107 = Megabytes and Satellites

Hello and welcome to A Problem Squared, the problem-solving podcast that's a bit like daylight saving, in that it never quite lines up between all the countries in which it operates.

That's a joke about our inability to schedule a remote recording between multiple continents.

Or, I guess, more accurately, it brings a little bit of extra sunshine into your life

approximately once a year.

I'm joined by Beck Hill, who is a bit like Daylight Saving in that she's occasionally an hour late.

It's a joke about us waiting for Beck at the start of this record.

Yeah.

And brings a little bit of extra sunshine into people's lives, etc.

And I'm Matt Parker.

I'm much like Daylight Saving in that I cause some weird statistical quirks in that I statistically increase the chance of a heart attack.

If you look at heart attacks across the population, they do increase when daylight saving changes the clocks, but they decrease later in the week.

Oh.

So they actually, on average, don't change the number of heart attacks.

They just bring them on slightly earlier for people who are already susceptible to having a heart attack.

Oh.

Well, because they're not sleeping, the sleeping pattern changes.

They like to sleep.

Yeah.

I believe there is a statistical increase in traffic accidents when the clocks go forward because everyone's driving with an hour of their sleep.

Real cheery start there.

Great analogies, Matt.

Thanks.

Now I've got to bring all the sunshine.

On this episode.

I'll be looking into a problem, which I probably should have left for Matt, to be honest.

Great.

I'm taking us back to the moon.

There's been some developments.

Ooh.

And there'll be more more any other business.

So much any other business.

So, Beck, how are you doing?

This fine episode 107.

I'm good.

I went and had an appointment with

an old problem squared friend.

Oh, are we talking dental work?

We are.

Dr.

Sophie.

Our resident.

dental expert.

Our resident dental expert.

So basically,

twice I was chewing gum and I got this real sharp shock of pain through my back molar and like that like radiated through my jaw.

And then I was like, oh, that ain't good.

And so I texted Dr.

Sophie because that's who you text your dental friends.

And she was like, oh, I can check it out for you coming at this point.

But she works at a pediatric dentist.

Right, right.

Okay.

So I really.

Did you have to borrow a child to get in the building?

No, but I did have to fill in a patient form.

It's for the parent to fill in about their child, but I had to fill it in about myself.

In some ways, Beck, you are your own child.

I am.

I am.

In a way that I wish I wasn't.

I was very aware that I was the largest patient in the waiting room.

There's all these other kids I colour.

And I wanted to color in.

Don't get me wrong.

Like, I was very...

Very excited by the stuff that was around there.

I took some photos.

You playing with the building blocks in the waiting room.

No, but there was a lion with fake teeth in its mouth that they'd entered in there, which I posted that on my stories on Instagram.

And it turns out my followers are not on board.

They do not like

a lion with false teeth.

It does not go down well with adults.

Was the lion false human teeth?

Or false lion teeth?

I feel like that's very important.

I could have sent you a photo.

I just.

If it's a full set of false human teeth, I am so on board.

That's so good.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay, for the listeners at home,

cast your bets now.

The winner is human teeth.

It's a full set of human teeth.

And the lion is like a plush kind of stuffed lion toy, which was clearly not designed to have these teeth put in its mouth.

And what really caps it off is

now the lion has its face now has two parts.

There's the original eyes attached to the original lion toy, and now there's the human teeth.

And both sets of facial features have very different emotions present.

The teeth are very happy.

The eyes eyes look downright concerned.

Maybe even like

pleading for help.

Oh, dear.

Yeah, sadness in his eyes.

That's what that brings up.

There's definitely sadness.

I zoomed in and I regret everything.

So, yeah, I got a lot of comments about that with people that ranged from the word haunting to new sleep paralysis demon unlocked.

This tracks with me.

Dr.

Sophie said kids tend to find it very funny, as did I.

The parents are the ones who find it very disturbing.

And the more the adults find it disturbing, the more glee the children get out of the fact that they don't find it disturbing.

And I fully am signed up with that.

Dr.

Sophie gave me a little lookover,

took some x-rays.

I'm all good for now.

I'm all sorted till I get to see my main dentist back in London.

But afterwards, I got to pick a prize from the prize box because you get prizes now.

It's like a little scented pen.

I was so happy.

And I took ages to pick because there were so many things.

You're like, what?

It's genuinely available.

It's a prize box.

Now, did a member of staff direct you to the prize box or do you just see it and decide

you deserve a prize?

It was actually one of the other dentists in the room said you should give her a sticker and then I and I laughed but then Dr.

Sophie went, oh yeah,

did you want something for the prize box?

And if anyone asks you that, you say yes.

I don't care where you are.

Yeah.

So done.

Yeah.

You should have asked for the lion.

That's what you should have asked.

Oh gosh.

No, I couldn't.

I would never dream of robbing the children of that joy.

No, that's so good.

I highly recommend going to a a pediatric dentist if you ever get an opportunity.

