097 = Number of Maps & Numbered Pads

Hello and welcome to A Problem Squared, the problem solving podcast, which is a bit like a pair of pajamas, in that we are warm, do our best to cover everything, and people often fall asleep with us on.

That's true.

That's true.

I'm your host, Bed Hillow, a a comedian very similar to Beck Hill,

but much, much sleepier.

And your other host is Mattress Parkertons, a mathematician much like Matt Parker, but more soiled.

Oh, wow.

Thanks.

And on this episode.

I've got OS Maps and the UK covered.

I'll be looking into zeros and phone keyboards.

Oh and my goodness is our

any

other bedtime.

Any other bedness?

Oh bedtime.

That's good.

A bedness is better.

A bedness.

Sorry.

Matt, how are you?

So you mentioned people fall asleep listening to this podcast.

Yes.

Which is a real occupational hazard for me now because I'm in Australia as we record.

You are not.

That's not, I'm not rubbing it in.

That's just context for everyone listening.

And while I'm out here, I'm doing a lot of my normal work.

I'm doing some Australia-specific work.

And one of the things I did was meet up with quite an eminent scientist who I'd emailed with previously when I had some questions.

And Lucy had a meeting at the same university.

So I said, oh, I emailed.

I said, hey, do you want to meet up?

And we did.

But then, and I knew this, because often when I email people, I'm like, oh, hey, I do YouTube or podcast stuff because then they're like, oh, yeah, they might know who I am.

And they tend to respond.

And she listens to the podcast.

She listens to a problem squared.

But she listens to it when she's falling asleep.

So

I'm, and I'm not going to name the person.

I don't want to dock someone for falling asleep to my podcast.

But they,

so we're having a conversation where like we're catching up on science, like, and I'm trying to learn science in this conversation.

but then she'll be like, like, she can't tell things that happened in my life apart from dreams.

That was the problem.

And she'd be like,

did your family have a battle with a tree?

I'm like,

yes, yeah, we had a,

we had stump dates on the podcast.

It's weird enough when someone listens to the podcast and just knows details about our lives offhand, which is fine, by the way.

But it's even more surreal when they then not sure if they dreamed it or it actually happened to me.

Because you and I constantly have the thing where we don't know if we've discussed something on the podcast already and we'll say that.

Is that the

opposite of a paralocial relationship?

Where we have a relationship where we don't know conversations we've had were recorded for public consumption or not?

I guess a crossover relationship.

Like para would be like a parallel, right?

So

what's the word for two lines that then?

An orthogonal relate?

I like orthogonal relationships.

Orthogonal relationship.

Have you ever had a dream about someone in your life, like a partner or a friend or whatever, where they have upset you

and then you've felt a little bit annoyed at them when you see them in real life?

I'm aware of the concept.

I don't think I've had that happen to me.

Do you hold dream grudges?

Drudges, they call them.

I don't think I hold...

dream grudges, but I will usually it's if I dream if it's someone that I see regularly then I'm kind of like oh yeah, you know, I understand it's just a dream.

But if it's someone I haven't seen in ages and I dream about them and then I see them not long afterwards, it can take me a little while to shake off whatever the vibe was in the dream.

Usually it'd be something benign like, oh, I just dreamt that we went to a shop and got like milkshakes.

And so when I see them, I'm like, are we getting milkshakes?

Like there'll be a residual kind of like, you like milkshakes, right?

Where that's something I've implanted.

And I have to say, the did I dream it versus did I say it on the podcast sensations are very similar.

Is that simple?

Especially when the sorts of things that we do are very dumb.

Speaking of things that we do, which are pretty dumb, I'm in Australia.

You're not.

Again,

rubbing it in.

There's a new big thing in Western Australia.

I got messaged by the father of neighbor Nina,

who people may have dreamt is

my friends who live around the corner in Gottaming.

We were talking about the fact because we're away for a while, so they've got a key to our place so they can help out in case there's a problem.

They then said, mid-conversation, I do hope you're going to see the big tractor whilst you're over there.

Perhaps that is why you were there.

Oh my goodness,

it is a big tractor.

I'm googling it right now.

