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Roundworld

#Pratchat60 Notes and Errata

08/10/2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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:
    • The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“
    • The Long War in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“
    • The Long Mars in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!“
    • We also discussed the precursor short story “The High Meggas” in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon“.
  • 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:
    • The Bromeliad books Truckers (#Pratchat9), Diggers (#Pratchat13) and Wings (#Pratchat20).
    • The Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind (#Pratchat28), Johnny and the Dead (#Pratchat34) and Johnny and the Bomb (#Pratchat37).
    • Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“
    • Nation in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“
    • We haven’t yet given The Carpet People the full Pratchat treatment, but we did talk about the differences between the original and re-written versions in a video discussion for Nullus Anxietas.
  • 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.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Dr Kat Day, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#EeekClub2021 Notes and Errata

25/05/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus episode Eeek Club 2021, answering questions from our Eeek tier subscribers.

  • In Ankh-Morpork, the “Glorious 25th of May” is the date of the “Glorious Revolution”, commemorated only by a small number of people who were there. They wear lilac in memory of those who died. It is covered in much detail in Night Watch, which we’ll be reading for our December 2021 episode. On Roundworld, Pratchett fans have adopted the date as a celebration of Discworld and Terry Pratchett, often wearing lilac (the flower or the colour), and sometimes raising money for Alzheimer’s research. May 25th is also Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams, which began two weeks after his death in 2001, and “Geek Pride Day”, which was started in Spain in 2006. That the Ankh-Morpork revolution shares a date with the former may not be a coincidence, since Night Watch was published in 2002.
  • We did indeed start offering subscriptions in January 2019; we announced them in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Our big open slather questions episode was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, released on the 8th of April, 2020.
  • James Spader provides the voice of robot protector-turned-exterminator Ultron in the 2015 Marvel superhero film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • The lockdown-related Discworld questions in #Pratchat30 begin around 1 hour, 5 minutes and 41 seconds in.
  • The first lockdown in Melbourne – and the rest of Australia – began on March 29, 2020. Melbourne had subsequent lockdowns from July 9 to October 26 2020, February 12 to 17 2021, and from May 27 until – at the time of last update – at least June 10, 2021.
  • Dragon King of Arms appears in Feet of Clay, which we discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.
  • We also discussed the difference between vaccination and variolation in the notes for #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben says The Truth, but means The Times, as in The Ankh-Morpork Times, the first newspaper on the Discworld. It features in the novel The Truth, which we discussed in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • The Sto Plains – which occupy the area directly hubwards of Ankh-Morpork, on the opposite side to the Circle Sea – include many city-states, like the kingdom of Sto Lat (ruled by Queen Keli), the Duchy of Sto Helit (as in Duchess Susan Sto Helit), and the protectorate of Sto Kerrig. Sto Lat is probably closest, only about 20 miles from the Hubwards Gate of Ankh-Morpork. Their populations aren’t known, but it seems likely the plains’ residents don’t outnumber the million people who live in Ankh-Morpork. The various kingdoms and smaller towns and cities of the plains are all independent of the city, but most of them use Ankh-Morpork dollars as their currency, and certainly look to Ankh for guidance in matters of culture, technology and commerce.
  • The Trans-Tasman Bubble is the quarantine-free travel arrangement between Australia and New Zealand, countries with similarly low COVID-19 cases, separated by the Tasman Sea. It was announced as a possibility early on in the pandemic, but officially took affect on April 19, 2021. The day this episode was released (May 25, 2021), new cases were announced in Melbourne, leading to the reinstatement of some restrictions and a 72-hour pause on the bubble for travel from Melbourne.
  • “Young Igor” is our affectionate name for the Igor who joins the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in The Fifth Elephant; he is the nephew of the Igor who worked for the Morporkian embassy in Überwald. We last saw him in The Truth, where he was tending to the wounds suffered by the Patrician and his clerk, Drumknott.
  • Rincewind’s age isn’t definite, but a good guess is that he was 32 during the events of The Colour of Magic, and 57 by the time of The Last Hero, so Ben is probably right about him “pushing 60”.
  • Melbourne’s second lockdown lasted 112 days, from July 7 to October 28, 2020. During most of that time, residents were only allowed to leave their homes under very limited conditions, and restricted in how far they could travel from home. It’s probably stretching it a bit to say these were some of the harshest lockdown conditions in the world, but it was reported that way at the time.
  • Liz’s comment about “trips to Aspen” refers to multiple incidents from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when wealthy Australians returning from a skiing holiday in Apsen, Colorado tested positive for the virus but did not self-isolate, causing a cluster of new cases.
  • Though he does walk with a cane, the Patrician is not as old as he seems; clues from various books (primarily Night Watch) place him as somewhere between 50 and 55, but it seems the assassination attempts of Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and The Truth have taken their toll and he’s not as strong as he used to be. Or at least, that’s what he’d like his opponents to think…
  • The Bubonic plague is a disease caused by infection of the lymphatic system with the bacteria Yersinia pestis. Usually a human is infected by a flea bite; several flea species can carry the bacteria, and spread among human populations via rats. The plague is responsible for three major pandemics: the plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed around 25 million people; the Black Death of the 14th century, which may have killed as many as 200 million people in Europe – about a third of the population; and the plague of the mid-19th century, which caused the deaths of around 15 million people in mainland Asia. (For comparison, as of May 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has officially caused 3.6 million deaths, though the estimated total death toll is 7.7 million.) Untreated, Bubonic plague is very deadly, killing half or more of those infected. Thankfully it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, reducing its mortality rate to 15% or much lower. These days cases are very rare, though the disease has not been entirely eradicated.
  • Here are some links to the very excellent The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret head canon Twitter threads:
    • The original Discworld lockdown thread: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1247840167819456515
    • Mental health tips: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1260514179779383297
    • Kinds of masks: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1303711942234836992
    • Stockpiling habits: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1250387201986383872
    • Quarantine hobbies: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1252918448793018371
    • Ankh-Morpork businesses during lockdown: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1255429705458688000
    • Post-Lockdown activities: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1257993303527735297
    • Lockdown 2: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1326545920415051783
  • Aunty Donna are an absurdist sketch comedy group based in Melbourne and formed in 2011. Their latest work is the Netflix series Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. You can find out more about them at auntydonna.com.