Even the clipboard was a tooth shape.

I was thrilled.

You know, they put a level of theming into a children's version of something that they really phone in on the adult equipment.

Yeah.

I want my dentist to have tooth-shaped everything.

There's no reason a normal human adult dentist can't have a tooth-shaped clipboard.

Yeah.

Or just not even a I want a tooth-shaped clipboard.

That's true.

You are weirdly obsessed with teeth, though, so that's a.

Please, someone sell me your teeth.

Not your teeth, Matt.

I mean,

businessmen, sell me your teeth.

Genuine financial offer from Beck to purchase your teeth.

I'm not joking.

I keep saying it.

I'm not joking.

I will buy your teeth.

Matt, how are you?

I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm still like in the preparatory part of the year when I'm planning ahead.

Planned out my year of videos.

Did my yoit.

Ooh.

I think we've talked about I'm yoiting again, which is my year of YouTube.

Second time around.

Which is why I bought an incredible quantity of giant post-it notes that just happened to be on the table next to me.

I love giant post-it notes.

They're so good.

They're so expensive.

Like,

that's half of planning is, oh, hey, if you want to borrow this dash.

Oh, I will.

Of giant post-it notes.

I have too many because, like, the day before Nicole, my producer, got in touch and said.

the giant post-it notes haven't arrived and we've got like the big planning session tomorrow and we were all like oh no.

And so

we inadvertently came up with three different plans to get more giant post-it notes in time, and all three paid off.

So we had

just

giant post-it notes for days.

And, you know, it correlates.

We were just that much more organized.

Have you hired a weird conference room in a seaside place again?

Very close.

So last time we hired a weird conference room in a seaside place

because council run

like function venues that aren't entirely windproof

on the coast during the mid-winter are not in high demand, and you can get them quite cheaply as long as you don't mind being cold and being in a room that hasn't been properly cleaned for a while.

And so, we had like a two-day planning, like for the um stand-up mass channel planning.

Can Person Alex has just come back from paternity leave, and so we decided that instead of having a distant trip away, we would stay way more local.

So we just hired a meeting room in a Novatel.

You're the only person I know who would do that and not use it to be having an affair.

Like

you're genuinely

having a meeting.

I've seen these, I mean, I've seen how many post-its now you get for this sort of thing.

I mean, a secret post-it note rendezvous.

Yeah.

We booked a room

and

we just were like, look, we just need a meeting room.

There's three of us.

There's nothing to, you know, a bit of space.

And so they're like, oh, we got a room that fits like 12 people.

And we're like, oh, perfect.

It was super cheap because it was like off-season in a weird location.

And then on the day, we got bumped into a different room.

I was like, what?

It's because BA, British Airlines, had suddenly decided they had to have a meeting and they pulled rank.

And the night before, I was flying back to the UK and the BA flight was delayed by two hours and I got in real late so I was tired in the morning because BA had delayed me for two hours and then they took my meeting room yeah we ended up still in a perfectly good room and then they're like oh um BA have accidentally over catered their meeting oh feel free to help yourself yes to any of the breakfast sandwiches and I was like All is forgiven.

And I'm like,

how much value can I extract?

I was like, I'm maxing the sandwich.

That's what the B stands for in BA, isn't it?

Breakfast sandwich.

Breakfast abundance.

Breakfast abundance, yeah.

Although we did overshot the market, we got yelled at because we started taking the pastries that they put out for the coffee break that hadn't happened yet.

We're like, oh, pastries, thanks.

So, yeah, we got told to stop just taking all the BA's food.

So that was my

wow.

That sounds

like we've both been very busy doing adult things.

Planning, getting our teeth looked at, yep, stealing sandwiches.

Uh, first problem was sent in by Ivan, but I spelt like the part of your body, E-Y-E Van.

Maybe they are Ivan, and that's just phonetic to make sure we get it right.

Whatever the case, they say they've always believed that there are 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte.

But a friend recently told them that it's actually 1,000.

They spent approximately 30 seconds googling it, which I can say Ivan is above average.

Thank you for putting in that effort.

But they're now more confused than ever and they don't know who to trust.

They've turned to us.

Everyone could trust us.

And Ivan says, Can you please help me understand why there seems to be different answers to this question?

Many thanks.

So, Beck, you've gotten the case.

What's the deal?

Yes.

So, I think I have partly answered this problem, partly solved it.

Well, that's the thing about a question about binary.

You've either solved it or you haven't.

Well, I'm here to blow your mind.

Oh, no.

Because this is like Schrödinger's answer.

Right, okay.

I think I know the answer.

Okay.

Well, want to say, before we start, I'm Team Ivan.

I just always assumed it's 1024

and we say it's a thousand for convenience, but I haven't even done that 30 seconds of looking into it.

So I'm equally interested to hear this solution.

Okay, first of all, I want to give a shout out to my dad, who spent a solid two, two and a half hours trying to explain a lot of stuff to me.

