • Plumbum is the Latin name for lead, which is why its chemical symbol is Pb. (This also helps distinguish it from the five other elements with names that begin with L.)
  • The idea that science works by disproving things was popularised by philosopher Karl Popper as falsifiability or falsificationism. Popper claimed that science worked not by looking at evidence in the world and using that to formulate laws, but by formulating laws and then testing them against reality, trying to prove them false. As Liz says, this is a lie-to-children – or at least a step in the development of the philosophy of science.
  • Pluto’s status had been in question since 1992, when several other similarly-sized objects were discovered in the Kuiper belt. In 2005 a bigger object, Eris, was discovered, and so in 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided to formally define what a planet was. As a result they also created the classification of “dwarf planet”, which they applied to Eris, Pluto and several other Kuiper Belt Objects.
  • Winter in Game of Thrones, like Summer, lasts a long but variable time – sometimes many “years”. (How they even have “years” of standard length when the seasons are like this is unclear.) Despite fan attempts to devise solar system models that might explain this, George R R Martin – author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which the show is based – is on record saying there is a non-scientific explanation for the seasons that will be revealed by the time he finishes writing the series.
  • The term “virtual reality” had become popular by the 1980s, and the first publicly available VR arcade games and consoles as early as the mid-90s, but the technology didn’t really take off while computer graphics were incapable of producing realistic looking worlds. Affordable VR headsets and kits became viable in 2010 with the invention of the Oculus Rift, and there are now several different commercially available VR systems, the most popular being Playstation VR, released in 2016 by Sony.
  • The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 film very much not based on the short story of the same title by Stephen King, who sued the production company to have his name removed from posters even though they did own the film rights to the story. In the film, Pierce Brosnan plays a scientist who uses experimental drugs and VR technology to improve the intelligence of Jobe, an intellectually disabled man who works mowing lawns. Jobe becomes malevolent and “uploads” himself into “cyberspace”. It’s…look, it’s very 1990s.
  • The Last of Us is a 2013 videogame for the Playstation 4 set in a dystopian future America where humans and many other animals have been taken over by a mutated version of the Cordyceps fungus. Cordyceps is a real genus, though the famous example which infects ants and alters their behaviour is now reclassified as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The fungus causes ants to climb to the underside of leaf and grab on tight, where it dies. The fungus replaces its body tissues and grows a fruiting body out of its head to spread its spores, and what’s more it’s been doing this to poor little ants for around 50 million years or more.
  • The Andalite Chronincles are better known as Animorphs, which we’ve previously talked about in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“. The Yeerks are small parasitic aliens, and mortal enemies of the animorphs, teenagers given shapeshifting powers in order to fight back against the Yeerk invasion.
  • Jack&Ian coined the term “extelligence” in their first book together, Figments of Reality: the Evolution of the Curious Mind in 1997. They define it in the introduction as “the accumulating knowledge of generations of intelligent beings” and consider it “a thing or process with its own characteristic structure and behaviour” requiring a new name. The book is largely devoted to exploring it. While it’s not as clear in The Science of Discworld, both Figments of Reality and What Does a Martian Look Like? explicitly include cultural knowledge like folklore and other non-written forms of knowledge as part of extelligence.
  • SimEarth was originally released in 1990, and was the second game in the “Sim” series following SimCity. (The third was SimAnt, in 1991.) It wasn’t just based on James Lovelock’s work; he directly advised on the game and wrote an introduction for the manual. As well as intelligent dinosaurs, it was possible to have machine life (assuming an advanced civilisation blew themselves up), intelligent carnivorous plants, and yes, a crustacean civilisation could totally be a thing.
  • The short story collection about women associated with the Nobel Prize is Ordinary Matter by Australian writer Laura Elvery, published in September 2020 by University of Queensland Press.
  • If you’re interested in a perspective on sexism in the Nobel Prize (along with other biases), this article on Massive Science is a good starting point.
  • While we’re used to thinking about Discworld wizards as men and witches as women, there are exceptions. Eskarina Smith, the Disc’s first woman wizard, appears in Pratchett’s third Discworld novel Equal Rites, which we covered in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Watch out for more on that front in future episodes. (No spoilers for books we’ve not covered yet!)
  • Mileva Marić was a Serbian physicist and mathematician. Her career in academia was interrupted by her relationship with Albert Einstein, who was her lover, husband and the father of her children. While she is not credited as a co-author on any of his work, there is evidence to suggest she may have substantially assisted Einstein in his early work, including the papers for which he won the Nobel Prize.
  • There are plenty of podcast episodes about the forgotten women of science, but so far we’ve not found a whole show about this. Let us know if you find one! Meanwhile some good feminist science podcasts are Lady Science and Superwomen in Science, while great more general science shows hosted by women are Ologies with Alie Ward and Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria.
  • For books on women in science, Anna recommends Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky, Inferior by Angela Saini and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. You can also check out the books on the STEMMinist book club list. (As usual, we recommend sourcing them from a local independent book shop, who can order in anything you want and needs your custom more than Amazon or BookDepository.)
  • William of Ockham (1287 – 1347) was a friar, philosopher and theologian whose most famous contribution to what would become scientific thought was the idea that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” – i.e. that an explanation that involves fewer things is more likely correct. This is known as the law of parsimony, or more famously, Occam’s Razor – hence the beard gag. (It should be noted that William himself used the idea to defend the idea of miracles.)
  • In most versions of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect end up on a space ark full of middle managers and other people claimed by their society to be the “useless” third, sent to crash into prehistoric Earth. On Earth, Arthur tries to communicate with the original inhabitants, the not-cave-people (they don’t live in caves), by teaching them to play Scrabble with tiles he makes himself. It doesn’t work. The Primary Phase of the radio series, the second book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and the original television series all end with Arthur and Ford trying to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything by getting the not-cave-people to pull Scrabble letters out of a bag at random.
  • Ben thought about including all the cancelled space missions in these show notes, but decided to save that depressing list for the separate article he might write with updates on some of the science in the book.
  • Humans have rarely thought scientifically about the Flat Earth. It was clear to many ancient civilisations that the planet must be round, and the first written account of the spherical Earth was in about 250 BCE by Eratosthenes and other Greeks, using geometry to mathematically prove its shape and possibly accurately calculate its size. (Jack&Ian point out that the accuracy is based on modern estimates of the unit they used, the stadion, but they are maybe a little overly suspicious.)
  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical 1884 novella by English schoolteacher Edwin A Abbott. As well as considering how two-dimensional beings might experience one- or three-dimensional worlds, it is also a fairly savage satire of the Victorian class system; the sexual politics of the book are either even more savage satire, or emblematic of the sexism of the time, depending on your interpretation. Ian Stewart not only wrote a sequel, Flatterland, in 2001, but an annotated version of the original, The Annotated Flatland, in 2002 (the same year as the updated The Science of Discworld and its sequel).
  • Mosasaurs are now well-known to the general public after appearing in a marine exhibit in the film Jurassic World, the 2015 sequel to the original three Jurassic Park films. Two different species of mosasaur were featured in the final episode of Impossible Pictures’ Sea Monsters, a 2003 follow up to 1999’s Walking with Dinosaurs.
  • Listener Bel described three categories of lies-to-children:
    • Protecting children e.g. “The world is a good and safe place”, stranger danger, “adults know what they’re doing”
    • Simplifications e.g. there are goodies and baddies and you can tell the difference by looking at them, “this is what an atom looks like”
    • Protecting adults, or “keeping the status quo”, e.g. sexism, racism, ableism, ageism and many more.
  • On being able to tell that a creature had hooves from its tooth, the specific instance Jack&Ian mention is of the Tingamarra tooth, which supposedly “demolished” the theory that placental mammals never made it to Australia. That call was a bit premature, since the claim is regarded at best as highly controversial and has not significantly changed the view of Australian palaeontology. It is still the consensus that the only placentals to arrive in Australia before humans were bats and rodents.
  • Temperance “Bones” Brennan is a fictional forensic anthropologist and protagonist of all twelve seasons of the television series Bones, which ran from 2005 to 2017. She’s played by Emily Deschanel. The television series is based on the Temperance Brennan series of novels by Kathy Reichs, which began with Déjà Dead in 1997 and, as of 2021, includes twenty novels and a short story collection. Ben is glad he missed this reference because while forensic anthropology is real – Reichs is one herself! – the show is pretty ridiculous. Bones has a hologram table! But it’s all good fun, and it gave David Boreanaz something to be cool and vulnerable in after Angel finished.
  • Teeth are great for palaeontologists because their enamel allows them to be preserved, and their shape and patterns of wear can be used to determine a great deal about diet and behaviour. Teeth are also very distinctive, and so you can tell a hooved animal’s tooth from that of an elephant or similar.
  • Liz’s joke about a creature with “don” in its name being really into “ham” is a reference to popular Australian ham, bacon and smallgoods brand Don. They are famous for their slogan “Is Don. Is good.”, coined for a series of ads in which a man spruiks their products in slightly broken, accented English before concluding with the phrase. (The same actor also plays the owner of a Gogomobil in another famous Australian ad from 1992 for the Yellow Pages phone directory. We have a lot of famous ads, probably because most of our television is otherwise sourced from the US or the UK; ad breaks were some of the rare times when you’d see Australian actors and sometimes hear Australian accents.)
  • To answer Liz’s questions: Are beak just giant tooth? No. Beak are is hair? …also no, but closer. Beaks are made of keratin, which is the same protein from which hair is formed. But there are two kinds of keratin: alpha-keratin is found in all vertebrates, and is used to form hair, wool and other softer but tough materials, like the outer layers of bony horns; and beta-keratin, found only in reptiles and birds, which is used to make scales, claws, feathers, shells and beaks.
  • Evolutionary electronics – also known as evolvable hardware – is totally a real thing, as is the circuit described in the book, evolved by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in 1996. Though it hasn’t led to anything groundbreaking, the same principles can be used to make adaptive hardware that can alter itself in response to changes in the environment.
  • A blimp is an inflatable airship that doesn’t have any internal structure – basically a big shaped balloon held in shape by internal pressure. “Zeppelin” is the common name for rigid airships, in which the body is supported by an internal structure. Zeppelin was the name of the German aircraft manufacturer which built many of the most famous airships, including the Hindenburg. The company vanished for around fifty years following World War II, but was revived in 2001 and still operates today – including working with Goodyear to replace their older blimps with semi-rigid airships. These have a supporting keel along the base of the envelope that holds the lifting gas, but no other internal structure.

