[Sticks]

Notes on Episode 11

The Butterfly Effect and other temporal paradoxes
The Lone Stranger wonders if he should pay off Jennifer’s electricity bill, as maybe she was due to be cut off and thrown into the street.

What he was wondering about is what is called the butterfly effect, which is to do with chaos theory right? Well not quite. There is a Science Fiction story where someone goes back in time and inadvertently kills a butterfly, and the whole of human history is changed, and this sci-fi story, the Sound of Thunder came out before Chaos theory was popularised. However the concept is still the same.

There is another paradox, the Predestination Paradox, where a person was predestined to go back in time and carry out a task in their past.

Another paradox is the Pago paradox, once mentioned on the TV series Star Trek Voyager, this is where an attempt to prevent something from occurring by going back in time, causes the event trying to be prevented, occurring in the first place.

Then there is the Chronology Protection Conjecture, which states that attempts to change history will always fail.

A British Summer – Three fine days and a thunder storm
In the story there had been a heat wave, yet the following day it is chucking it down. Yes the weather can do that, especially in the British Isles, hence the expression, three fine days and a thunder storm.

Nigel and other “Real” characters
Reference is made to a Nigel. In 1988 when I was doing this, I was in the middle of writing the back in time episode and I wanted to use a certain person as an incidental character. The person I wanted to use was sitting or standing next to me and objected to being used, so I ended up using someone else. He was the only person to object to being used. Of course in the 1993 rewrite, I changed the names of all the characters to protect the privacy of those I had used in 1988 on a restricted circulation computer system. (And no I am not ever going to say who they really were, apart from the Lone Stranger character which was based on an idealised version of me)

Grandfather Father Son
This is a reference to how backup tapes were cycled in the days before CD-ROM’s, DVD’s and other forms of back up storage we use today. Assume you back up once a day. Tape one records the contents of the hard drive and is stored on day one. On Day two, you record onto tape two, and on day three you record onto tape three.

Because of space restrictions then, you could only keep so many tapes, and three was the number picked. Tape one is now the Grandfather, Tape two the father and tape three the son

On day four, you wipe tape one, and reuse that tape for day four’s back up run. Tape one is now the son, tape two is now the grandfather and tape three the father. On day five, you wipe tape two and reuse that. So now Tape three is the grandfather, tape one is the father and tape two is the son, and so on.

This form of cycling tapes was therefore known as the Grandfather father son system.

Kendal Mint Cake
Kendal Mint Cake is a high energy minty sugary bar that they sell to hill walkers and mountain climbers because it is small and has a high number of calories, needed when hill climbing or mountain climbing. You can usually get it at outward bound stores, and it is really nice to eat.

Zoraxima Thraal
This was the name of the main villain in the story I wrote in 1989, previously mentioned. (See notes on episode 10)