Relevant to this problem?

Well, you know how I have a habit of when I try to answer a simple problem, I go down multiple rabbit holes.

Yes, very familiar with this.

I think I accidentally opened too many tabs on my dad.

Got a lot of questions.

I think we got pretty far away from the initial problem.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

So

my

understanding up until this point.

So first of all, I was somewhat somewhat familiar with the concept of it being 1024 in that

it wasn't something I really thought about.

I'd seen those numbers.

I'd never questioned them.

I think I also would just go, eh, computer stuff, right?

But if you said to me, how many bytes are in a kilobyte, I would say a thousand.

So I was like, oh, I'll ask my dad.

He knows about that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

So I gave my dad a call because he tutors like coding stuff.

He used to work in IT, became a maths teacher.

So like, I feel like he's in a pretty good position to help me understand this.

And

firstly, things that I have learnt today.

So a byte is worth eight bits.

Yep.

Correct.

And a bit,

to my knowledge of understanding, if you have one bit,

you can switch something on or you can switch it off.

But that's it.

Like you only get like one opportunity to do that it's the smallest Possible bit of information.

Yeah, a single bit can flip backwards and forwards so a bit means that you can go on or off but like that's one one thing that you can do you can have it on you can have it off and so if you were to write that that's a zero or a one now two bits means that I found it helpful to think of it in terms of decimal spaces like places.

Yeah.

So one bit is like one and then two bits means you get two decimal spaces.

So you can either have a zero and a zero or you can have a zero and a one or you can have a one and a one or you can have a one and a zero.

That's an entirely accurate way to think about it.

Which means

that two bits can have four combinations.

Yeah.

And three bits would then you've got like a third decimal space.

You can have zero zero zero, you can have zero zero one, zero, one, zero, zero, one, one.

I'm starting to sound like Crichton, I realize.

You can keep going like that.

And when you get that, you get eight combinations.

Correct.

And you go another decimal space, you get 16.

And that's because we're counting in base 2, which means we're going to the power of 2.

Beck, I'm very proud of you right now.

I also learned that anything to the power of 0 is 1.

Yeah.

Yep.

Except for 0.

0 is the only thing that's not allowed to be because you can't have 0 to the power of 0 because reasons.

It's an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object.

Yeah.

Because anything to the power of zero is one,

but zero times anything is zero.

And who's going to win?

Yeah.

So

we just don't even open that door.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

So two to the power of zero means that there's only one two there, and it's not two anything.

So that the answer is one.

Like it's almost like two divided by itself is one.

Correct.

That is correct.

Yes.

Yeah.

The reason that eight bits equals a byte,

and putting it out there, I am now aware that in some cases bytes have been, haven't always been eight bits.

In some cases, they've been different.

But when dad tried to explain that to me, I was like, do you know what?

The old hill thing is kicking in.

Let's get back on topic.

Command W a couple of these tabs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's eight bits in a byte.

And the reason for that is because each of those combinations that the bits could do ended up representing like a piece of information.

And in early computing, all we sort of had was numbers

and Western alphabet, the English alphabet.

And so we only needed 256 or less than combinations in order to represent what each of those

things is.

And so they're like, cool, let's let's call this a bite.

A bite has, because that's to the power of eight.

Yes, I believe that half a bite, four bits, is called a nibble.

You are having me on ridiculous like that.

And I think that's

never used in seriousness, but I think officially four bits.

Producer Laura Grimshaw has come in to confirm it is a nibble.

There you go.

Half a bite is a nibble.

That makes sense.

That's a good system.

That's fantastic.

I love that.

I will also add that, yeah, early computing kind of settled on eight bits

and

probably not unrelated.

I mean, seven's enough for the alphabet, like what we call ASCII, as you were saying.

Yes.

Eight is just really neat.

And

eight is itself

a power of two.

So three bits are enough to count to eight.

So if you want to keep track of how many bits the index or positions, you need three bits to keep track of a position within an eight-bit byte.

So, it's also a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The sort of thing that you're saying right now is the sort of thing my dad was saying.

Completely lost me.

As soon as he started to say

how many bits are needed to work out the bits in a bite, I was like, What the flip are you talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, You sound like you're saying, in order to get a car, we have to drive to the car place.

And I was was like, what?

No, yeah, no, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I understand that.

It's like saying,

right,

if you buy a lot of notebooks

and each notebook has 100 pages in it.

Yep.

And you're like, oh, how am I going to keep track of all my notebooks?

And you're like, I know.

I'll keep track of them in a notebook.

And in my notebook, I'll have one page per notebook.

And then you're like, well, how many notebooks should I buy?

And you're like, look, if I just buy 100 notebooks,

that's the easiest option because then I can have one page per notebook in my notebook.

And so that's, that's kind of what's going on here.

You're saying that each notebook would be a page in the notebook?

Yeah.

Yeah, cool.

So you'd have one notebook.

It's like page one.