#Pratchat59 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“, discussing Pratchett’s 2005 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on this video of Kat’s extraordinary Pratchett shelf!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is of course inspired by Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which young Charlie Bucket manages to find a “golden ticket” admiring him to the magical factory of weird chocolatier Willy Wonka. We’re not entirely sure if Charlie Darwin would rather have encountered the oddities of Wonka’s factory, but he certainly didn’t seem to have enjoyed seeing the God of Evolution’s whale production line… The book was memorably filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder playing the part of Wonka, though Dahl did not like it. It was a modest success at the time, but became a cult classic in the 1980s when it was frequently broadcast on television. A 2005 adaptation using the same title as the book was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp as Wonka, but the less said about that the better.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld II: The Globe in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, with guest Alanta Colley. We felt afterwards we hadn’t adequately expressed all of our feelings about it, so we discussed it a bit more in episode seven of our bonus subscriber only podcast, Ook Club, released in October 2021.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Richard Dawkins in #Pratchat29 and #Pratchat47. His early books on evolution are good, and The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1986, makes a great companion piece to Darwin’s Watch. But in the early 2000s he became more and more focused on being anti-religion, and in 2006, a year after The Science of Discworld III, he published The God Delusion, which argued that any belief in a god was delusional. It became his best selling work. He has continued to attract controversy over the years, thanks to his large audience and his perceived position (until fairly recently) as a representative for atheists, whether they want him or not. He’s made enough problematic statements that there’s an entire Wikipedia article titled “Views of Richard Dawkins“.
  • Redshift is an increase in the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, that occurs when observing objects which are moving away from us – making the light from very fast moving objects over large distances appear redder than it truly is. This is mostly observed with the light from distant stars as the universe expands. It can happen in the opposite direction too, with the wavelengths getting shorter, which is known as blueshift. Kat mentions Terry’s use of it in Thief of Time; she also mentioned that it appears in Thud! but we cut that as we didn’t want to spoil a book we’ll be covering very soon.
  • You can get a good overview of Monopoly‘s history as The Landlord’s Game via episode 189 of the 99% Invisible podcast, “The Landlord’s Game“. In recent years there’s been renewed interest in Elizabeth Magie’s original 1904 game, which tried to popularise Georgism, an alternate form of land tax. You can find out way more about it at landlords-game.com. Meanwhile, if you still think the modern game is fair, check out this monopolynerd.com blog post from 2012 which breaks down the probability of getting a full set of properties through luck (i.e. landing on them and buying them, without having to trade with other players), based on turn order.
  • I’m You, Dickhead is officially available for free here on YouTube. Note that it really lives up to the title; there’s swearing and the protagonist truly is a dickhead.
  • Bees and wasps (and ants) are members of the order Hymenoptera, a group of insects that includes more than 150,000 species. Spider wasps, the parasitic wasps which prey on spiders, are in the family Pompilidae; there are around 5,000 species of them, most of which specialise in specific kinds of spider.
  • The telephone is usually attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, who was the first American to be granted a patent for the device in February 1876. But even at the time this was controversial; rival inventor Elisha Gray also filed for a patent the same day, and Bell’s patent was suspended for three months so the matter could be settled – which it was, eventually, in Bell’s favour. But there are plenty of good reasons to think this wasn’t entirely fair or just… (Ben didn’t mean to conflate this dispute with the War of the Currents, but they two conflicts have a very similar vibe.)
  • Elizabeth Fulhame was a chemist lived in Edinburgh in the late 18th century, though some details of her life are lost to history. The book from which Kat quotes is An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous, which she published in 1794. Catalysis, which she describes in the book, is the now commonplace practice of speeding up a reaction between two chemicals by using a third substance, a catalyst, which isn’t affected by the reaction.
  • Kat is remembering The Science of Doctor Who, which did indeed star Brian Cox and was broadcast on BBC Two in November 2013 as part of the programme’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations… Which means Ben has it one the Blu-Ray box set he has of all those anniversary specials!
  • We’ve previously mentioned the cellulose billiard balls way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” (about Men at Arms), and #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“ (about Moving Pictures). The 99% Invisible episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben is The Post-Billiards Age from May 2015, which we also mentioned in both of those episodes.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat59 – Charlie and the Whale Factory

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Scientist, writer and editor Dr Kat Day joins Liz and Ben on a timey-wimey to Roundworld, as the wizards once again try to save humanity in Pratchett’s third collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: 2005’s The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Roundworld – the impossibly non-magical universe in a bottle which runs on rules – has gone wrong again, and the wizards feel duty-bound to set it right. Humanity’s survival depends on the publication of a specific book, but something is trying very hard to make sure its author writes a different one…or gets eaten by a giant squid. With the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, the wizards go to war – but who is their hidden enemy? And why is there one beardy fellow too many in the Great Hall?

In the (short) fiction chapters, the wizards must once again travel into Roundworld history, this time with a clear mission: to get Charles Darwin onto the Beagle so he can write The Origin of Species. In the science chapters, Jack and Ian have a focus – the importance of the theory of evolution – but they also feel free to use the time travel plot to explain infinity, DNA, the nature of science and history, and much more besides. They’ve learned to stay away from the cutting edge – but have they come entirely out of the “philosopause” they didn’t seem to know they were in last time?

Does the plot rely too much on prior knowledge of the Discworld? Is that really a problem, given the nature of the book? Did you follow the explanations of Minkowski spacetime and the different kinds of infinity, or were you happy coasting across the science chapters? Do they completely miss the point in that last non-fiction chapter – and does it really matter, when the end of the fiction part is so satisfying? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat59 on social media!

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Guest Dr Kat Day is a chemist, a former teacher, a medical editor and a writer of both science and fiction. Kat became well known via her chemistry blog The Chronicle Flask, which is currently on hiatus; you can also find her fiction at the fiction phial. Kat is also an assistant editor for Pseudopod, the horror fiction anthology podcast from Escape Artists. Kat recommended the story “Celestial Shores” as a possible entry point for Pratchett fans, as well as “Let the Buyer Beware” from Pseudopod’s sister podcast for young adult speculative fiction, Cast of Wonders. Over on Twitter you can follow Kat at @chronicleflask, and Pseudopod at @pseudopod_org.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode Pratchett turns sixty! As promised back in #Pratchat30, we’re doing another all-questions episode. This is your chance to send in questions about books you missed first time round, pitch your wild Discworld theories, and ask us pretty much anything you like that doesn’t fit into the usual book-focussed episode. We’d also love you to answer our questions: what are do you enjoy most about the show? What kind of episodes do you wish we’d do? Which of our opinions have you most disagreed with? And have you learned anything from us? (Ben sure has!) Send us your answers, and questions, using the hashtag #Pratchat60, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Oh, and in November, get ready for a double-header: not only are we reading Thud! with educator Matt Roden for #Pratchat61, but we’re cooking up a bonus crossover episode! Yes, we’re teaming up with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, another great Pratchett podcast, to discuss Where’s My Cow?, the hottest children’s book in Ankh-Morpork. We thought we’d let you know a little early, since it might be tricky to track down a copy…

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat46 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“, featuring guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins, discussing the second instalment in The Long Earth series written by Pratchett and Stephen Baxter: 2013’s The Long War.