Whatever people at home...

are thinking of, it's bigger.

Yeah, so it's

a big tractor.

It says Made in Australia at the top.

And underneath,

there appears to be a police car, which are not small cars.

They're like those sort of real-drive ones, parked under it.

Quite easily so.

Easily able to drive like an SUV style vehicle under the big tractor.

Now, very sadly, it's roughly a three-hour drive north of Perth.

And we do not have any...

going north of Perth trips planned at this time.

If it had been there a year and a half ago when we went up for the eclipse, would have been great.

Would you say, Matt?

Yes.

That they unveiled that because they want it to be a tourist attractor.

Attractor.

Excellent.

So

we are driving in a south direction from Perth this time.

So on the way down, we will go to the Big Ram in Weijan.

So I'm going to go report our first ever

host host on location report from a big thing.

I'm going to go via the big Ram and I will report back next episode.

Well, speaking of big things, I

went to Thorpe Park recently, which is an amusement park.

It's got big pictures.

And

I went on big roller coasters, which is very fun.

Here's to

use our previously coined catchphrase.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast already.

That is our slogan.

Yeah.

I have two

friends who the three of us have in the last year become single.

And we formed the first wives club club because I'd never seen the first wives club.

And so we decided the three of us to get together and watch that.

So we had the first first wives club club.

And then we had

the second first wives club club

where we watched big business with Bette Middler in it.

So basically, we've become a Bet Bette Middler appreciation.

Bet Middle Club.

Got it.

And then the topic of roller coasters and theme parks came up and we were like, are we going to do this?

Are we doing our first excursion as the First Wives Club Club?

So we decided that we would go during a school day so that it would be nice and quiet, which we did.

My friend Amy has long COVID.

She's long COVID rock star on Instagram.

She posts a lot about accessibility and things like that.

So we'd been talking about

as if it was a school trip, and I said how cute it'd be to have it all touching lunch bags.

So I surprised the other two by getting us custom-made little lunch bags.

Little branded bags.

The first Wives Club poster on it with our faces very poorly Microsoft paint-jobbed

over the picture it exactly.

Yep.

And there were clouds.

And I handed them out.

And Amy burst into laughter and revealed that she had also got us personalized lunch boxes.

That's so good.

It was such a good thing to do.

So that's what I've been up to.

Had a really fun time at Thorpe Park.

For anyone curious, I believe that by the time this episode comes out, Amy will have a video up on her Instagram about the process of applying for

accessibility at amusement parks.

And what is the theme at Thorpe Park?

Is the theme just theme park themed?

Just roller coasters.

Most roller coaster themes.

Just all roller coasters.

I really enjoyed Swarm.

That was my favorite.

It's alien themed.

I went to Thorpe Park once, and I was there with my friend Eugenie von Tunseman.

She was involved in the VFX for the film Interstellar of the Black Hole.

She's also a huge roller coaster nerd.

She's like giving you the stats about the roller coaster.

It's got this many inversions.

Like you go upside down that many times.

And then when you do the roller coaster ride, she's counting off all the things that she mentioned before the ride on the ride, ticking them off as you go around the roller coaster.

Never before has being on a roller coaster been so similar to filling in a spreadsheet.

I had a great time.

Well, sounds like maybe it was easier to arrange that than for an accessibility access.

Sounds like it was easier than the accessibility access.

Our first problem comes from Severin.

S-E-V-E-R-I-N.

Severin?

Severin says, hi!

I stumbled across a chapter on ordinance survey maps of England in Matt's newest book.

Great read, by the way.

They're talking about Look

there, which is available.

Yeah, I wonder why Matt chose this problem.

It just came up organically.

Great Christmas gift.

Severin says, are there actually enough maps of Great Britain that if you were to lay them end to end next to each other to practically tile them that it would actually cover the whole land.

Now I'm guessing that this is different, like not just copies of maps, right?

I took it to mean maps that currently exist.

Okay, so not like different brands of map or something.

Yeah, well I started off by thinking are there enough like OS maps that if you put them all out you could cover the UK?

But you can widen it out to are there any maps of any type that if you put them all together you could cover the UK.

