Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

Not hand and glove, the fit isn't that close.

Others found by research wizards include Objects In The Rear View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, No User Serviceable Parts Inside and, of course May Contain Nuts.

There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much because it's self-evidently a load of marsh-gas. [This footnote is a footnote in the original quotation. So this is a metafootnote.]

The bean-counters don't even know how to count beans sensibly. Are we surprised?

A tour of any airport bookshop will show that this is reasonable.

But Joycean scholars would be furious if we excluded Finnegan's Wake, which reads exactly like that.

See The Science of Discworld, 'A giant leap for moonkind'.

An extremely common and versatile substance, unfortunately not available in all universes.

The sad histories of these hitherto unknown civilisations, along with the tale of the two-mile limpet, can be found in The Science of Discworld.

Isn't 'Bombastus' a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.

Headers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic.

What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it...

Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.

Carers even encourage or berate the child: 'What's the magic word? You forgot the magic word!'

Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it -and should have, but the publisher got cold feet - was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)

A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala.

And new diseases, although it was quite hard to make bamboo models of these.

The Librarian, on the other knuckly hand, held the view that humans were apes who had given up trying. They were the ones who simply couldn't cut the mustard when it came to living in harmony with their environment, maintaining a workable social structure and, above all, sleeping while holding on.

On his first visit to England in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was asked 'What do y think of modern civilisation?' He is said to have replied 'That would be a good idea.'

A time measurement we developed in The Science of Discworld as a 'human' way of measuring large amounts of time. It's 50 years, a 'typical' age gap between grandparent and grandchild. Most of the really interesting bits of human development have taken place in the last 150 Grandfathers. Remember objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

Most of them being Grandfather bacteria, you appreciate. That's the trouble with metaphors.

Though they're monkeys, not apes.

It helps considerably to steal privilege from other species; for instance, all that food material in plant seeds, tubers and bulbs.

It happens all the time on Discworld!

But we eat sheep, too.

There's been a very cute discovery about elephants recently, and the only place we can find to put it is this footnote. (This, after all, is what footnotes are for.) It has been known since 1682 that elephants' lungs are unusual, without the 'pleural cavity', a space between the lungs and the chest wall that is filled with fluid, that most mammals have. Instead of fluid, elephants' lungs are surrounded by loose connective tissue. It now looks as if this type of lung exists because it lets elephants go snorkelling, breathing through their trunks. In 2001 the physiologist John West calculated that with a normal pleural cavity, the pressure of the water would burst the tiny blood vessels in the pleural membrane and snorkelling could be fatal. We're now wondering whether the trunk evolved in the ocean as a snorkel. Land vertebrates first evolved from fish that came up on to the seashore. Much later, a variety of mammals went back into the oceans and evolved into several kinds of sea-mammals, the most spectacular modern descendants being whales. We now see that somewhere along the way, some of those water-adapted mammals came back on to the land and turned into elephants. So the elephant is now on its second evolutionary journey out of the water and on to the land. It would be nice if it made up its mind.

See The Science of Discworld, chapter 38.

Peasants do cost.

David Brin fans will know what we mean here: in the Five Galaxies, no race (save for the long-defunct Progenitors) ever became extelligent without the aid of a sponsor race which already was. Save for humans, because even in an SF story we need to feel superior. We are, after all, the True Human Beings.

Always be careful of the twentieth-century 'story' of 'the natives who live in harmony with their environment'. It tends to gloss over the fact that back in history they killed off all the really big animals, and now it's a choice between harmony and death.

Mind you, Genesis does say that after Cain killed Abel he was exiled to the land of Nod, on the east of Eden, where he 'knew his wife' and Enoch was born. It doesn't tell us how the wife got to Nod in order to be known. She could have been one of those unmentioned servants, slaves or concubines. That, in turn, raises even more problems with the story of Adam and Eve.

This is why we have been forced to invent differences of religious belief, which give us an excuse to kill each other because They are so dramatically different from us True Human Beings -they don't even know that spilling salt, and then failing to hop three time around the table, invites a demon into your home. So it's all right to wipe the False Humans, Them, from the face of the planet.

The ! is a symbol denoting a particular clicking sound.

A meal that should see you through the week, as the old music hall joke reminds us.

Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika still have their cichlid species flocks; your local tropical-fish shop will have representatives.

'Going walkabout' seems to have been a way to avoid this torture for at least some Australian tribes.

Yes, we know you don't believe this, but ... The first reliable data are in Elliott Philipp's analysis of blood-groups from families in high-rise apartments in Liverpool in the late 1960s, published in 1973. There, 10 per cent of the 'legal paternities' were biologically impossible. So, correcting for the cases where the milkman had the same blood-group as the legal father, about 13—17 per cent were 'discrepant paternities', as the coy phrase goes. Hundreds of births in Maidenhead, in the stockbroker-belt, yielded the same proportions. American figures for the 1980s were about 10 per cent, but these were underestimates because they were not corrected as above. That's the thing about science: it tells you stuff you didn't expect. It gets worse. Or maybe you feel it gets better. At any rate many animals that until recently were famed for their fidelity, such as swans, turn out to be partial to a bit on the side. That ubiquitous beast, the monogamus, is rapidly going extinct.