  • Equal Rites is the third Discworld novel, and the first to feature Granny Weatherwax. It tells the story of Eskarina Smith, a girl based in (large) part on Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, who becomes the Disc’s first female wizard. We discussed it in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. The subject of the gender split in magical society comes back in the later Tiffany Aching books.
  • Ben mentions VCAL, which is the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is a more practical alternative to the standard Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), a qualification which is more likely to lead to a university degree; VCAL is instead intended to prepare students for an apprenticeship, TAFE course or similar directly vocational training.
  • Most of the captains depicted in the numerous Star Trek television series go on “away missions“, i.e. missions in which they leave their ship (or equivalent). This is especially true of Captain James T Kirk of the original Star Trek, though it’s hinted that this practice is frowned upon by the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard’s first officer, Riker, leads most away missions. Mind you, Picard’s contemporary captains Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager) and Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) go on plenty of missions too…
  • Speaking of Star Trek, the episode Ben is thinking of is indeed called “The Measure of a Man“. It’s the ninth episode of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally broadcast in February 1989. It’s frequently cited as one of the show’s early greats, even if the legal proceedings are a bit suspect. The book The Metaphysics of Star Trek, which uses Star Trek scenarios to illustrate various metaphysical concepts, was later republished as Is Data Human?, as one of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of “personhood”.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld back in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Final Death is the term used in the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (and its cousin, Vampire: The Requiem) for the ultimate destruction of a vampire, who is already undead. They are not nearly as impossible to kill as the vampires of the Discworld; see for example our discussion of Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The Sesame Street song about being alive – or at least the one Ben is thinking of – is “You’re Alive“, first broadcast in 1980. It’s not quite how Ben remembered it, but Sesame Street has tackled the topic several times, always using the measures of eating, breathing and growing.
  • Alan Alda, best known for his years playing trauma surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, established the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in 2009. The Flame Challenge launched in 2012, with the aim of answering the question “What is flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old could understand, as judged by actual 11-year-olds – all because Alda himself received an uninspiring answer from his sixth grade teacher when he was eleven. The winner was announced at the World Science Festival, and the competition was successful enough to inspire several more over the next few years. Each answered a new question picked by 11-year-olds, including “What is time?” and “What is colour?” Sadly the websites for the challenge and the Alan Alda Center no longer exist, but you can find the winners on YouTube with a bit of effort.
  • We’ve previously talked about Beauty and the Beast villain Gaston and his fate, perhaps most significantly in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • The Beast’s age can be worked out from two bits of evidence. First, the enchanted rose, which will only bloom “until his 21st year”; this implies he is aging during his curse, and the rose is wilting during the events of the film. Second, Lumiere – the maître d’ of the house, transformed into a candelabra – says that they’ve been waiting for “ten years” since being cursed. Why the curse affected the servants is not clear, but muddying the waters is the portrait Belle finds of the Beast, in which he looks exactly like his 21-year-old self. Regardless of the Beast’s true age, Chip’s birth remains a mystery.
  • The original Beauty and the Beast was written in 1740 by Parisian novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her version is long, detailed and contains and many characters, including Belle being one of twelve children. Most later retellings are based on a greatly pared back version rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and first published in 1756. These originals draw on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and do not include an equivalent of Gaston, who was added in some later versions. Assuming the Disney version happens around the time the oldest stories were written, Liz is right that they would have lived to see the French Revolution in 1789.
  • Anti-racism is is active opposition to racism, and can take many forms. While the idea has gained more visibility in recent years, with books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and renewed momentum behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s certainly not a new idea.
  • The Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness appears in Men at Arms, which we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited Men at Arms in #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“, a live appearance at The Lost Con online event run by the Australian Discworld Convention.
  • Diggers is the second of the three books of the Bromeliad, Pratchett’s trilogy about the diminutive Nomes. We covered Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, Diggers in #Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and Wings in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • We discussed The Long Earth and (briefly) The High Meggas in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
  • Thanks to listener Steve Leahy, who reminded us that there is at least one alien on the Discworld: Tethys, the sea troll, who crash-landed there after falling off his own watery world of Bathys. He appears in The Colour of Magic, which we discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation.” (We discuss the sequel, The Light Fantastic, in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“.)
  • “Literary fiction” is basically a synonym for “high brow”, “serious literature” or “worthy of awards”, and is used to distinguish supposedly more sophisticated and “important” writing from so-called “genre fiction”. As we discuss, it can get in the bin.
  • Ben finally found a source for the story of the student with the Terry Pratchett book who was dismissed by a lecturer, only to turn things around by revealing they’d written a thesis on his work. It was related on Tumblr by the user thebibliosphere in a comment on this post about “people I still want to stab more than a decade later”. We’ve embedded that exchange below.
https://fistinginferno.tumblr.com/post/187226941007/people-i-still-want-to-stab-over-a-decade-later
  • The “sort of neolithic spaceship” Potent Voyager was dropped off the Rim in Krull in The Colour of Magic; it is already falling, with Twoflower inside, when we encounter it at the start of The Light Fantastic.
  • Mutter’s Spiral is not a real world name for the the Milky Way; it’s the name given to it by the Time Lords in Doctor Who, as mentioned in the 1976 story The Deadly Assassin (yes, they really named it that). You are right to infer this means Ben has spent too much time thinking about Doctor Who.
  • We previously mentioned The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones in our discussion of The Long Earth in the afore-mentioned #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
  • Ben still maintains a list of Discworld podcasts on Podchaser, but has since grown this into the wiki side-project The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters. The podcasts he mentions at the end of this episode are:
    • The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret (Patreon here)
    • Radio Morpork
    • Desert Island Discworld (Patreon here)
    • Who Watches the Watch (Patreon here)
    • Unseen Academicals (Patreon here)
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Angua, Ankh-Morpork, Bonus Episode, Dorfl, Eeek Club, Granny Weatherwax, Nomes, Patrician, Reg Shoe, Roundworld, The Watch, Unseen University, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat59 Notes and Errata