In notebook one, I write down,

you know, my favorite TV shows.

And then there's page two.

You're right.

Aye, notebook number two.

I keep track of my recipes.

And so, right.

So it's convenient to have multiples of notebooks that match how many pages are in a notebook if you're using a notebook to track your notebooks.

You've given me like the missing link that I needed.

Got it, right?

Because we started talking about, like, I could sort of see what dad was trying to get to, but I just couldn't like where he was coming from one side.

I was coming from the other.

And if this was a meme, Matt, you are the bridge between these two concepts.

Once eight bits made sense to be a byte,

then once we went beyond that for like characters, it just made sense to use a whole other byte to then

keep track of what alphabet you're looking at, or whatever the case may be.

So the thing is, the very, very original kind of ASCII was seven bits with the left spare one.

Because eight bytes just neat because it's a power of two.

We've been through through this.

And then once they added in all, like the European, like you know, an A wearing a hat, all that kind of stuff, that was enough just to use the eighth bit so you could fit that in a byte.

But then when we added on more languages and emojis and everything else, instead of just adding like a ninth bit, a tenth bit, so on, we just add a whole other byte.

Because it's just way easier to do everything in batches of eight and it's just a byte for this and a byte for that than trying to divide things up on a unnecessarily smaller scale so it's just because a byte is a handy unit of you know bits that's just what we use for basically everything for most people and by most i mean not the people listening because i'm aware that most folks listening to this will be aware of this but i would say outside of this podcast most people when we think of

bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, etc.

Our main interaction with them is just when it comes to the amount of memory that you can get.

So it's usually like, oh, I'm going to, I need to upgrade.

So I've got a terabyte of memory for my email or

256 gig on my hard drive, et cetera.

So that's kind of how we think about it.

And so

I was like, okay, so everything runs on two bytes now.

And it was like, yes, but one is the location of the thing and the other.

And I was like, ah, my brain.

Yeah, but that's, yeah, that's just a specific use.

I wouldn't get too distracted by that.

Okay.

All right.

But I do like the note.

I think the notebooks thing, because when he was talking about pages and what it represents and stuff, I said, oh, that sounds like when you get a manual, you buy something and you get the paper manual, and then it's in all the different languages.

And so you're like, oh, what's the English one?

So you go to the index and you find out what page the English instructions are.

And then you flick over to that.

And then you can find your.

There's a specific case of using binary to represent characters.

Like there's loads of other ways we can use it.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

And I believe that Unicode was created so that programs that were built using the one byte system and programs like there were some still using one byte, some still using two byte.

They were having to convert and be translated and then they were like, let's just do Unicode.

Early on computing was absolute chaos.

But then eventually people kind of decided it was handy if everyone was doing the same thing.

Because then you can send data backwards and forwards.

And so everything gradually standardized.

Yeah.

Now, that's a nice little segue.

I say that.

I'm going to take a while till I use it.

So the bit where I get stuck

is because I understand we count in base two when it comes to the bits.

Yep.

We also seem to count in base two for bytes.

Yes.

For why?

So, so.

One thing to clarify, first of all, is just kind of putting bits into bytes was just a matter of convenience.

It's a because a single bit is such a small amount of information, it made sense to lump a couple together.

It's like, you know, you don't tell someone, like, if you're going to see someone in, you're like, oh, I'll be with you in five minutes.

You don't say, oh, I'll be with you in 300 seconds.

Because a second, while useful, is too small to deal with regularly.

So we lump them together 60 at a time and say, that's a minute.

And it's way easier to do that.

And we happen to lump them in groups of 60 for weird historical reasons.

Yes, which we've covered on previous episodes.

Same thing with computers.

We lump together bits into bytes, eight at a time, for weird historical reasons.

And it's just easier to talk about bytes.

And then, like you're saying,

once you're talking way more bytes, it's easier to lump them into megabytes or gigabytes or something else.

But we keep doing that.

It's a bit like with time, we then lump minutes into hours as another group of 60.

Yeah.

And then hours into days as 24 and all these things.

And that's just because you know the 60 is kind of it's useful in terms of telling the time for a bunch of weird old reasons.

So do we generally go by like you would have like eight bytes, 16 bytes, 32 bytes, 64 bytes?

Yeah, just because, it's coming back to my notebook analogy, you're keeping track of what's in all these bytes by referring to different positions in it.

And it's just easier to then use binary to count what position you want to go and look at you have to store that in binary

so you may as well use powers of two as well because it's just easier in a computer at the end of the day anything in a computer is easier if it's a power of two

but for a human

Everything is easier if it's a power of 10, because we're used to normal base 10 numbers, 100, 1,000, a million, so on.

Yeah.

There's a wonderful coinky dink

that

two to the power of 10, the 10th power of 2, is 1024.

Yes.

Which is very close to 10 cubed, 1000.

Yes.

Now I am aware of this.

So the thing I was getting stuck with is

why do we have to do it that way?