  • The episode title references the Kinks song “The Village Green Preservation Society“, and our own love for and defence of Helen Green (now Valienté). We previously mentioned the song – and Ben’s favourite cover version, by Kate Rusby – in our episode on Johnny and the Dead, #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. (See below for more on the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.)
  • We’ve covered all of the Discworld books Deanne mentions:
  • We link to Speculate in the episode’s podcast post, but it’s worth mentioning that both of your Pratchat hosts have appeared as panellists at both of the Speculate events held so far, in 2018 and 2019. Speculate co-director Joel Martin has also been a Pratchat guest three times, including for #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, our episode on The Long Earth.
  • As discussed in #Pratchat31, Stephen Baxter is best known for his Xelee Sequence of space opera novels, and for writing the official sequel to H G Wells’ The Time Machine, The Time Ships. See the episode notes for #Pratchat31 for more information.
  • The next two books in the series are The Long Mars and The Long Utopia, not The Long Cosmos as Ben says; that’s the final book in the series.
  • There’re some hints as to how the Long Earth series was planned in Chapter 18 of Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Pratchett and Baxter planned out the series as a five-book arc when they first decided to write it together; no specific date is given, but this seems to have been around 2010 or 2011. It was a true collaboration, each contributing writing, and editing the other’s work, and complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013. Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking of those books while Terry worked on his final solo projects, though he did visit Pratchett once or twice for more ideas.
  • Monica “Spooky” Jansson disappears for about 160 pages in Ben’s paperback edition. After Chapter 1, she’s not seen again until Chapter 23.
  • Given the rough timeline available from The Magic of Terry Pratchett, it seems likely that The Long War was indeed being written in 2011 and 2012.
  • We don’t think we ended up coming back to it, but there is a hint that there might be another direction in which to step. In Chapter 54 Bill recounts a story to Joshua about a comber who, on a bet, spent the night drunk and naked on “the Cue Ball”, a Joker Earth whose surface is weirdly featureless and smooth. Spooked by a sound the next morning, he tried to step while hungover and claims he stepped not East or West, but in some other direction… No doubt this will either never be heard of again, or form the entire basis of one of the sequels.
  • Leukaemia – originally Leukämie in German, from the Greek words leukos (λευκός), “white”, and haima (αἷμα), “blood” – is the collective name for a number of forms of blood cancer. It usually begins in bone marrow, where blood cells are manufactured, and the risk of contracting the disease does increase with exposure to radiation. There are four main types of leukaemia, with many sub-classifications, but Spooky’s specific diagnosis is not specifically mentioned – indeed, the word “leukaemia” is only mentioned once in the entire book, in Chapter 23.
  • The first book starts with Step Day in 2015, but most of the action – including all of “The Journey” – takes place in 2030, with flashbacks to various events in the fifteen years between. As we later mention, this book takes place 25 years after Step Day, in 2040.
  • For the record: Helen is 18 in 2031 when she marries Joshua, who is 29. Liz and her maths are right when she says they met the year before, a meeting which occurs in chapter 50 of The Long Earth.
  • The American War of Independence, aka the American Revolutionary War, was fought by citizens of the then thirteen British colonies in America between 1775 and 1783. The Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives from the colonies, who gathered in a “Continental Congress”. We could go on, but there is a lot written about this stuff on the Internet, so we’ll let you do your own research. Ben does mention the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest by a group called the Sons of Liberty against laws which allowed the East India Company to sell tea in America without paying the same taxes levied on citizens of the colonies. A whole shipment of the company’s tea was thrown into Boston harbour, and while the Sons of Liberty had a good point, it still stings to know all that good tea went to waste…
  • “Old Faithful” is one of several geysers in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. A geyser is formed when an underground reservoir of water is close to a volcanically active area; the water is heated by magma, turning into steam, and enough pressure forms to force the cooler water on top out of a vent at the surface. Old Faithful erupts every 44 minutes to two hours, but even that amount of variation is unusually predictable – a result of it being relatively separate to the other geysers and geothermal systems in Yellowstone. It’s been recorded erupting more than a million times, but like all geysers it is not a permanent feature. The Yellowstone Caldera is the most active volcanic system in the United States, and is thought to have had three major eruptions occurring 2.08 million, 1.3 million and 631,000 years ago. Its most recent eruption was much more minor: a lava flow that happened 70,000 years ago. Geologists seem to be of the opinion that a “super-eruption” like the one 1.3 million years ago is very unlikely, though it will erupt again at some time in the future.
  • When Ben says “your brain’s not fully cooked” until you’re 25, he is quoting Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the Australian science communicator. Dr Karl – not to be confused with the other Dr Karl, the fictional medical doctor from Neighbours – has been broadcasting mostly via ABC radio since 1981, and has written 47 books, mostly collections of short articles about popular science. He often talks about the fact that human brains are still developing well past the teenage years, though he more recently has given the age of 20-23 for when the brain is “fully cooked” – i.e. when cognitive development is thought to have completed. You can find Dr Karl’s various books, podcasts and more on his website.
  • Joshua and Helen meet in Chapter 50 of The Long Earth. Unlike most of Helen’s story in that book, it’s not written from the perspective of her diary, though something we didn’t mention was that Joshua is already famous well before setting off on “The Journey”, as he saved dozens of kids on Step Day who got lost on a stepwise Earth. Upon meeting him, Helen exclaims “The Joshua Valienté…” and starts to blush. To be fair, they’ve heard of her, too: her diary is actually a blog, and is read by many folks. Joshua thinks that she is “kinda cute”, and also likes the look of Reboot, considering it the kind of place he could live.
  • Sally makes it clear to Joshua that they will only be friends in Chapter 43 of The Long Earth, where she says: “Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends. But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?”
  • The thing about Ghostbusters not being comedy came about in the wake of the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which at first had many fans asking where the comedy was! In response, many younger fans came out to declare surprise that anyone would think the original was a comedy, and so a Twitter trend was born.
  • Tim Ferguson is the source of Ben’s figure that comedy requires four laughs per minute, on average – but you won’t find this specific pearl of wisdom in his book The Cheeky Monkey. Ben actually picked it up in one of Tim’s online sitcom writing workshops, which he runs semi-regularly.
  • Our previous episode was #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, which discussed Pratchett’s short story “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”.
  • The Snowpiercer television series, released on Netflix in May 2020, is based on the 2013 South Korean-Czech film Snowpiercer directed by Bong Joon-Ho, of The Host and Parasite fame. The “Snowpiercer” is a high-speed train that circumnavigates the globe, now covered in snow after an attempt to alter the atmosphere and reverse climate change went wrong and plunged the world into a new ice age. The train is segregated, with poor workers stuck in the rear carriages while the wealthy elite enjoy luxury in the forward cars. The film stars Chris Evans as a leader of a revolt by members of the tail section, and also features Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-Ho, Jamie Bell, John Hurt and Ed Harris. The series is a retelling, not a sequel, and stars Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly as analogous characters to Evans and Swinton, respectively. The series and the film are both adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige; the first volume was published in 1982 by writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, with later volumes by Rochette and Benjamin Legrand in 1999, 2000 and 2015.
  • All jokes aside, helium really is a precious resource – liquid helium is an important coolant used in industry and scientific work, and indeed party balloons account for only 10% of the world’s helium use. Or at least they did, before the pandemic. Helium demand has lessened in other industries, where fears of running out had led to caps and rationing, but while availability has improved in the last year, prices are still at an all-time high. Accordingly, plans are underfoot to try and recycle and reuse helium, and stop it from being lost to the upper atmosphere.
  • “Bosun Higgs” is a reference to the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle very important to the Standard Model of physics. Bosons are particles which carry forces, and differ in many ways from fermions, the particles that make up mass. Other bosons include photons (electromagnetic force), gluons (the strong force which holds quarks together) and gravitons (the still-theoretical particles which propagate gravity). Higgs bosons are produced by the Higgs field, which gives other particles mass. The Higgs boson is the subject of Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle, though It was proposed as an explanation for mass by Peter Higgs and his team in 1964, but remained theoretical as while it is massive compared to other bosons, it is also highly unstable and quickly decays. Its existence was confirmed in 2013 by scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider, and Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on the boson in 2013.
  • While the September 11 terror attacks certainly had a big impact on air travel restrictions, these were really a tightening of security measures brought about in the 1970s because of the frequency of aeroplane hijacking in the 1960s. These were extraordinarily common in the wake of the Cuban revolution, and especially so between 1968 and 1972. The security measures started in 1969 with profiling of passengers, asking individuals to submit to questioning and personal metal detector tests. The first metal detectors used for everyone were introduced in 1970 in Louisiana; this became a nation-wide practice in the US in 1973, with X-ray screening of baggage added in 1974. These measures spread to the rest of the world during the 1970s by agreement of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which establishes internationally agreed rules for civilian air travel. Since 2001, additional security measures have included “random” chemical tests of passenger clothing and baggage for explosives (ask your brown friends how random it feels to them), the requested removal of shoes, coats and hats during security screening, and the use of full-body scanners, though these have been controversial.
  • For many years Australia has had incredibly harsh policies regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by sea. As well as indefinite detention – mostly offshore – a particular claim of the last few (conservative) Liberal-National coalition governments has been that they “stopped the boats“, a phrase particularly loved by cabinet minister Peter Dutton, previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and current PM Scott Morrison – who infamously has a trophy in the shape of boat, gifted by a supporter, bearing the legend “I stopped these”, from his time as Immigration Minister. The government frequently claims that the inhumane treatment they meet out to asylum seekers is meant to deter any more from coming, and thus stop the predatory people smugglers who charge them outrageous sums of money to make the dangerous journey. They’ve claimed now for many years that the boats have stopped, when the truth is that they have not – they are merely being intercepted at sea by the Australian Navy as part of “Operation Sovereign Borders” and so are not reported as “arrivals”. The pressures in nearby countries forcing desperate, persecuted people to try and reach safety by any means have not gone away, and those are the main factors. And yet cruel policies of long, indefinite detention, lack of support, denial of long-term visas and vilification in the media continue, as a way to court the votes of those who approve of strong border protection. It’s a source of shame for many of us in Australia; if you’d like to support the plight of asylum seekers in Australia, please consider supporting a couple of our favourite charities: the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and RISE.
  • Brexit – the removal of Great Britain from the European Union – really started becoming a thing in the early 2010s, though the first floating of a public referendum on the topic wasn’t until early 2013. It was a promise of Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron that he would bring about such a referendum if he won the 2015 general election, so while the idea was around when The Long War was being written, it seems unlikely it was a major influence on the novel.
  • We discussed Terry’s own favourite of his books, Nation, in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • For more on Pratchett’s first use of “Jokers“, see our episode on The Dark Side of the Sun – #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
  • The kobold Finn McCool is named after one of the great heroes of Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill. His adventures form the Fenian Cycle (an Fhiannaíocht in Irish), and also feature his people, a band of warriors known as the Fianna. His exploits are too numerous to go into, but form a cycle of stories as vibrant and exciting as those of King Arthur or Hercules. Ben recommends having a read.
  • “Kink-shaming” is pointing out someone’s kinks (specific sexual interests) with the intention of embarrassing them, often as supposed evidence that they are not a good person or have something “wrong” with them. This is not a new practice, but has in recent years been highlighted for the damage it does: it makes people ashamed of their kinks, and thus less likely to embrace the things that will satisfy them; it reinforces the idea that only regular “vanilla” sex is acceptable; and it conflates harmless (when consensual) kinks and fetishes with actually harmful behaviours, derailing serious conversations we need to be having. It’s more or less the opposite of the sex-positive movement, which seeks to reinforce a healthy embrace of positive sexual communication and behaviour.
  • The Kinks were a English rock band formed in Muswell Hill by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1963. The original line-up featured Ray, Dave, Pete Quaife and Mick Avory; Quaife left in early 1969, but the other three remained members throughout the group’s subsequent history and several alternate line-ups, including talk in the last few years of a reunion album. Their last public performance was in 1996. The bands’ biggest hits include “You Really Got Me” in 1963 from their first album Kinks, the single “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” in 1966, “Waterloo Sunset” from 1967’s Something Else, and “Lola” from 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Underground, Part One. The album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was a passion project of Ray Davies, a concept album released on the 22nd of November 1968 – the same day as The Beatles, aka The White Album. It was the last album on which bass player Pete Quaife played. Its production was quite long, and late in the process Ray Davies asked for the release to be postponed so it could be expanded into a double-album, but only got permission from their record label to add three more tracks. The “twelve-track mono version released in Europe” mentioned by Bill in the novel was the original shorter version, released in France, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Italy, but never in the UK, making it a bit of a rarity, with a different line-up of songs and some alternate, earlier mixes.
  • Local examples of the kind of “Instagram experience places” Ben is thinking of include Sugar Republic (giant candy props) and ArtVo (large-scale perspective art you can photograph yourself in).
  • Bounce, the “trampoline place” mentioned by Deanne, is one of many indoor trampoline parks around Melbourne and indeed the world. Their website says they’re part of a “global freestyle movement”, though we struggled to find out where this idea comes from. Basically it’s like BMX or skateboard stunts but without a vehicle, performed while jumping on a trampoline, jumping off and running up walls and so on. Bounce has several outlets, but there are also other businesses offering similar experiences.
  • That cat you can hear meowing in the background is the fabled third Pratcat, Kaos, who has lived with Ben since late December 2020. Despite what he would have you believe, he is fed five or six times every day, and not once a century when the Moon is in the Eighth House…
  • We discussed The Fifth Elephant – where Vimes is hunted by the von Überwald werewolf clan – in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King.”
  • Ben is probably wrong to say that English is not the majority language of the world – but it depends how you count it. According to stats published by the language reference journal Ethnologue, Mandarin Chinese has about 921 million native speakers, Spanish 471 million, and English 370 million. But if you include folks who speak it as an additional language, English edges into first place with 1.348 billion speakers, compared to Mandarin’s 1.21 billion and Hindi’s 600 million (with Spanish having a total of 542 million speakers worldwide).
  • The Beagle matriarch, Granddaughter Petra, is presumably named after Petra, the first pet featured on long-running British children’s program Blue Peter. Petra, a dog of indeterminate breed, joined the show in 1962; when Peter Purves (previously of Doctor Who fame) became a presenter in 1967, he also became Petra’s permanent handler to help her be more comfortable in the studio, and she lived with him when not filming – an arrangement used with presenters and crew for all subsequent Blue Peter dogs. She died in 1977, and was commemorated by a bust at BBC Television Centre (later moved to MediaCityUK). She was followed by the most famous Blue Peter dog, Shep, a border collie who stayed with the show from 1971 to 1978 and was famously attached to presenter John Noakes, who often had to tell him to calm down while trying to present. The current Blue Peter dog is a beagle/basset hound cross named Henry, and the programme has also had cats, tortoises and parrots as pets.
  • Ben briefly mentioned the Kromaggs, antagonists from the 1995 US parallel universe TV series Sliders, in our episode on The Long Earth. They are also non-human ape-descendants, though presumably their ancestor was Cro-magnon man, giving rise to the name. Their society is technologically advanced and militaristic; they have flying craft that can “slide” between parallel worlds, and when first encountered they have conquered around 150 Earths, stripping them for resources and enslaving their human populations. It is revealed in later seasons that they originally came from a world where they lived alongside humans, but when they grew violent they were exiled using sliding technology and prevented from returning. This becomes part of the back story of the protagonist Quinn Mallory, though by the later seasons multiple cast changes and shifts in tone and focus had lost a lot of early fans. (Ben mostly dropped off around the end of season three.)
  • The “love languages” are a popular way of describing the ways in which humans express and receive love, made famous by Baptist pastor and radio host Gary Chapman in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. Of the original five, we mention “Acts of Service” (doing things for your partner) and “Words of Affirmation” (telling them you love them or giving them verbal praise); the other three are “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch”. Psychologists and counsellors have since expanded on this, either by adding one or more additional specific languages, or redefining the concept such that languages are unique to each relationship dynamic or individual. The original book has sold more than 11 million copies, though, so the concept of the original five love languages has become deeply entrenched in popular culture discussions of love and affection. Chapman has since written ten other books about similar subjects, though note his work has not been without criticism – he is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, and holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, making the widespread applicability of his ideas suspect. He has also been opposed to later expansions of the idea, rejecting the addition of other languages as just “dialects”.
  • Tintin is the fictional young Belgian journalist who is the protagonist of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of French-language comic albums written by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907-1983), better known by his pen name, Hergé. Tintin first appeared in a newspaper supplement in 1929, but became hugely popular, starring in 24 full-length albums between 1929 and 1986 and selling millions of copies. Tintin is accompanied by his faithful dog Snowy, a small white fox terrier, and often aided by his best friend, merchant sailor Captain Archibald Haddock. While the books are largely great adventurous fun, it should be noted that it makes use of many racist caricatures and stereotypes common in the first half of the twentieth century, though some of the albums hold up better than others. Its cultural influence is huge, though; 1980s new wave/pop group The Thompson Twins is named after Thomson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling moustachioed detectives (who are not related, but look near-identical) from the series, and no lesser a team than Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish banded together to make a CGI film adaptation in 2011, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
  • The Aboriginal concept of connection to Country is hugely important; rather than have us tell you about it, we encourage you to learn about it from First Nations sources, for example Common Ground. While its expression in Australia is unique, the concept is common to many traditional cultures around the world.
  • The hugely popular sci-fi franchise Stargate, which began with the 1994 feature film, is just the most famous expression of the “ancient astronauts” idea, popularised by Swiss author Erich von Däniken in his scientifically panned but bestselling 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? It’s notable that in the work of von Däniken and others, it only ever seems to be non-Abrahamic gods who are said to be aliens. (Star Trek at least had an alien claiming to be the one true God, though that was in the generally hated film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.) If you want to learn more about the harm done by such racist theories, this article by Sarah Bond for Hyperallergic is a great overview.
  • The “Bury Your Gays” trope has a sadly long history; you can find some further explanation and a long list of examples at TV Tropes.
  • Frank Woods is not mentioned in The Long Earth – he’s a totally new character, making Ben’s annoyance about his role at the end of book many times greater. Ben may have been thinking of “the boy genius” Franklin Tallyman, who signs up with Jack Green’s company as a blacksmith and is instrumental in the founding of Reboot. He also repairs the Mark Twain when Joshua and Sally come through Reboot on their way back to Datum Madison. (Ben will soften on Frank in the next next book.)
  • An “OTP“, short for “One True Pairing”, is a fan or fan group’s favourite couple in a show, book series or other work of fiction. “Shipping” is itself short for “relationshipping”, and is used as a verb for actively wanting two (or more) characters to get together, regardless of what a show or book’s writers will actually have them do. Non-romantic versions are sometimes called “BroTPs” or FrOTPs.
  • “The ‘In’ Crowd” was originally recorded by American singer Dobie Gray in 1964; it featured on his album Dobie Gray Sings for “In” Crowders That Go “Go-Go”, and also on Dick Clark’s popular radio documentary program Rock, Roll and Remember. There have been a few influential covers since, most notably UK English singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, who released it as a successful single and on his 1974 album Another Time, Another Place. (Ben is also partial to the Mike Flowers Pops version from their 1996 album “A groovy place.”, though the original is yet to be surpassed.) The chorus and verses feature the refrain “I’m in with the ‘in’ crowd”, and so it’s the most likely reference for Lobsang’s line “I’m in with the Oort Cloud”. The Oort Cloud, by the way, is the theoretical cloud of icy “planetismals” (essentially, very small planet-like objects, much smaller than true or dwarf planets) which forming the the boundary of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’s named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who revived this old theory in 1950 as a way of explaining the origin of comets with very long periods. The Oort Cloud is a looooong way from the Sun, with its objects lying between 0.03 to 3.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the Earth craft furthest from Earth, won’t reach it for another 300 years, though it will no longer have power left to send images back to Earth by then.
  • Joshua’s lost limb getting “Star Wars’d into a new hand” references the fact that multiple characters in the Star Wars franchise lose their hand (or other limbs), only to get prosthetics that are so lifelike and functional as to make the loss effectively meaningless in a dramatic sense. The first to do so (in terms of real world chronology at least) was Luke Skywalker, whose right hand is cut off by Darth Vader during their duel in The Empire Strikes Back; he gets a new hand before the credits even roll. (For the nerds: it’s an L-hand 980, produced by Antilles BioGen.) Vader himself lost his right arm from the elbow in a duel with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones, and gets a cybernetic replacement that’s stronger than his natural arm – again within ten minutes of screen time! Anakin later loses it, along with all his other limbs, in Ben’s most hated part of Star Wars – Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith – paving the way for him to become “more machine now than man”. He eventually loses one of his cybernetic hands again in his final duel with Luke in Return of the Jedi, but he dies soon after so no-one bothers to replace it.
  • In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent makes his own Scrabble tiles when trapped on prehistoric Earth. In the story, the Earth is a hugely complicated computer built by a species from another dimension to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, after their previous computer, Deep Thought, calculated that the Answer to the (unknown) Question was “42”. Without knowing the actual Question, the Answer makes no sense, and so Deep Thought designed the Earth to find out. Arthur and his friend Ford discovered this, then ended up travelling back in time and crashing on Earth in the early days of human beings. Arthur has the early humans pull letters at random out of the bag as a way of testing how the planetary computer’s program to calculate the Ultimate Question is going; the results are not encouraging. This happens near the end of the Primary Phase of the original radio series (in Fit the Sixth), in the final episode of the original television series, and at the end of the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
  • As we mentioned in our The Long Earth episode, The Gap is an American clothing store established in 1969. They’ve been involved in several controversies, but we’re particularly displeased with what they’ve been up to since #Pratchat31: in particular forcing Australian social enterprise Clothing the Gap to change their name to Clothing the Gaps, costing them a great deal of money and energy. Clothing the Gaps is majority Aboriginal owned and run by health professionals as a way to support the “closing the gap” movement, which isn’t about shutting down the US brand (tough that’s something we’d like to do now), but rather about addressing the massive gap between health outcomes like life expectancy and the prevalence of many preventable diseases, between Aboriginal Australians and the general Australian population. Their stuff is great and we recommend you check them out at clothingthegaps.com.au.
  • Robur is the “science tyrant” antagonist of Jules Verne’s novels Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer) and Maître du monde (Master of the World), as mentioned in #Pratchat31. His craft, the Terror, is ten metres long and can travel on land, on or under the sea, and through the air at incredible speeds, but it is struck by lightning and destroyed. Robur’s body is never found, though his captive, Inspector John Strock, survives the crash…so you never know.
  • The train-based war game based on Deadlands was Deadlands: The Great Rail Wars, released in 1997. Unfortunately there were no train miniatures – players fielded teams of humans (and maybe other creatures) who fought in standard Wild West terrain, though they did use steampunk gatling pistols and magic.
  • There is indeed such a thing as a train that lays its own track; the real world kind are used to lay new track for the passenger and freight trains that will follow. Here’s an example from China, featured on trainfanatics.com. Ben was thinking of something more fictional, though he hasn’t been able to track it down (no pun intended); listener Graham Kidd suggested the 1974 science fiction novel Inverted World by British author Christopher Priest, which features a city travelling north on train tracks, which cannibalises the tracks already used to build more tracks ahead. It sounds great but isn’t the one Ben’s thinking of!
  • We’ve found some claims that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones were also good friends, though we’ve not found any evidence of that; we have found proof that they met, though, in the form of this Institute of Contemporary Arts talk, “Whose Fantasy?”, from 1988, chaired by Neil Gaiman, and featuring both Pratchett and Wynne Jones, along with John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. It sounds like a bootleg recorded from the audience, but it’s quite a good listen!