And what's the difference between an ordnance Survey map and, say, a road map?

So, an Ordnance Survey map is done by the Ordnance Survey,

who have been mapping the...

Well, the reason, and actually, Severan's been pretty good at this, specifically Great Britain.

They are in charge of mapping Great Britain and have been for centuries.

And that's including Scotland and Wales.

Not a secret society.

Not including Northern Ireland.

Like a secret society, a secret mapping society.

They did one big triangulation late 1700s, early 1800s.

And by that I mean they went out with surveying equipment and covered Great Britain in triangles and then measured them all.

So they know exactly where everything is.

And this was a bit revolutionary because...

Well, you know, the thing is, how do you draw an accurate map?

Maps are so difficult to draw accurately.

And they're really useful.

Once you've got them.

They do have a long history with, you're saying secret societies and whatnot, but they are, well, at least they have been historically, and things continue to be a military technology for mapping.

Oh, less fun stuff.

Yeah, less fun stuff because if you've got to move troops and armies on foot, knowing the shortest way to get somewhere, factoring in elevation, it's not obvious at ground level how to get places faster than someone else moving troops.

So a knowledge of terrain and distances and elevations is incredibly important.

And piracy.

And piracy.

And burying treasure.

Yeah.

But famously, maps for burying treasure are often not as accurate as they could be and leads to some ambiguity in where the treasure is and makes it difficult to recover it.

The OS maps were the first kind of really accurate maps that covered all of Great Britain.

And now we can't take it for granted that the westmost point

on the Great Britain mainland is Land's End.

I mean, it's called called that.

But prior to OS maps, we didn't know that.

It's been reported people thought Cape Cornwall was the most westerly point in England.

Whereas there's actually Land's End.

And that was just from guessing.

Yeah, from looking at it.

There was no easy way to get a bird's eye view other than drawing a map and then looking at it.

And when OS maps, which are originally done for military reasons, were made available to civilians so anyone could buy them,

was the 1840s, I want to say, ish, early 1800s.

They were incredibly expensive, but they became incredibly popular.

Loads of people were buying them because it gave you the sensation, or you could look at something as if you were flying over it.

It was the only way to get a bird's eye view of the landscape.

There was an extra layer of novelty that we don't appreciate now because we're so used to views from above, that these were just such an alien viewpoint on the landscape.

The first generation of OS maps in the early 1800s cost per map

more than the average week's salary at the time.

Wow.

Crazy expensive.

Yeah.

To this day, OS maps, the organization,

have an aircraft that

they fly over Great Britain to double check where everything is.

And just in case it's all changed.

Just in case it's moved.

Have a guess.

How many things in the OS map changes per day?

Average number of changes per day.

Well, now, does an OS map, we're not just talking topological, are we?

Well, yeah, so the OS map is like footpaths, roads, hedges, the works.

Like it's just basically everything in the UK.

Right.

So probably quite a lot of things change because obviously trees and stuff change.

Like plants grow.

Roads are built.

Buildings are built.

All of Great Britain, hmm, are like 700 things.

20,000.

I think I was close.

I wouldn't have, I would have guessed you're right.

Something, you know, hundreds maybe?

But yeah, on average, if you take all the changes they make to their database every year and divide it by the number of days, it's an average of about 20,000 things that change.

And they try to fly over every part of the UK at least once every

three years.

Their default resolution is one pixel for every 15 centimeters.

They're about two gigs of photo and they take thousands per flight.

They put them on a hard drive and ship them back to the main office.

They're too big

to send online.

So there could be one map that covers the entire UK because it's to scale.

Yes.

And that's part of how I worked out our problem here from Severin.

So for people not in the UK, another quick bit of information.

You can buy the OS maps printed out.

But they come in a special folded up way and they've got a special cover and they're very pleasing.

I may have a whole drawer full of them at home, and

so these are like classic physical objects you can buy, and then you go for a walk, and you'll see people in the countryside all the time walking around with these maps trying to work out where they're going.

So, that's why I thought it was an interesting question.

Like, are there enough of these maps around that if you got them all out, you could cover the UK?