Why can't we just say we have a thousand megabytes in a gigabyte?

But is it because

so using your seconds analogy,

60 seconds equals a minute.

And if I want two minutes, that's 120 seconds.

If I want three minutes, that's 180 seconds.

Yep.

If I have like 100 seconds, that's not a full, like that's in between.

So I can't say that that is a minute.

And if I want to cover myself, I'd go, oh, well, let's just say that that's two minutes.

So it's like saying that

a minute is 60 seconds and two minutes is 120 seconds.

And let's say we always

like to time things in terms of like two minute intervals.

And everyone's like, oh, why is it 120?

I'm used to 100.

Let's just say.

Let's use the same name as if it was a hundred.

So I understand that the reason that we say a thousand, like we say, is it's easier.

It's easier just to round it and say, oh, it's so.

I understand that that's the answer.

Like it, we just say it because it's easier.

I wish I never found out about bits.

I feel like it's so confusing.

I feel like if we start, if I started from bytes and never mentioned bits, I would be, I would totally have my head wrapped around.

Yep.

It's like

when you go from, you know, there's 24

hours in a day.

And you're like, but wait, but there are 60 minutes in an hour.

I'm like, it doesn't matter.

We've decided there are 24 hours in the day.

Doesn't matter how we're dividing the hour.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

So I now understand.

We count bytes.

We're doing it to the power of two because like the closest we get to like a nice

sort of decimal sounding number.

Yeah, a friendly looking number.

Yeah.

is 1024, which is pretty close to a thousand.

Good enough.

And so we were like, cool, let's

let's do a megabyte.

Because what would the first round number be?

Is there ever a base two that ends in.

No,

it never lines up perfectly.

Wow.

Okay, cool.

That now makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, there are other ones once you get higher up, like two to the power of 20 is very close to a million,

but not super close.

Hang on, let's see if I can remember it.

I think it's 1 million, I want to say 48,000.

Yeah.

I want to say 753, but I don't think it was that.

576.

So close.

Oh, so close.

So close.

And yet I can't remember people's faces.

I know.

It's because a million is just 1,000 squared.

And so...

1,024 squared is still pretty close to a million.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, to recap,

bits, I'm going to forget about them.

It's interesting.

I learned something about how

binary works, about counting base

to blah, blah, blah.

Interesting.

Unnecessary, because all they need to know right now is that bytes are counted to the power of two,

and the closest we get to a nice, round, friendly-looking number is 1024.

And so we were like, let's just call that a megabyte.

That's 1,000 bytes, roughly.

And then, okay, so that just gets us to the first part of the question.

Yeah, but we're here now.

So it's all good.

So to come back to the question,

the ISO, which is the International Organization for Standardization, I already think that

it should fire itself for not.

Like a non-standard name.

Yeah, right?

Should be iOS.

Come on, guys.

And listeners have contacted us to say it no longer works as an acronym.

It's now just the name ISO.

So thank you for everyone who sent that in.

So ISO turned around and they were like, no, no, no.

You can't change what a kilo is or a mega is just because.

Yeah.

What the heck?

What are you going to do?

Change the language?

What are you talking about?

So they got very annoyed.

Not 1,000.

That's 1024.

What are you doing?

And they got real, real missed.

They did.

They got mega-angry.

They did.

Which I think means that they are 1024.

They would explode.

They would explode.

So, technically, new terms were created.

So what is 1024 bytes is actually now called a kibibyte.

Yeah.

No one uses this.

And a thousand bytes is a kilobyte, technically, to try and get them out of trouble.

Now, the reason that I haven't fully answered this question yet.

So, if I buy a USB stick with one gigabyte of data on that,

am I actually getting a thousand million bytes?

Yep.

Or am I actually getting,

I think it's called like a gibby bite?

Gimme, gibby bite.

Gibby bite?

Gimme my gibby bite.

That's what they say.

Can you get a gibby nibble?

The old, the old.

Giga nib.

Giga nibble would be a great name for a pet.

It would be.

But a genuine question, like, what am I getting?

I believe

you're getting

a thousand million bytes or a billion bytes, as

we would say, in base 10.

Now, I've never plugged in a USB drive or something and actually, like, properly checked,

but...

I'm pretty confident you get exactly what it says on the 10.

But how does that work if you count in base 2?

Like, is it possible to get 1000 bytes?

Conveniently,

the correct one, the technical one, the thousand, is smaller than what computer scientists were doing with their

1024.

Yeah.

And so, actually, yeah, like if you've got a system that can keep track of a thousand and twenty-four things, and instead you're like, ah, fine, we'll stop at a thousand,

you're good.

You're just not using it to its full full potential.

So it's perfectly fine to have a thousand

bytes or a thousand megabytes.

We can still count to a thousand in binary.

It just, you know, we could have gone to a thousand and twenty-four with the same amount of effort, but it's fine.

If the ISO are going to get real upset, we'll stop at a thousand.

Okay.