08/09/2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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!

Since I was chatting to @PratchatPodcast about it yesterday, here’s my ridiculously long Terry Pratchett shelf 😄 pic.twitter.com/qVXigRlKk2

— Dr Kat Day 🏳‍🌈 🧪🐙 🇺🇦 (@chronicleflask) August 25, 2022

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.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Dr Kat Day, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat59 – Charlie and the Whale Factory

08/09/2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

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!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_59.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:00 — 44.8MB)

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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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Dr Kat Day, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

Eeek Club 2022

25/05/2022 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

It’s a second instalment of the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we release a bonus episode discussing topics selected by our “Eeek” tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • What was good, fun and enjoyable about The Watch?
  • Is Vimes a Cynic, a Stoic, or an Epicurean?
  • What was Granny Weatherwax and Ridcully’s relationship like, and why didn’t it continue?
  • What pop culture would you have liked to have seen referenced in a Discworld novel?
  • What moments from the series hit you personally because of a personal experience?
  • If democracy came to Ankh-Morpork, what political parties would we see?
https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Eeek_Club_2022.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:58 — 47.0MB)

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Graham, Frank, Cath (and Eddy), Steph, Jess and Ellie, Karl and Soren!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing 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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Bonus Episode, CMOT Dibbler, Eeek Club, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Harry King, Moist von Lipwig, Mustrum Ridcully, Patrician, Reg Shoe, Roundworld, The Watch, Vetinari, Vimes

Eeek Club 2021

25/05/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Welcome to a new tradition: the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we will release a bonus episode discussing topics selected by our Eeek tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • How would Ankh-Morpork deal with COVID-19?
  • What would happen if Granny Weatherwax was head of Unseen University – or if Angua commanded the Watch?
  • Are golems alive? (For that matter, is fire alive?)
  • How has Pratchett and/or the Discworld informed our personal philosophies?
  • If Pratchett had kept writing the Discworld series, would it have evolved into science fiction?
https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Eeek_Club_2021.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:27 — 46.0MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS | More

A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Karl, Catherine, Soren, Jess and David, and Frank!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing 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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Angua, Ankh-Morpork, Bonus Episode, Dorfl, Eeek Club, Granny Weatherwax, Nomes, Patrician, Reg Shoe, Roundworld, The Watch, Unseen University, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

08/09/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

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.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Alanta Colley, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat47 – A Finite Number of Shakespeares

08/09/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

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!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_47.mp3

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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

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Alanta Colley, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

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