#Pratchat22 – The Cat in the Prat

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Episode 22 – released, by pure coincidence, on International Cat Day – features Elizabeth, Ben and resident Pratcat Asimov for a look at one of Pratchett’s oddest books: 1989’s humorous examination of all things feline, The Unadulterated Cat.

Cats these days just aren’t a patch on the ones you used to get: untameable aloof outdoor beasts who are more likely to trap you in a neighbours’ house with a broken leg (long story) than to sit nicely on your lap and purr. The Campaign for Real Cats has had enough of modern, “fizzy keg” cats, with their bows and bells and posing. This is the Campaign’s guide to identifying, understanding and appreciating honest-to-Bastet real cats.

Pratchett teams up with cartoonist and illustrator Gray Jolliffe to give us a tongue-firm-in-furry-cheek guide to the world of cats in one of his rare non-fiction works. It’s the kind of thing you buy the cat lover in your life for Christmas, full of chapters detailing the types of cats, their names, the games they play and “advice” on how to deal with them. Are you a cat lover? Did this ring true for you? We’d love to hear from you – and to hear your cat stories, and any real cats you’ve identified in fiction! Use the hashtag #Pratchat22 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest Asimov lives with Liz and is our resident “Pratcat”. He was previously audible in the background of #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick” and #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“. No doubt he’ll crop up in future episodes too. You can follow his adventures on Instagram at @asimovthecat.

You’ll find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

In September we return to the Discworld – and its most real of cats, Greebo – as we head to the opera for Maskerade, the 1994 book which brings the witches to Ankh-Morpork! Our guest will be teacher and opera singer Myf Coghill. We’d love your questions – send them to us via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat23.

As mentioned in this episode, we’ll soon be releasing our first bonus episode just for subscribers! All bonus episodes will be available to anyone who subscribes, so if you’re interested, jump over to our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat15 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)

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We kick off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk with our fifteenth episode, heading not to the Discworld at all, but to Earth, 1990! Two guests – academic Jen Beckett and writer Amy Gray – join us as to tackle a book written by two authors: Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

The time has come for Armageddon: the End of Days, the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Which comes as rather a shock to the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who’ve been more or less friends for centuries, and rather enjoy Earth the way it is, thank you very much. But can they really do anything about it in the face of the ineffable plan of God? Or when everything that happens has been foretold by a 16th century witch – as interpreted by her descendant, Anathema Device? And has anyone asked the Antichrist himself what he thinks? Well no, of course not. They don’t know where he is.