That seems dumb.

It is dumb.

Well, the early days of computing, computer scientists, because we had like the amount of memory and processing power and everything was so small, because everything was so new and difficult and expensive to build, they had to wring every last bit of computational value out of their systems.

So they were maxing everything out.

Now, however, we've got storage and processor power for days.

So we no longer have to be squeezing every last bit out of every possible situation.

So it's fine.

A thousand makes way more sense.

It's okay.

Yeah.

So

in conclusion, dare I say?

Oh.

There could be a thousand twenty-four megabytes in a gigabyte.

Yes.

Legally, there should only be a thousand.

Yeah.

By advertising standards, there can only be a bad.

Yeah.

And everyone's like, look, we're giving you more than we promised.

Come on.

Yeah, no.

Those squares over an ISO.

Yeah, if you wanted to not be bothered to put in an extra 24 megabytes, you could say

it's a gigabyte.

And I don't know in what situation that 24 megabytes would save people money.

I'm sure it would on a very large scale.

It sounds like there might be ways that this has actually played very nicely into the hands of certain people.

Because you know, once you start like timesing that by a lot, right?

Like we were saying, you know, it was at 1,048,000, etc.

That's that's a lot of that's a lot of extra biteage.

Yeah,

I just think they were upset they were using official terminology wrong,

and so they had a crackdown.

You'll still see the old system sneaking around.

Like when you buy SD cards, you'll buy like a 256 gig SD card or a 512.

Yeah, my phone came with,

I think, 256

gigabyte inbuilt memory.

And it's new.

That's a quarter of an old school terabyte because that's the power of two system.

Yeah.

But as long as they don't call it a quarter of a terabyte, then no one gets sad.

But if I get a terabyte, does that mean I'm not actually getting four times 256 anymore?

I'm getting less.

No, no, because it's rounded down.

Yeah.

So someone is making money from this.

Oh, big ISO.

Big ISO.

They're skimming off some bites off the table.

They can see the extra money could be made from this.

I'm calling it.

I'm calling it now.

Look, Ivan, you said you spent 30 seconds googling and now you're confused and don't know who to trust.

I spoke for two to two and a half hours with my dad and now have and guys like I just want to give a shout out to our producer Laura Grimshaw who has had to listen to me try and understand this and ask Matt multiple questions and she's going to edit this to make it sound like it's making sense but we've been recording for three days straight and

we have not slept.

You've flown back to the UK and during this time I'm back in the UK.

I was recording on the plane.

And do you know what?

I still don't know who to trust.

Because, do you know who I certainly don't trust?

ISO.

The squares of the ISO.

I think we should put together a fund to bribe them back into letting us.

Oh, that'd be pretty special.

You should make every other branch of science

change.

So now a

mega Newton is now 1024 Newtons.

Just

switch.

Yeah.

That'll show them.

That'll show them.

Yeah.

And now there's 1,024 hours in a day.

Coincidentally, how long it's taken for me to understand as much as I can.

Ivan, I really hope that that helped.

Now, I would love to give you a kilo ding, but I feel like

I'm going to go back to Ivan to see if that's an acceptable answer.

And

how many dings they're going to give?

It will be a power of 10 or a power of 2.

We'll find out.

Our next problem comes from Steve,

who

is referencing a previous episode.

Said, here's a long callback.

I was recently catching up on the old episodes in between listening to new ones.

Love this.

Love a bit of the old repeats.

In this instance, it was episode 28, having a chat and navving a sat, where you worked out whether or not GPS could be used on the moon.

Your conclusion was: so, in theory, if it worked, it would work, but it doesn't work, so it won't work.

That's, that's.

It's not a very generous paraphrasing of what we concluded, but fine, carry on.

I like it.

The incredible new thing that has just occurred is that it works, at least as a test towards a future use.

The Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Lunar Lander touched down on the moon on March 2nd and subsequently acquired and tracked GPS signals.

There is a NASA press press release they quoted saying NASA and the Italian Space Agency made history on March 3rd when the Lunar GNSS receiver experiment, that's Lugre,

became the first time.

I'm the first you're going to pronounce that.

Lugre.

I didn't look up to see how they say it, but I'm very happy with Lugre.

Yeah, became the first technology demonstration to acquire and track Earth-based navigation signals on the moon's surface.

Now, it's not a problem, but it is an interesting update that takes up the amount of space that a problem would to solve.

So, yeah, yeah, I feel like it's a continuation of the previous problem.

Yeah.

Now, I would like to recap.

The problem from episode 0 to 8 was: could you take a GPS receiver to the moon and it still kind of be able to pick up signals and know where it is?

And we had a long chat about how GPS works, the way it receives the signals from these spacecraft, and then

triangulates where it is, all that jazz.

But the

grand conclusion was that it probably wouldn't work because consumer GPS devices, as a safety feature, or rather, in a can't be used in an improvised intercontinental ballistic missile

sense,

they turn off if they go too fast or too high.