Now, the way

that would be logical to answer this problem would be

measure a map, work out its area,

and then work out the total area of Great Britain, divide one by the other, and see how many maps it would take.

You could do that.

You would get the answer very easily.

I thought I'd be clever about it.

And by clever, I mean deliberately complicated.

I realized the map comes with the scale.

The explorer map is 25,000 to 1.

That means every.

That means it's already telling you how many of that map,

like the magnitude

is so it's that's how many loops it would be yeah exactly yeah it's already giving you the scale if I was to say this doll of me is one one hundredth beck hill then you know that a hundred of those would be my size so I was like well we've already got the scale that answers the question sort of so the two complications are one Yes, it is 25,000 to 1.

So like every centimeter on the map is equivalent to 25,000 centimeters in real life, 250 meters.

That's only distance.

So, like you said, if your Beck Hill doll was 10 to 1, you'd need to stack 10 for your height, but they wouldn't be the same area as Beck Hill.

They wouldn't be the same volume as Beck Hill.

You've only done length, one dimension.

I see.

The maps, we care about area.

That was if it was instead of 100.

Oh, you did say 100 to 1, but that would be a very small doll.

That would be ridiculous.

Doesn't that work, doesn't that work in

not volume but doesn't that work on the x-axis as well like if we're going vertically yes but it would also be 10 dolls across correct it's 10 in each direction or for the case of the map 25 000 in each direction so area you've got to multiply two of them together so the area is 625 million to one got it which is just 25 000 squared So it means at that scale of the map,

you would need 625 million of them.

Assuming Great Britain is flat.

Assuming Great Britain is flat, and in a previous episode we've covered

the ups and downs of the terrain count towards the surface area.

We're not going to get into that here.

The answer is yes, a bit.

Because that's only if you had a map which was all of Great Britain.

You would need 625 million OS maps, but each one is the entirety of Great Britain.

to then cover Great Britain.

But you don't get all of it in one.

You get a little bit in each one.

So that's the complete collection.

That's if you had one of every map that covers the entire country.

Then that would work.

So the answer is yes.

The OS maps could cover all of Great Britain if

in existence was 625 million complete sets of

maps, which based on the current UK population, admittedly not Great Britain, but close enough, which is almost 67 million, is nine complete sets each.

I don't even own a complete set.

I love these maps.

I've got an above-average number of these maps in my house, and I haven't even got the complete set.

There's no way on average the average person in the UK owns nine full sets of maps that cover the UK.

And OS maps at this scale is like the best case scenario.

Most maps are smaller scale,

so they cover less each.

So in conclusion, I don't have to work out the area of a map.

I don't have to work out the area of Great Britain.

All I have to do is square the scale and compare that to the population.

And I can say definitively, there are not enough OS maps.

Well, specifically, there's not enough of the explorer style maps.

But given we're out by an order of magnitude, even if you factored in all the other maps, no one owns, on average, enough maps to cover the UK 10 times over, which is roughly what we're saying you'd need to have.

So the answer is no.

What about places that have just loads of maps to offset people who don't have maps?

Like map shops.

Yeah, map shops have a lot of maps, but they haven't got enough to drag the average over.

You could ask OS if they can give you the number of maps they've printed.

I did look online to see if they already made maps.

Even if people don't own them.

Are you saying somewhere there's a warehouse that contains enough paper equivalent to the surface area of Great Britain?

That feels like another problem.

It's not a.

Now, I could have done the area calculation because I knew the answer is going to be no, because the area of Great Britain is so big and paper is, in this sense, quite thick.

The volume of map it would take to cover great britain is going to be off the charts but i thought it was more interesting to do it using the map scale factor because that's kind of fun yeah os maps i couldn't find their actual sales figures they do release and i think this is a bit mean the 10 least popular selling maps in great britain and they're all in scotland And then they specifically release the top 10 least popular maps just from England.

So the least popular map in all of Great Britain is Explorer map number 440

which covers and I apologise if I mispronounce this Glen Castley and Glen Oickle that's obviously wrong in Scotland.

That's the map the fewest people bought.

If you limit it to just England, it's Explorer map number 248, which is Bourne and Heckington.