Good Omens was Sir Terry’s first collaboration with another author, and Gaiman’s first novel, written while he was still working on his biggest comics success, Sandman. In part a parody of The Omen, but joking about everything from motorways to computers and the Greatest Hits of Queen along the way, it’s an epic tale of Armageddon soon to arrive on the small screen via Amazon Prime and the BBC – adapted by Neil himself. Did you come to this as a Pratchett fan, or a Gaiman one? Did you cross over and start reading the others’ work? And how different do you find it to the rest of Pratchett? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat15 on social media to join the conversation.

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Dr Jennifer Beckett lectures at Melbourne University in Media and Communications. Her specialist areas as a researcher include Irish cinema and cultural studies, social media, and transmedia world-building. (Jen’s basically an expert in all the cool parts of popular culture.) A current focus for Jen is the connection between social media and trauma, as explored in her most recent article for The Conversation: “We need to talk about the mental health of content moderators“.

Amy Gray has written for The Age, The Guardian, the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre and many other publications and organisations. She’s currently working on her first book, hopefully to be published in 2019. You can find out more and support her independent writing via her Patreon. You can also find her on Twitter at @_AmyGray_.

You can find full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We love bringing you Pratchat every month, but in order to make sure we can stick it out to the very end – and cover every one of Sir Terry’s books – we need your help! We’ve started an optional subscription service via Pozible which will help us keep making Pratchat for you, and even let us do it better; find out all about supporting Pratchat on our new Support Us page.

Next month we’ll continue the religious theme as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones for an examination of faith, Discworld-style, in Small Gods! Send in your questions about gods (big or small) via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat16.

#Pratchat22 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“, discussing Pratchett and cartoonist Gray Joliffe‘s non-fiction humour book, The Unadulterated Cat, with guest Asimov (an actual cat).

  • This episode’s title is a reference to the famous Dr Seuss children’s book The Cat in the Hat (and definitely not the 2003 film adaptation).
  • Best-selling humorous cat books include How to Tell if Your Cat is Planning to Kill You, several volumes dedicated to Internet sensations Grumpy Cat and the LOLcats of I Can Has Cheezburger?, and other books that draw on similar themes to The Unadulterated Cat, including Cats Are the Worst and Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed.
  • Eric Ernest Jolliffe – the wrong Jolliffe – was an Australian cartoonist and illustrator who led an adventurous life, including work all over Australia and serving as a camouflage officer with the RAAF in World War II. He is best remembered for his magazine and newspaper strips Saltbush Bill and Sandy Blight, and his own magazine, Jolliffe’s Outback.
  • Gray Jolliffe’s anthropomorphic penis character, Wicked Willie, was the star of both a series of comic books and also a straight-to-video series of animated shorts directed by Australian Bob Godfrey, best remembered for his work on the children’s animated series Roobarb and Henry’s Cat.
  • Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche is a satire of masculinity, originally subtitled “A Guidebook to All That Is Traditionally Masculine”. It was written in 1982 by American humorist and screenwriter Bruce Feirstein and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Localised adaptations were subsequently written for the UK and Australia, the latter by Australian playwright and author Alex Buzo. Solidifying Ben’s connection between the two books is his discovery in December 2021 (thanks to listener Sven) that the German translation of The Unadaulterated Cat was titled Echte Katzen tragen niemals Schleifen – “Real Cats Don’t Wear Ribbons”!
  • Nathan W. Pyle’s strange planet series of comics about aliens trying to understand life on Earth is available at his web site, nathanwpyle.art, and on his Instagram at @nathanwpyle. Pyle experienced some controversy in April 2019 over an old tweet, but his cartoons remain a delightful commentary on the absurdities of our world. Both the cat name cartoon and the vibrating cat cartoon are still on Instagram.
  • Operant conditioning is a form of learning where a behaviour becomes more or less frequent because of positive or negative consequences of the behaviour – a reward or a punishment. This is different to classical or Pavlovian conditioning, where a seperate stimulus is associated with the behaviour – the classic ringing of a bell when feeding Pavlov’s dogs.
  • You read all about the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) at their web site, camra.org.uk.
  • The UK cat documentary mentioned by Liz is “The Secret Life of the Cat: the Science of Tracking Our Cats“, an episode of the BBC series Horizon from 2013. Fifty “cat residents” from the village of Shamley in Surrey were fitted with GPS trackers and cameras over 24 hours.
  • My Fair Lady (1964, dir. George Cukor) is a film version of the 1956 musical, itself an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (though the ending is quite different). In the story, academic Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle to speak with an upper class accent to see if she can pass as a lady. The film stars Rex Harrison as Higgins, a role he originated on the West End, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza, a controversial choice over Harrison’s stage partner Julie Andrews, who at the time had no film experience and was not thought famous enough to carry the film. The movie won eight Academy Awards.
  • There are plenty of fainting goat videos on YouTube; here’s a National Geographic one to get you started.
  • Cats can’t spit like humans do, but they can spray saliva when hissing. One of the main things that trigger allergic reactions from cats is a protein present in their saliva.
  • The Famous Five are Enid Blyton’s team of four teenage crime fighters – Julian, Dick, Anne and George – and their dog, Timmy. They first featured in a series of novels published between 1942 and 1963. The books were also adapted into a popular television series in 1978 – and included friend of the Splendid Chaps, Gary Russell, as Dick. Blyton really did use the paper key-retrieval trick often in her books, and not only for The Famous Five.
  • Ben’s explanation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is basically correct, but the main idea tested by it is quantum superposition. This is the concept that subatomic particles exist in all possible states until observed. There are plenty of good write-ups and videos explaining it in more detail online.
  • We previously mentioned Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall (2018) in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“. There’s also a Seafurrers blog maintained by Bart the cat.
  • Summer Bay is the fictional New South Wales town where popular Australian soap opera Home & Away is set. Some of the beach houses inhabited by its characters have elaborate staircases.
  • The cane toad, Rhinella marina, is a species of toad native to Central and Southern America. It was introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 to control two species of native Australian beetle whose adults eat sugar cane leaves, and larvae eat sugar cane roots. The documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) – followed by a sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) – is a great intro to the toad’s impact on Australian farming, wildlife and culture.
  • The original video of Fenton the labrador – titled “JESUS CHRIST IN RICHMOND PARK” – is pretty great. At the height of his fame in 2012, Fenton had merch including the book Find Fenton, a Where’s Wally? style work inviting you to do what it says in the title.
  • Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov had a famous rivalry which lasted for fifteen years of insults both public and private, though it seems likely this was mostly for their entertainment, and that they let go of any actual animosity in their later years. One famous story has it that Clarke learned a passenger who died in a plane crash was reading one of his own novels; he sent the news to Asimov, suggesting that the passenger would have been better off with one of Isaac’s books, since they would have died in their sleep. Asimov replied that the crash probably came as a “merciful release” from the pain of having to read one of Clarke’s novels.
  • The microrganism Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that reproduces in the bloodstream of cats, and exits their systems in their faeces. The parasite can infect any mammal, causing a disease known as Toxoplasmosis. It is often symptomless but can cause neurological problems in people with compromised immune systems. Some studies have suggested possible links between cat ownership as a child with adult schizophrenia, and one scientist thinks that it affects human behaviour, causing irrational attachment to cats, though this is far from a mainstream theory. You can read about Jaroslav Flegr’s theories about cat parasites affecting human brains in this 2012 article from The Atlantic.
  • Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is T S Eliot’s 1939 collection of cat poems in which he reveals many secrets about cat psychology and society, including how they name and organise themselves. As mentioned, you can find Eliot reading it on Spotify. It was rather improbably adapted into a hugely popular stage musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Weber in 1981 (and is soon to be released as a Hollywood film, the trailer for which has had…mixed reviews). In the book and early versions of the musical, Growltiger is a piratical cat who lives on a barge on the River Thames, and as Lachlan suggests, is definitely a real cat. Of note is that Eliot, whose works are noted for containing racism, used offensive terms to refer to the Chinese cats fought by Growltiger in the poem, “Growltiger’s Last Stand”. The poem was adapted as one of the original songs in the musical, complete with the racist epithet intact, but was later rewritten and then replaced altogether.
  • Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is a series of young adult dystopian novels set in a future America which has devolved into a corrupt wealthy Capitol and twelve districts of poor, exploited workers. Each year two young “tributes” from each district are sent to take part in the “Hunger Games”, a battle royale fight to the death meant to remind the population that they cannot fight the state. Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist and hero of District 12, has a hate-hate relationship with Buttercup, her sister’s “hideous-looking” ginger cat, who is described as a good mouser and enjoying eating entrails from the animals Katniss illegally hunts to help feed her family.
  • Jonesy is another ginger cat who belongs to Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist of the Alien films, and features most prominently in Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien. He and Ripley were the only survivors of the Nostromo when the alien creature killed the rest of the crew; he was left behind on Earth when Ripley returned to the planet where the alien was found, 57 years later. In 2018 Jonesy became the subject of his own cute cat book, Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from his point of view.
  • We previously talked about Horse and Footrot Flats way back in episode 4, Enter Three Wytches, with Elly Squire.
  • Garfield is the famous creation of cartoonist Jim Davis. A fat, ginger cat, Garfield was originally the star of a newspaper comic strip that began in 1978 and is still syndicated in many papers today. He has since become a star of television, film and millions of plush toys. Garfield is definitely not a real cat: he loves fancy human food (especially lasagna), hates Mondays for some reason, and has a beloved teddy bear named Pooky. Garfield’s popularity despite its bland, inoffensive content has led many third parties to produce alternate versions of the strip. Realfield replaced Garfield with a more realistic cat (this reddit post has plenty of examples), while Garfield Minus Garfield imagines a world in which Garfield doesn’t exist, and his owner Jon appears to be talking to himself. (There’s also the similar De-Garfed, which leaves Garfield in but takes out all his dialogue, leaving Jon talking to a cat which doesn’t talk back.) There’s also The Garfield Randomizer, which creates Garfield cartoons by combining individual panels from existing strips at random, and Garkov, which replaces the dialogue with new text generated by a Markov chain, a popular method for remixing existing text into new forms. (For a Pratchett-related Markov generator, check out Scrambled Pratchett (@ScramPratchett) on Twitter.)
  • In the Doctor Who New Adventures novels published by Virgin in the 1990s, the Seventh Doctor is given a cat named Wolsey during the time he was temporarily transformed into a human. When the Doctor regenerated he gave Wolsey to his previous companion Benny Summerfield, an archaeologist from the 26th century. Wolsey stayed with her for many adventures, including when alien technology warped reality into something resembling a pantomime, transforming Wolsey into a humanoid cat who referred to Benny as “servant woman”, making his real status pretty liklely! In the audio adventures created by Big Finish Productions, the Fifth Doctor’s companion Erimem from ancient Egypt brought aboard a stray cat named Antranak, who was also pretty real, though the Doctor didn’t like him much. Antranak eventually sacrificed himself to save the Doctor and his friends, though this may have been the influence of an alien intelligence which had been absorbed into his mind. Because Doctor Who.
  • Throgmorten is a cat (another ginger!) who appears in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), a book in her Chrestomanci series detailing the earliest adventures of magician protagonist Christopher Chant. Throgmorten is a magical cat stolen by Christopher from a temple for use in a magical experiment, but Christopher’s uncle proposes to kill and then sell bits of Throgmorten. Christopher instead takes the cat home and sets him free, earning a grudging respect which helps him in his later adventures.
  • Only Forward is the debut novel of Michael Marshall, written under his original pseudonym Michael Marshall Smith. He wrote many sci-fi and horror novels and short stories under that name before switching to Michael Marshall for crime fiction, and more recently Michael Rutger, under which name he writes paranormal thrillers.
  • The Maquis de Carabas in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is not based on Puss in Boots himself, but rather sprang from Gaiman asking himself “What kind of person would own a cat like that?” In the original tale, it’s a miller’s third son who inherits the cat, rather than the mill or his father’s money. The cat requests boots, then serves his master well, gaining him favour with the King and eventually a title, partly by claiming his master is the fictional “Maquis de Carabas”. The miller’s son himself is not especially bright or brave, so Gaiman’s Maquis certainly feels like he has some of the cat in him. Gaiman’s other cats include those of the Sandman comic story “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”, in which cats share a secret story about their history, and The Cat, Coraline’s ally in Coraline, who is able to walk between worlds and speak when in The Other Place.