Yes.

So if they go over a thousand knots, they stop working.

If they go above, I think it's about 18 kilometers above sea level, they stop working.

But we were trying to work out: could you still get a GPS receiver to the moon and it continued to work?

Because in theory, it could.

However,

some manufacturers, the devices will turn off if both of those things happen at once, but not if either one happens separately.

So potentially you could get it high enough off the Earth if it never went very fast.

But the moon itself is moving very fast.

And so it turns out if it was still

accurate enough to know exactly how fast it was moving, it might continue to work.

But odds are, because all the GPS satellites are so far away by the time you get to the moon, it would probably

not be able to accurately work out how fast it's going and it would turn itself off.

So we were saying a consumer level one would probably not work because of the safety overrides.

What NASA have done here is with the Italian Space Agency

deliberately made a device that obviously hasn't got those limitations to see if it will continue to work when you get to the moon.

Yes.

Now, there are projects to put a dedicated equivalent to GPS on the moon because that would be way easier.

But it would still be handy to be able to kind of piggyback off the Earth's GPS.

And I'm using GPS in the general sense.

Technically, as you said when you read out the press release, it's a GNSS.

It's a global navigation satellite system

because that includes the US GPS and the

European Galileo system.

So GPS is more of a brand name of the American version, but there are other GNSSs available.

Okay.

And this the mission that NASA sent up used satellites from both of them.

So they actually put up a high-altitude, specifically high-altitude-built GNSS receiver that can receive both GPS and Galileo signals.

So they deliberately picked

one design for high-altitude navigation.

They then had to pair that with a really good antenna and a low-noise amplifier because the signals are going to be quite weak.

So this isn't just like an off-the-shelf system.

This is something where they've deliberately got a very good antenna, a very good amplifier, and a specific type of receiver to be able to process this.

But they're still the first people to have done it.

So, they were able to launch this mission, get it to the moon, and it worked.

So, that's amazing.

Now, it is amazing it worked because, and this may seem obvious, the moon is a long way away,

and normally we're very close to these satellites.

Well, we're very close, is relative.

I mean, the moon is

like

30 times further away from the Earth than the size of the Earth.

Yeah.

Our satellites are very, very close to us.

They're pretty close.

They're reasonably close.

It's like saying, well, if I'm wearing clothes, then surely that person over there is also wearing clothes, which they're not because they're quite far away from you and your clothes are not big enough.

It's like saying, well, yeah, you're right.

I got this big jacket on, so I'm warm.

I'm sure that person standing way over there is also warm because they're also near my jacket.

but you actually need a much bigger jacket yeah and they're on the wrong side of the jacket yeah

yeah

why didn't we just use that for when we answered it originally

and it was able to pick up um signals from both gps and galileo satellites which is incredible it was able to pick up signals not only from the satellites that were like

as close as they could be so like when they were on the moon side of the earth, but they were able to pick up signals from satellites on the far side of the earth.

So, just incredible achievement.

However,

that said,

GPS and Galileo and all these things are pretty accurate on the Earth.

Like, you will know where you are

down to a meter or so.

Well, yeah, if you're doing like Google Maps, you can see where you're at on the street.

You can tell what direction you're facing.

The full versions, if they were completely unlocked, you can get right down to

incredible resolution.

And the official mapping services in the UK have a bunch of stationary GNSS receivers that are tracking their positions, getting down to centimeters.

Like,

you can get very accurate on the Earth.

The recordings they were getting on the moon, less so.

It just said you are on the moon.

It just says location, moon.

Yeah.

So they are down to to a positional accuracy within one and a half kilometers

so

that's not bad like not is not bad to me that's the difference between like you know how uk postcodes pretty much point you to like the house yes australian postcodes point you to like the suburb yep

That's how I think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's like being in Australia and you can work out where you are based on the UK postcodes.

It's still pretty vague.

Right.

Okay.

So

it's not like accurate enough that you could, you know, use your sat-nav on the moon.

But as a proof of concept, it's pretty good.

So the fact that they were getting down to one and a half kilometers is pretty amazing.

And the longer you stay still and collect data, the more accurate it can get.

But I don't know what the results are from doing that.

But it is nice.

I mean, we covered this problem three years ago, pretty much to the month.

And it is nice that since then, NASA and the Italian Space Agency have launched an entire mission just to answer the question

that was raised by, at the time, listener Phil.

And so I just think that's great of NASA to have helped out.

And it's good to know.

I'm really grateful.

I wish they would also work out how much pizza is too much pizza, but I feel like.

we got some open questions from the early days of this podcast.

Maybe we should do our, people should,

maybe we'll celebrate because we went past 100.

Maybe we could celebrate, but people can request we

revisit some classics we never properly solved.

Yeah, by now, we've probably had so many people send us in solutions on like on the problem posing page.

Oh, yeah, we could.

If we were to combine them all, we'd be like, Oh, yeah, we can answer these now.