Heckington.

No one likes to ramble in Heckington.

To Heckington, I say.

They don't say that.

They're not going there.

No one's going to Heckington.

Heckington.

Oh, no way.

Born in Heckington.

Wait a gosh darn minute.

Whoa.

So Heckington is in Lincolnshire for anyone wondering.

Oh, yeah.

And hello, any listeners from Heckington.

One of its best-known features is an eight-sailed windmill.

Wow.

Heckington falls within the drainage area of the Black Sluice Internal Drainage Board.

So, you know, it's pretty exciting.

It's a great place for a walk.

Yep.

I can definitely put them on the map.

That was beautiful.

Fine, I'll get them.

No offense, Heckington.

I'm sure it's wonderful.

I will say the OS Maps people, their media team have been very helpful in the past.

I've contacted them with questions and they've been great.

So I could have got in touch and said, how many maps do you sell?

They might have said, we can't tell you, given that I couldn't find, like, they do a lot of press releases and I couldn't find the sales figures anywhere.

I found that six million people have downloaded the app.

That's probably not a bad metric for the number of people who use OS maps in 2015.

If you bought a paper map, that's when they started including the digital version with the physical maps.

So, six million OS map users at a civilian level is probably about right.

And that means I'd have to have a hundred full sets each for there to be enough to cover Great Britain.

So I could square the scale and look at the population and say, no, not possible.

Wow.

I think you've gone to great efforts to triangulate that answer.

Hey, thank you.

And you went to the

additional effort of flying overhead to check for any changes.

So I'm going to give that a ding.

Excellent.

Sorry, it was a bit ramble ding.

Well, if you got a bit lost, I know a good rambling map.

Our next problem was sent in by William, who went to the problem posing page at a problemsquared.com and said, Hello, Beck and Matt.

Lovely opening, William.

It seems like many people, they point out for the second completion, they've listened to everything in order, and they've just caught up to the most recent released episode, which means they remember our older episodes better than we do, and they would like to dredge something up.

They have a problem with telephone keypads, so they

remember an old episode where I was saying that zero is a perfectly valid number, which it is.

They've got an extra issue with that.

They think the buttons on a phone pad are out of order with zero coming after nine.

They want to know why is this and how can this be changed so that zero takes its rightful place before the one?

You preach it, William.

They then want to say, will this always be a problem?

Beck, you looked into this.

Is this a problem?

Can we fix it?

Well, I mean,

no, yes, sort of.

No, it's not a problem.

Yes, we can fix it.

That sums up a lot of this podcast.

Yeah, so I don't think I had really...

made note of this in the past.

The only time I have was when I found it really funny that in Australia our emergency number was triple zero.

Yes.

Which means that on an old rotary phone it would be the longest number to call it.

The longest one possible.

Yeah.

In an emergency.

Dick dick dick dick dick dick.

Yeah, which I found very funny.

But also upon realizing that, kind of accidentally answered the problem.

Can we quickly define the problem though?

Because on a calculator, I just brought up the calculator app on my phone.

The numbers very neatly go from from zero, one, two, three, four, and count all the way up.

Calculator keypads make sense.

Very happy with those.

If you then switch over on exactly the same device, not only do the numbers go in a different direction, they come down the screen as opposed to going up the screen, but the zero is at the wrong end of the numbers.

It starts at one, gets to nine, then you got zero.

The zero is relegated to like the other weird symbols, the hash and the asterisks.

So I don't know why calculators got it right and phone keypads have got it so wrong and that lives on in our smartphones to this day.

Yeah.

So it goes back to rotary phones.

Oh.

So what would happen is you would

with a rotary phone if anyone is imagining it's like a circle.

You got your numbers.

It goes from one to nine, zeros at the end.

So the way that you would operate a rotary phone dial is you would stick your finger in the little hole where the number is and you turn the dial clockwise and what would happen

is that there was a finger stop there's a little metal bit there so as you would turn the rotary i i realize i'm doing this uh visually for you guys listening

is miming i think it's wax on but with the single finger yeah yeah basically i feel like i used a reference cultural reference from the time of rotary phones that may not have helped no

so you would turn that until you you hit the finger stop, which is as far as you could rotate the dial.