#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, featuring guest Alanta Colley, discussing the second collaboration between Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

  • The episode title is a reversal of the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will “almost surely” eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In this book, a single Shakespeare eventually (after much tampering with history) produces a species descended from monkeys that can invent and use typewriters – modern, storytelling humans.
  • The most recent Sci Fight, “Should we upload our brains into the cloud?”, was held online on Thursday, 12 August 2021. The debate is available on YouTube, and was part of Melbourne Science Gallery‘s exhibition “MENTAL“.
  • You can find out more about Alanta’s comedy shows, including Parasites Lost, at alantacolley.com.
  • Melbourne’s six lockdowns began with two in 2020 – March 29 to May 12 and the big one, from July 9 to October 26. There have been four in 2021: from February 12 to 17; May 28 until June 10; July 16 to 27; and the current one, which began on August 5 and is not expected to end until the Victorian population reaches an 80% vaccination rate, estimated to happen by December.
  • We covered The Science of Discworld a year ago in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, with guest Anna Ahveninen.
  • Alanta makes the reasonable assumption we’ve had “forty-six prior guests” – but, thanks to a few repeat offenders and some double-guest episodes, the actual count to date is forty (including Tansy Rayner Roberts in our first live bonus episode).
  • Douglas Adams’ famous love of long baths was a trait he passed on to the Captain, a character who appears at the end of most versions of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, commanding his starship from the bath. You can read about his bath habit – er, Adams’, not the Captain’s – in this great piece by his friend Jon Cranter for The Guardian.
  • The photo of Pratchett with Jack and Ian was taken at Warwick University – where Jack and Ian were both researchers – on July 14, 1999, just after he made them honorary wizards of Unseen University, and the University made him a Honorary Doctor of Letters. (The photo from the book is different, but you can see another one in this article from the time on the Warwick University website.) This was the first of Pratchett’s ten honorary degrees, which we listed in the notes for #Pratchat27.
  • The History and Philosophy of Science is a distinct humanities discipline, combining the study of both…er…the history and the philosophy of science. It arose from the fact that the philosophy of science has been primarily studied from an historicist perspective: deducing what it is and how it works by studying the history of its development.
  • Mustrum Ridcully famously has no time for meetings or long explanations; in Reaper Man it is explained this way:

…it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991)
  • On another look, Ben isn’t really sure why he was confused about how the wizards end up on Roundworld; Ridcully explains to Ponder in Chapter 5 that the elves passed through Discworld to get into Roundworld, and he and the faculty were caught up in the “trans-dimensional flux” (Ponder’s words, obviously). They landed in London because Dee had made a magic circle – Hex further explaining that while magic doesn’t work in Roundworld, it can create “passive receptors” for outside magic to connect to, as with the crystal ball he uses to communicate.
  • The other Discworld element (or substance, at least) Ben couldn’t remember the name of is “deitygen“, which Ridcully says is known to be produced by intelligent beings. While Narrativium is the most important element on Discworld, the world itself is said in The Truth to be composed of Air, Earth, Fire and Water – though there is also an important fifth element: Surprise.
  • Mind-body dualism is the idea that the mind is a non-physical substance, i.e. that mind and matter are not the same kind of thing. There are several different flavours of this philosophy. Cartesian dualism, more generally known as substance dualism, is the one discussed in the book; others are subtly different, suggesting that while there are the mind is distinct, it is not a different type of substance to ordinary matter. (Note that when we say “substance” here, we mean it in the philosophical sense that encompasses all things.)
  • Spontaneous Human Combustion is the idea that sometimes humans just burst into flames without any apparent external cause. It’s not taken very seriously these days, and critics and researchers – most notably science investigator Joe Nickell and forensic analyst John F. Fischer – have found that in most cases there were likely sources of flames near victims which were overlooked and not reported in popular accounts.
  • The bit in the book about humans being unable to imagine being a dog or a bat is in Chapter 26, “Lies to Chimpanzees”.
  • Liz read about the babbling baby bats in this article from the New York Times, though many new outlets picked up on this research about greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata), published in Science by Dr Ahana Fernandez and her team. This video from Science magazine gives you the short version.
  • That birds learn songs from their parents was first observed (in scientific terms at least) in the 1950s, when British ethologist Peter Marler noticed that chaffinches sang different songs in different parts of the country. His work showed that some birds are innate singers, while others learn their songs from their parents, creating regional differences or dialects. This has since been observed in many bird species.
  • Jack and Ian have written many other books, separately and in collaboration. Ben mentioned What Does a Martian Look Like? (aka Evolving the Alien) in #Pratchat35. On a related note, Ben spotted that in his first edition of The Science of Discworld II, in chapter 10, the authors introduce the idea of an elf visiting Earth in the distant past and observing our ancestors; this visitor is mistakenly referred to as a Martian several times afterwards, leading Ben to wonder if this was text originally written for the other book…
  • Ben previously mentioned Flatland and Ian Stewart’s sequel, Flatterland, in #Pratchat35. The science that Ben thought Ian did a particularly good job of explaining was string theory – the branch of physics that seeks to explain discrepancies between classic and quantum physics by saying that fundamental particles are not actually tiny points, but strings which exist in higher dimensions, and we only see the point that pokes into our three. (That’s a lie-to-Pratchat-listeners, but it’s on the right track; see chapter 16 of Flatterland, “No-Branes and P-Branes”.)
  • Dr Randolph M. Nesse is currently a Research Professor of Life Sciences at The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, and Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. You can read a summary of his views on altruism and social selection – another kind of “group selection” in biology, where social groups who may not be closely related work together to survive – on his website here, with links to his articles on the subject, though he does not include the 1999 Science and Spirit piece cited in chapter 20 of The Science of Discworld II, “Small Gods”. He also wrote a book about commitment (as discussed the book), Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, in 2001. Notably, though, he seems to have concluded that commitment offers only “a limited explanation for some special kinds of altruism … it did not offer the more general kind of explanation I wanted.” He refers to the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, who has studied altruism in animals, when discussing where his own work is heading.
  • Evolutionary medicine (including evolutionary psychiatry) is the scientific use of evolutionary biology to understand and treat diseases. It complements the standard “proximate” approach of looking for problems in an individual by looking at evolutionary explanations for why all humans have the potential to develop certain diseases. Randolph Nesse is a recognised leader in this field; his books on the subject include Why We Get Sick and Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Evolutionary psychology is a similar approach to psychology, but while the idea behind it is sound, it suffers many of the testability and ethnocentric problems as regular psychology. Shallow interpretations of evolutionary psychology have also been used to prop up many harmful ideas, especially in terms of gender roles. Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and political activist, thinks evolutionary psychologists often ignore evidence that doesn’t support the political status quo.
  • The “Galaxy Song” – not “Universe Song”, though to be fair the name of the song is only mentioned in album liner notes – was originally written by Eric Idle and John du Prez for the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In the film, a medic (John Cleese) trying to convince a woman (Terry Jones) to donate her liver for a “live organ transplant” opens a door and a man (Eric Idle) steps out to accompany her through the universe while singing the song, making her feel small and insignificant enough that she agrees to the transplant. An updated version (“The Galaxy DNA Song“) was used for astrophysicist Brian Cox’s TV series Wonders of Life in 2012, and in 2016 another updated version appeared in the two-hour television program The Entire Universe Show, also hosted by Cox. It wasn’t included in any of the Python stage musicals, but an updated version did appear in the stage show Monty Python Live (Mostly) in 2014, including a video cameo by – you guessed it – Brian Cox, but also…someone else whose appearance we won’t spoil. The original is actually pretty good for the time – if you assume facts are rounded to the nearest singable number, then it gets several figures pretty close to correct. Liz may have quoted the speed of light to her teacher: the song gives this as “twelve million miles a minute” – not far off an accurate figure of 11.16 million miles per minute, though scientists would normally express it in round numbers as a bit under 300 million metres per second (299,792,458 m/s, to be more precise).
  • We’ve previously mentioned the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption many times. The most significant discussions of it appear in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, but we most recently talked about it in #Pratchat38 – so Ben is way off when he says we haven’t talked about it for “about 30 episodes”. (Though, given how long the last year or two has felt, we’ll give him a pass on this one.)
  • The history of the idea that storytelling makes humans unique goes back to at least the 1967, when the name Homo narrans was coined by German ethologist Kurt Ranke. American communications scholar Walter R Fischer used it in his later work, in which he also codified the “narrative paradigm” – the idea that all significant communication occurs through storytelling. (Pan narrans seems to be a unique contribution from Jack and Ian.)
  • Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was first performed in 1993 at the Royal National Theatre in London, with a cast that included Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Emma Fielding. It is set in an English manor house belonging to the Coverly family, and happens in two time periods: in the present, two rival academics are researching the mysterious history of the house’s previous inhabitants at cross purposes, while one of the Coverly siblings is doing biology research. In the past of 1809, young lady of the house Thomasina Coverly has some advanced ideas about science and mathematics, while her tutor is caught up in drama with the house’s visiting poets. (Ben played the modern-day scientist, Valentine Coverly.)
  • The book Ben read about chaos theory was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It should also be clarified that it was the play that was about complexity not chaos; the book is definitely about chaos.
  • The Luggage’s legs were the subject of much discussion in previous episodes; way back in #Pratchat14, when we discussed its debut in The Colour of Magic, we wondered if anyone had tried drawing it with non-human legs. It is described in the first two books only as having “little legs”, without any reference to them being human-like, or their colour, leading us to make a callout for fan art depicting them as…well, anything else! Josh Kirby has always drawn them as human-like, and made them white-person flesh coloured, despite the fact that the Luggage’s wood is a darker colour. We suspect this influenced Pratchett’s own image of the Luggage, and its next appearance in Sourcery is the first time it has “little pink legs”.
  • Hobbits, also known as halflings, are a kind of people found in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. They look like humans, but grow only to about three feet tall (hence the name), with slightly pointed ears. Aside from their size, their main difference from humans is their feet: they have extremely tough soles, and the ends of their legs from their ankles down, as well as the tops of their feet, are covered in thick curly hair to keep them warm. As a result, hobbits do not wear shoes. Clearly these sort of feet would suit the Luggage well!
  • John Dee (1527 – 1609) was, as described in the book, a real historical figure. An English mathematician, occultist, astronomer and astrologer (the two being far more closely linked back then), he advised Queen Elizabeth I, and is – unfortunately – credited with coining the term “British Empire”. He had one of the biggest libraries in England in his day, giving the wizards a handy portal into L-Space. In his later life, he found public opinion turning against sorcery, and while he was abroad much of his library and possessions were stolen, destroyed or burned. Once Elizabeth was dead, her successor James I had no interest in helping Dee, and he died in poverty in 1608 or 1609 at his home in Mortlake. He has been a popular character in works of fiction, though Ben is mistaken to think he has often been a villain; he’s perhaps confusing him with Doctor Destiny, a supervillain who appears in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, and whose real name is John Dee, but is not meant to be the same person.
  • Stephen Pinker – a long-time defender of evolutionary psychology, it turns out – published The Language Instinct in 1994, well before The Science of Discworld II. The book not only argues that language is an innate trait possessed by humans, but also tries to debunk many commonly-held beliefs about language. It has been criticised for presenting too strong a view about how much of human behaviour can be explained by innate, biologically evolved instinct.
  • Swedish supergroup Abba reunited for performances in 2016, in the wake of the smash hit Mama Mia, a stage and film jukebox musical featuring their songs. They announced that year that they were working on new music, and a new “digital entertainment experience” featuring “ABBAtars” of the band – digital avatars of the group which would look like their 1970s selves, and which would somehow appear in concert. Two announced singles, and the ABBAtar experience, were delayed multiple times, but in August 2021 they announced Voyage, their first new album since 1981’s The Visitors. The album was released on September 2, 2021, and pictures of the band in motion capture suits – the lycra numbers with little ping-pong balls attached – accompanied many articles and made the rounds on Twitter. (Here’s the BBC one.)
  • Ponder and Ridcully argue about evolution in The Last Continent and The Science of Discworld, and to be fair, evolution only seems to work on the Disc on one island in its distant past, where is it the work of the God of Evolution. (See #Pratchat29 for our discussion of that!)
  • When Liz says “We’ve gotta Back to the Future this“, she is specifically speaking of the scenario in Back to the Future: Part II, where Marty’s carelessness allows villain Biff Tannen to go back in time and give his young self a book containing future sports results, allowing him to take over the town and run a hugely successful (and, it’s implied, criminal) business empire out of a casino. Marty and Doc have to go back in time and set history on its proper course.
  • Thief of Time (to be discussed in #Pratchat48) was published on the 1st of May, 2001 – a year and a day before The Science of Discworld II! It wasn’t the most recent Discworld book at the time of the latter’s release: in between, Pratchett published The Last Hero (a large-format illustrated book, published in October 2001) and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (the first younger readers Discworld novel, published in November 2001; see #Pratchat33). But Thief of Time was the most recent “regular Discworld novel for adults”, and in fact its first paperback edition was published one year after the original hardcover – the day before The Science of Discworld II.
  • Night Watch is the twenty-ninth Discworld book, and the sixth of the eight City Watch books. It remains one of the most popular of the entire series. Our current plan is to discuss it for #Pratchat50 – unless you have a better idea!
  • Liz’s speech referencing free will (or the lack of it) was given at the last Sci-Fight she participated in, on the 20th of May, 2021. The topic was “Scientists Go to Heaven”, and Liz was (perhaps surprisingly) on the affirmative team.
  • Liz has said “Time is a flat circle” on a number of occasions, beginning way back in #Pratchat5; this is Ben’s first time. It refers to the idea of “eternal return” – i.e. that time repeats itself – and is specifically a reference to the first season of the television series True Detective.
  • Loki is a Disney+ series and part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the series, a version of the trickster god Loki – as seen in the films Thor, The Avengers and others – is lifted from existence when he becomes a “variant” – a version of someone who strays from the single set of events enforced as the “sacred timeline” by a mysterious organisation known as the Time Variance Authority.
  • “A Bathing Ape” – or BAPE for short – is a fashion brand from Japan founded in 1993, now owned by Hong Kong fashion conglomerate I.T Group. You can see the kind of stuff they sell on their website.
  • The aquatic ape hypothesis is, at best, highly controversial among anthropologists. It was first suggested by marine biologist Alistair Hardy in 1960, though he described it as a “rough guess” rather than a serious theory, and according to some accounts was mortified at the sensational media attention it received at the time. It was popularised in part by Welsh television writer Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book The Descent of Woman, which challenged the highly gendered stories of human evolution – in particular the focus since the 1950s on early humans hunting and gathering, excluding the previously thought just as important activity of fishing. After receiving general acclaim for the book but criticism for the aquatic ape portion, she later published an entire book devoted to the idea, 1982’s The Aquatic Ape. The theory has been defended by many, including philosopher Daniel C Dennett (who has also suggested that both Morgan and her opponents go too far) and David Attenborough. The later seafood theory of human brains, espoused by Michael Crawford and David Marsh in their 1989 book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future (as mentioned in Chapter 8, “Planet of the Apes”), was not taken especially seriously either. All that said, there’s always room to challenge the status quo, especially if the dominant stories it supports seem to suspiciously uphold modern ideas about gender roles. So far, though, the fossil record doesn’t support the idea that early humans spent most of their time on the beach, so at best, the jury is still out.
  • It’s worth noting that the updated 2002 edition of the first The Science of Discworld also talks about the aquatic ape hypothesis and the importance of seafood in brain development – and goes another step further. In chapter 42, “Anthill Inside”, they mention that the savanna hypothesis is also in trouble from evidence that some areas where early human fossils are found weren’t savanna back when those humans died – they were woodlands. This is an ongoing question, and the savanna hypothesis – while still the dominant idea in the public consciousness – is described as controversial by some palaeoanthropologists and palaeobotanists, with interpretation of the habitat at that time seemingly still a bit in question.
  • The so-called “paleo diet” – short for palaeolithic diet – is, like most diets, a fad, in this case supposedly emulating the diet of our palaeolithic ancestors. Though versions of the idea go back at least as far as 1890s, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin really made it popular with his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, which claimed humans ate very little other than meat up until 10,000 years ago and recommended modern humans do the same. It saw a revival at the start of the 21st century – when The Science of Discworld II was published – and the new name was seized by health scientist Loren Cordain with her 2002 book The Paleo Diet. (She also owns the copyright on that name.) While some of the recommendations of the diet probably are good for you, there’s not much in the way of proper research into the amazing health benefits Cordain and other proponents claim – and, for that matter, there’s not that much detail available about what our ancestors actually ate, either.
  • Neanderthals were a sister species to (or perhaps a subspecies of) modern humans; they are given the name Homo neanderthalis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalis if you think of us as Homo sapiens sapiens). They are named after the Neandertal valley in Germany, where their first fossils were found, and lived mostly in Europe until around 40,000 years ago. In the last few years, evidence has been found in Spain that Neanderthals – who lived there before modern humans – made forms of cave art, suggesting they may have been more sophisticated than the unflattering ideas given of them via the “Ugs” in Science of Discworld II.
  • Tool use in animals has been observed in many species, including monkeys, dolphins, birds (especially crows), and yes, octopuses. There’s some debate about what counts as a “tool”, but some animals do modify objects they find in the environment to suit their purposes; this includes crows and octopuses.
  • Octopuses can indeed get out of jars, as evidenced by this viral video from 2010 which did another round of the Internet in 2014. Though it should be noted that while the octopus does unscrew the lid from inside the jar, she seems perfectly happy to stay inside it.
  • We haven’t yet found a good source for the idea of fish returning to the location of their ancestors every four generations, but don’t confuse it with the four-generation cycle of history, which is another name for Strauss–Howe generational theory.
  • Robust and gracile are terms mostly used to describe two broad groups of species of our ancestor genus Australopithecus. While the concept does appear more broadly in biology, it seems much less common.
  • The three kinds of elephant are the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant (referred to in the book as the Indian elephant). Genetic analysis suggests that the two African elephant species diverged more than 2.5 million years ago – the same kind of timeframe as the divergence between woolly mammoths and Asian elephants.
  • Let’s talk about that claim about the huge number of illegitimate children. In chapter 12, “Edge People”, Jack and Ian say “In English society, about one child in seven” are in the position that their “legal and biological parentage differ”. This is based on Elliott Philipp’s analysis of blood groups in the late 1960s, published in 1973. Blood typing was the standard form of paternity testing before DNA fingerprinting techniques were refined in 1980s, and it is pretty good at determining that someone can’t be someone’s parent – you have to get the genes for your blood type from your parents, after all. Unfortunately we have no way of checking these numbers because we can’t find the study, or any writing about it (or similar ones in the United States, for that matter). It doesn’t instil us with confidence that the book’s authors seem to have misspelled the author of the study’s name – they name “Elliott Philipp”, who we think is probably Elliot Elias Philipp (1915 – 2010), a gynaecologist and obstetrician from Stoke Newington in London, though his official biography doesn’t mention this study. In any case, the figure of “one in ten” is popularly accepted, and was the result of the surveys they cite, but they correct for the fact that an unknown father has a reasonable chance of having the same blood type as the supposed father, leading to their figure of 13-17%, or roughly one in seven. There are other figures; while there’s not as much literature about this as you might expect – or at least not any that’s easily accessible to a lay researcher – we found that a study by University of Leicester in 2009 using a survey of genetic markers in nearly 1,700 British men suggested the real figure is probably closer to one in twenty-five. Here’s a BBC article from the time – note that the Leicester researchers don’t seem to be aware (or at least, don’t mention) Philipp’s study as a possible source of the one-in-ten assumption.
  • Mitochondria are the “organelles” responsible for most of the generation of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main source of chemical energy in cells. They are found in most cells of eukaryotic lifeforms on Earth. (An organelle is a distinct sub-structure that fulfils a specific function – so the cellular equivalent of an organ in the body.) The dominant theory is that they were once separate single-celled organisms that were absorbed and incorporated into the body of our single-celled ancestors millions of years ago. Supporting this is the fact that mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s been long thought that children only inherit the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of their mothers, hence the idea of “mitochondrial Eve” – the woman from whom all modern humans inherited their mitochondria. As the book points out, this doesn’t mean there was only one woman, only the others alive at the time do not have any surviving direct female-line descendants (they could have direct descendants, but if they or their following generations only had male children, then they would have inherited another line’s mtDNA). And, as modern lines end – i.e. as women now live and have no daughters – the specific woman in question would change. More recent genetic studies from 2013 have suggested the most recent mitochondrial Eve would have lived around 155,000 years ago, about twice as far back as the estimate current at the time of The Science of Discworld II. Of note is that since at least 2018, researchers have discovered that humans can inherit some of their mtDNA from their fathers, though this seems very rare and doesn’t seem to have left a significant mark on the human genetic map.
  • The Richard Dawkins book Ben mentions is The River Out of Africa, which uses the metaphor of a river to represent the flow of humans – or at least human DNA – out of Africa and across the world.
  • The Biblical story discussed in the book, in which the Israelites agree to let the Hivites join their tribe if they get circumcised but then murder them all, is the story of Dinah and Schechem, from the book of Genesis, chapter 34.
  • The early version of “Sleeping Beauty” to which Liz alludes is known from its earliest written version, “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, by Italian author Giambattista Basile in his 1634 book, the Pentamerone. Rather than being waken by a handsome Prince, the magically cursed princess Talia is discovered by a king, who…look, we’ll let you look it up. It’s not okay.
  • Cinderella’s slippers might be described as being made of “fur” in earlier versions, but this doesn’t seem to be an allusion to what Jack and Ian are talking about. Rather “squirrel fur” was one of a number of luxury materials that a common would never be able to afford or allowed by the conventions of status to wear. Many sources we found about this debunk the idea that it’s a mistranslation of an earlier version. The famous source of the modern version, Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” (“Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper”) uses the unambiguous phrase “pantoufles de verre” (“glass slippers”) many times. We will also note that Ben is wrong about the story always being about shoes – sometimes the item that helps identify the mystery woman is a ring. The earliest written version, in Chinese, does feature gold shoes.
  • The name Rumpelstiltskin actually derives from the German name Rumpelstilzchen. As Ben mentions, this is the name of a type of goblin – a noisy one who walks with a limp, in fact – and loosely translates as “little rattle stilt”. It seems to come from the old German children’s game, Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart, which one source described as “like duck-duck-goose except instead of a goose there’s a goblin, and instead of a duck there’s a man with a limp”. The goblin player would rattle and bang on things. (Sadly it seems others also think there’s a phallic interpretation for the story, though it doesn’t seem to be an explicit part of the tale in any version we can find.)
  • Ilona and Peter Opie published many books; the ones relevant to this discussion are 1959’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and 1974’s The Classic Fairy Tales, which contained twenty-four stories as they first appeared in English, with a literary history.
  • We’ve mentioned the various folk tale indices in our show notes on previous occasions; the big one Ben usually refers to is the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), though there are others. Like the Dewey Decimal System, the idea is that stories with closer numbers are more similar, or at least share significant traits. Both Rumpelstlitskin and Cinderella are in the 500s, the grouping known as “Supernatural helpers”. Rumpelstiltskin is the main example of ATU type 500, and Cinderella is the “persecuted heroine” subtype of 510A, “Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes”.
  • The high school physics experiment Ben mentions is still done in high schools today. It uses a “ticker timer”, which is basically an electromagnet which, when attached to an AC power supply, turns on and off, causing a metal strip with a point on it to vibrate up and down at a fixed speed. It has a bit of carbon paper under the metal strip, so when the strip moves down it will make a mark with the carbon on paper underneath. In the experiment, you feed a strip of ticker tape through some guiding holes under the metal strip; by attaching one end of the tape to a block of wood with wheels on it, it can be dragged through, and by measuring the distance between the dots on the tape you can measure the speed at which the truck is moving. Ben was happy to discover that searching for “ticker timer” on YouTube brought up a number of high school physics teachers (many of them in Australia) explaining the demonstration to their students – some of them even from the Before Times!
  • The horse galloping photography experiment was to determine whether a horse always has one foot on the ground when trotting. It was undertaken by famous American photographer Eadweard Muybridge for Leland Stanford, former Governor of California, as mentioned in the book in chapter twenty-two, “The New Narrativium”. While the story of this settling a substantial bet is popular, some historians say there’s no evidence it’s true. The two men later had a falling out when Stanford published a book about horse movement containing illustrations based on Muybridge’s photographs but giving him no credit, costing Muybridge some research funding.
  • Rincewind’s deep love (or indeed lust) for potatoes was first explored while he was marooned on an island at the beginning of Interesting Times.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat25 (Equal Rites), #Pratchat31 (The Long Earth) and #Pratchat35 (The Science of Discworld), as well as the second episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. Thursday Next is the star of his most famous series of novels, beginning with The Eyre Affair; she works for the Special Operations Network department 27 ((or SpecOps, or specifically SO-27, for short), the Literary Detectives or “LiteraTecs”. Not only is literature incredibly important in her alternate history 1985 – “WillSpeak” machines are common coin-operated vending machines which recite lines from his plays and poems – but the lines between fiction and reality are very thin, allowing her to pass into the “BookWorld” and enter the plots of well-known novels. Her father has long since disappeared, but he worked for SO-12, the ChronoGuard, tasked with protecting the timeline from paradoxes and other tampering. As a result, Shakespeare and time travel are at least minor elements (an often much more significant ones) in most of the Thursday Next novels.
  • Liz claims no-one knows when Shakespeare was born, or what his life was like, or who he was…some of which is true. We don’t know when he was born, but we do know he was baptised on the 26th of April, 1564; his birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which is also the date on which he died in 1616, aged 52. We also known he was married to Anne Hathaway on the 27th of November 1582, but there’s little detail recorded of his life until he begins to make his mark on the theatre scene in 1592, when he was roasted in print by rival playwright Robert Greene. As to his identity, while no end of scholars have made themselves famous with alternative theories about his identity and very existence, at least half of the Pratchat team subscribes to the simplest theory: that he was just one guy, named William Shakespeare.
  • Doctor Who featured Shakespeare in the 2007 episode “The Shakespeare Code”, when the Tenth Doctor and his companion Martha Jones visit the Globe to see an original Shakespeare production and discover alien witches are influencing both Shakespeare’s play and the Globe theatre for their own ends. Doctor Who had mentioned Shakespeare several times in the classic series, implying (but never showing) that the Doctor had met him on more than one occasion.
  • Ben makes an unintentional pun when he says that “Shakespeare is kind of your biggest Touchstone” – Touchstone is the name of a fool, one of the major characters in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It.
  • The author who suggested Western-style science requires monotheism, which is why it didn’t develop in China was British biochemist, historian and sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995). A noted scholar of Chinese history and philosophy of science, he wrote many books, but Jack and Ian specifically mention “his truly gigantic History of Science in China“. His work was so influential that in history circles, the question of why China had been overtaken by the West in scientific terms, despite being centuries ahead with many of the most important inventions, is known as “the Needham Question”. Needham has been criticised for being perhaps biased in China’s favour, however, and there are many other hypotheses that have been put forward to answer the Needham Question.
  • We hope you enjoy the seeming non-sequitur when Liz says “On the space elevator, on the way to the banana planet“; this is a result of a previous bit where Ben gave an entirely incorrect (and thus cut) account of how banana plants move up hills, and Liz deciding that when they get to the top they build a space elevator and leave the planet.
  • The Milgram experiment, conducted by Yale University psychologist Dr Stanley Milgram in 1961 and published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology as “Behavioural study of obedience” in 1963, remains one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. As the subjects were filmed – and that footage used by Milgram to capitalise on his fame by using it in a 1974 film titled Obedience – it has been shown to students of psychology and the history and philosophy of science for decades. But like many similar experiments from the time, it has since come under a great deal of scrutiny. In 2013, Australian psychologist Gina Perry published Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments; with access to all Milgram’s original papers and documentation, she felt that his methodology and the the quality of the experiment was highly questionable. Even those who think the experiment holds up – and it has, despite ethical objections, been repeated in various forms, even as recently as 2007 – many others question the conclusions that have been drawn from the results. This great piece by Cari Romm for The Atlantic from 2015 is a great primer on the legacy of the experiment, and more recent criticism.
  • As Ben mentions, if you’re a subscriber, keep an eye out for the next episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast – he has a few more things to say about this book!
  • The expression Bojack Horseman has ruined for Liz is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Many sources trace its origin back to a version found in The Court and Character of King James, written by Anthony Weldon in 1650, though some suggest a similar sentiment appears in “The Embassy to Achilles” in Homer’s The Iliad – or at least its English translation by Alexander Pope, published between 1715 and 1720. (Having had a look, that latter attribution seems a bit of a long bow.) Bojack Horseman is a Netflix original animated series about depressed and self-hating anthropomorphic horse actor Bojack Horseman. In the first season’s fourth episode, a number of characters are unable to recall the expression correctly. This echoes former US President George W Bush, famous for his “Bushisms”, who also mangled it; here’s a little collection of his gaffes that includes that one, from a speech given on September 17, 2002 in Nashville.