We're done, yeah,

yeah.

So, I don't think it's not ding-worthy because we're just adding on to a previous one.

But you know what?

I'm gonna give it an adding

nicely done.

Thank you to Steve for pointing that out.

It was kind of fun to dig through it, and yeah, I think it remains true that if it works, it works, but if it doesn't work, it won't work.

And now it's officially time for any other business or some other word beginning with B that's on whatever the theme of this episode was.

So that was three days ago, Matt.

I know.

I can't even remember.

Okay.

We have heard from Chrissy

and Theo.

Subsequently, both in the problem posing page.

They selected solution in the dropdown and they both got in touch to let us know that

there is a German game show we might be interested in.

So, in episode 103,

I said, How great would it be if when you win the game show, you get to host it the next night?

And apparently, that is a thing.

I'm definitely going to mispronounce this, but it's so apologies.

I believe it's called Versteltmedi Show, and it's got a question mark in it.

Is it probably like who's the host of this show or something?

Probably.

Let's translate it.

Who's stealing my show?

That's

stealing my show.

Great.

That's awesome.

It turns out the winner.

The winner is stealing the show.

And now some...

Any other big thingness?

We've been sent good news and bad.

The good news came in from Tom.

who pointed out they'd come across the world's tallest working bicycle.

That's fantastic.

It's in Argentina.

It's five and a half meters tall.

That's too tall.

Nine and a half meters long.

That's too long.

Its wheels are 3.1 meters in diameter.

Oscar, the man who built it, rode it for 30 meters.

No.

To set the Guinness record.

That's phenomenal.

Well, is it so?

Because

he just rode a bike

three lengths of the bike.

He'd already achieved a third of it by sitting on the bike but sitting on the bike but Tom provided a link to an Instagram reel of the bike and oh my goodness it is a giant working bike like that's incredible and terrifying oh I'm looking at the video now

yeah so the middle of oh it's oh it's so cute so it's got like it's got

It's got like decoy seat and handles at the top.

But got a normal tiny little seat and handlebars in the very middle of the frame

so you can actually operate it.

And what I love about this is that it's what you would expect.

Like if you were to put a tiny, if you wanted to take your hamster on a bike with you and you put like a little seat and little handlebars in the middle so the hamster could sit on there with you.

Wow.

That's great.

We'll link to that in the show notes and we'll we'll put it out on our social medias.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

We do have some bad news, unfortunately.

Roboto Raccoon wrote in saying, just noting, the big prawn has been damaged.

It is a sad day.

Hurricane damage.

Yeah, they've linked

just to an article from the Brisbane Times about multiple parts of

damage.

They have said, to find the part that talks about it in the article, just control F prawn,

which has delivered.

Cyclone Alpha just claimed its first casualty, Bolina's big prawn.

Oh, it's lost.

Okay, right.

So, now, buy damaged.

Yeah.

It's lost an antenna.

That's not bad.

No.

I mean, it looks like it's maybe lost a little girth, but I think that might just be the angle of the photo.

It says the prawn has survived rusting and dilapidation, a demolition attempt in 2009, during which it was rebuilt and placed outside Bunnings in 2013, and the region's severe flooding in 2022.

There were fears the big problem would be knocked down when Bunnings bought the land on which the attraction sat, but the hardware giant opted to keep the fiberglass crustacean.

Like, what?

I'm sorry, but if you buy a place and it comes with a big thing, you keep on to the big thing.

You're not the key.

You're the custodian of that big thing.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it lost an antenna.

It's fine.

It's not.

I was worried that it meant the whole thing had come down.

Look, it's going to need a little bit bit of work.

Hopefully, bunnings will provide.

It's still a recognizable prawn.

Phew.

Well, on that relieving note, that the prawn will probably be okay.

We've reached the end of this episode of A Problem Squared.

We always like to thank, well, we like to thank all our listeners.

So if you're listening, listen to this.

Thank you.

We also like to thank our Patreon supporters, but to make it a little easier than reading out all their names, we pick three at random every single time to mispronounce their names live on air, which this episode includes Anas

Tazia, yeah, I guess, Anas Tazia

Final offer

Row

Berte Law

Tree

St.

Ian

Hank L.

Well, that's it.

You've been listening to me, Matt Parker, and Beck Hill, and our producer Laura Grimshaw, who is a bit like Daylight Saving Time in that

she was introduced to increase efficiency.

Yes, and she's referenced in the song Bad Touch by the Bloodhound Gang.

There you go.

Thanks for listening.

Okay.

Now you're just still

shooting everywhere.

Yep.

Spraying and praying.

Yeah.

That's

that's my vibe.

That's not how you'd put it.

Okay, I'm gonna go

F4.

F4.

Hit.

Oh,

yes.

Heck yes.

I almost swore that's how excited I was.

Then?

Okay.

How about

G4?

Hit.

And it do I hear anything sinking?

You don't.

This is so good.

I know what you've done, and it's hilarious.