The rotatory.

You would take out your finger, and then if you remember, it'd go dick, dig, dig, dig, dick.

You made the sound before, Matt.

As it went back.

Yep.

And that's because the dial was spring-loaded.

And as it turned anti-clockwise,

as it returned to its starting position, it would be at a fixed rate controlled by an internal mechanism.

As it turned, it would open a contact which sent a series of pulses along the phone line.

Can I add something in?

The pulses it sends is actually it briefly hanging up.

They're tiny hang-up pulses.

Yes.

On and off.

It's like binary.

Yeah, yeah.

But it means you could dial

by just tapping the hang up part of where you put the phone.

It wasn't a rotary phone.

It was just like a, at the time, more modern phone.

But when you hung up, you put the physical phone down, it would disconnect the line.

By tapping the disconnect button fast enough,

you could manually tap in a phone number by doing the correct number of taps fast enough with little gaps as if it was a rotary dial, because the system still allowed rotary phones.

Yes, because then when tone dialing became a thing, and that would work on different tones.

So, if you remember,

you know, as you're done, that would basically be using the same idea as like a pulse, but it would use a different tone for each number.

And so, that was faster because you didn't have to do loads of pulses for one number.

You just had one tone for each number, which meant that sometimes if you played that tone, if you were able to recreate that tone down the phone line,

it would still dial even if you couldn't press the buttons on your phone.

So if you could record the tones of something dialing, you could play that down the phone line and it would still dial.

Okay, two dumb facts.

One, I'm pretty sure it was a Casio watch that would store phone numbers that would then be able to play the tones from the watch so you could just hold it up to the phone.

I may have misremembered that.

I'm pretty sure that was a thing that existed.

Could have been a dream?

Could have been a dream.

Also,

there were people who worked out that when you use some payphones or you put money in, it would signal the amount of money you put in by using tones over the line.

So you could just record those and then play them back to get free.

Free calls.

I think it's amazing.

Back when just the frequency of the pulses encoded all the information, you could record it and replay it back, and there was no way of telling.

There was definitely a phone freaker called Captain Crunch who realized a phreaker.

You're going to have to start again.

What's a phone freaker?

Oh, like an old school hacker.

Like a hacker before there were computers.

A phone freaker was someone who would, it was like what they called hacking.

They called it freaking.

I'm glad they changed the name now I think about it.

They realized you could get this children's whistle that came in Captain Crunch cereal and it would recreate tones to be able to pick up a payphone and use the whistle to load money onto your call to then get a free call.

Yeah, old school, old school freaking hacking.

Oh, I love this.

So that's what would happen with the pulses.

So it would go like one pulse, and that would be sort of turning it on and off, then two, turning it off and off twice.

Now, because

zero is a number,

but you can't denote zero with zero pulses.

Because then it's just not on.

There's no way the telephone exchange would know.

Very similar to Morse code.

If you think about that, you'd have to leave quite a long gap.

Yeah, to indicate the end of one and the start of the next bit of pulse.

Yes.

So what they did is they decided that to dial zero, you would need 10 pulses.

So the zero was put after the nine.

Gotcha.

So that when you were dialing on the rotary phone, you let go it has enough physical distance to come back and hit that mechanism 10 times so that's why the zero came after the nine

then the design just naturally carried over to modern push-button phones

some countries did adopt different systems so in sweden a zero sent one pulse

a one sent two pulses going from zero to nine.

That works.

Now, Matt, when I started answering this, you weren't sure if we'd already covered this.

And I suspect that the reason that you're not sure if we'd covered it is because Numberfile did a video.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Talking about the 17 designs that Bell, as in Alexander Bell, almost used for the layout of telephone buttons when buttons were introduced.

There was the 10-pin, which is reminiscent of bowling pin configurations.

The rainbow.

Such a good idea.

It's sort of like a nice little arc.

The staircase, not a fan of that that one, personally.

No, that's awful.

Yeah, it's more like a sort of diagonal.