#Pratchat47 – A Finite Number of Shakespeares

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Science comedian and public health nerd Alanta Colley joins Liz and Ben on their second trip through Discworld into Roundworld, as they join Rincewind and the wizards of Unseen University in Pratchett’s second collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

While on a team-building exercise in the woods near Unseen University, Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully and his faculty are accidentally swept along when something makes its way through the Discworld into Roundworld. That something turns out to be elves – nasty, parasitic lifeforms who feast on the imagination and emotions of others. Roundworld – the universe in a bottle created by the wizards’ experiments, which somehow runs without any magic – has been altered by their presence. Now the wizards – including Rincewind, the long-suffering Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography – have to find a way to get rid of them without dooming the local human population in the process…

Having entirely missed humankind in The Science of Discworld, the wizards are back for another go! And so are science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen – but this time, they don’t want to explain cosmology, basic physics and the history of the Earth, but instead sell you on the idea that storytelling is the essential ingredient that makes humans…human.

Are we really Pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee, rather than Homo sapiens, the “wise man”? Is it wise to write a popular science book with an author who will guarantee the book will be read again twenty years later – and to include some “cutting edge” science, no less? What do a debunked psychological experiment, the term “overcommitment”, and filthy explanations of fairytales have to do with it? And who’s this shrewd and world-wise street wizard named Rincewind, and can we have some more of his adventures please? Let us know what you think using the hashtag #Pratchat47 on social media, and join in the conversation!

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Guest Alanta Colley is a comedian, science communicator and storyteller whose solo shows include Parasites Lost (about parasites), Days of Our Hives (about beekeeping) and The Origin of Faeces (you can probably work that one out yourself). She also wrote and performed the “comedy experiment” You Chose Poorly with our own Ben McKenzie. Since 2017 Alanta has also been the host and producer of Sci Fight, a series of comedy science debates; both Ben and Liz have been guest speakers, along with previous Pratchat guests Anna Ahveninen (#Pratchat35) and Nicholas J Johnson (#Pratchat38). You can hear Ben and Anna’s last appearance on Sci Fight in this episode of the Climactic podcast, or see the first online debate for Melbourne Science Gallery on YouTube here. Visit scifight.com.au to sign up to the mailing list, and you can find Alanta as @lannyopolis on Twitter and Instagram, via Facebook or at alantacolley.com.

You can find out more about what Liz has been writing by following her as @ElizabethFlux on Twitter or Instagram.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode we read one of the few precious Discworld novels left to us, though luckily we got a little preview this time around; yes, we’re joining up with Susan, Death and the history monks for the very timely Thief of Time, which we’ll be discussing with journalist Ben Riley! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat48, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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