Yeah, it's funny what hindsight does, because you look at it and you're like, these are all chaos apart from the obvious one.

But that's just because we've been staring at that now for decades.

Yeah, what's interesting is

one of them is basically the calculator layout.

Yep, should have done that.

But I suppose they've gone for the one where it's counting from the top, left to right, going downwards.

You've got one, two, three, four five six seven eight nine in that sort of configuration of three by three square and then the zero is just put on the end which i can sort of understand as being like because if the nine was just an additional one there's something kind of like

if the nine is just like sitting there i would maybe have accepted if the zero was in the top and then you had the three below it I think they should have just had one to nine in a square and then if you press all of them at once that's a zero

like a hand smash yeah oh yeah this has been quite good for me because uh i'm going to show you a an impulse purchase that i made recently which i didn't realize until answering this is an incorrect

uh is an incorrect phone now so this is a handbag

that i recently bought it's definitely a phone that's so great with zero is the only one in the right place yeah so the numbers are going anti-clockwise and has a zero at the start.

So is everything wrong with this number pad?

And I did not realize that.

I did not notice until I started answering

this phone.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, this is the great thing about this.

Oh, what?

You can plug your phone in.

Yeah, let's see what it sounds like if I plug it in.

Oh, okay.

Now I'm talking to you through the phone.

Hello.

Okay.

I'm sorry, this line is busy.

Goodbye.

Yeah, so that's

hilarious.

That was a great impulse online purchase, which I'm still very happy with.

You should be.

We're back.

I think some people would have just phoned that in.

You have answered the call, and I'd never thought that it was the Rotary Heritage that had left Zero abandoned on the incorrect end of the run-up numbers.

So

I'm going to give you a ring, a ring-a-ding.

Yay!

There it is.

I was waiting for it.

I was like, Matt, you better.

I mean, it's right there.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was waiting.

So, yeah, great work.

I didn't realize that.

And now you've inspired me to check if

modern phone networks still accept pulse dialing or has that been discontinued?

Ooh.

That's

let us know.

That's a video.

That's so yoitable.

Now, on to any other bedness where we will cover things relating to previous episodes.

Matt, would you like to hit us off with the first one?

Alex sent in some any other bedness regarding finding enough prefixes for nils.

This is our various size nils problem.

How do you describe all the nils?

Apparently, there is no need for such an ordered list of size words.

Huh.

They've defaulted to a list of olive sizes.

Okay, so allegedly olives come in different sizes.

There's a few variations depending on where you are in the world.

In Europe at least,

it's a relatively standardized range of nine different size nils going from bullet kneel all the way up to mammoth kneel.

Assuming we're not using any ones with extra or super prefixes.

Ah, there you go.

So So thank you, Alex.

We can use technology already developed for the olive industry for our various size nails.

They do say, however, unlike olives, there are probably fewer than hundreds of nails per kilogram in all cases.

That is very true.

Well, I should also add that whenever I drive to stay with my dad in South Australia, I go past the big olive.

Which is surprisingly small for an olive.

There might be more in Work Australia, but there's one in South Australia that it's not as big as you would expect, but it is big compared to an olive, I guess.

Yes.

It's the macadamia not all over again.

And on the same subject of Neil's, we heard from Laura Pidgin on the Discord, which, by the way, we do have a Discord.

We've got a Discord on Reddit for anyone interested.

And it said, the Neil stuff last ep is the most I've laughed in like a month.

Thanks, Laura.

Us too.

I didn't think Niels was going to be this popular.

Yeah.

It was so fun.

I will say that our WhatsApp group for Problem Squared with producer Lauren Armsborough

and Matt and I does in brackets have

intense Neil.

Increased Neil.

Increased Neil.

Ben Creased.

Which is the Neil on the end of our WhatsApp group name.

Enhanced Neil.

Anyway, Laura Pitcher said, I imagine it'd be possible to do something like this for size words, but I don't envy people whose job it is to get people to survey on things and then Laura linked to perception of words describing sizes of groups

there was a perceptions of probability yeah so

yeah it's a really cool plot so it's people have obviously been surveyed to come up with probability so almost certainly comes in at about you know 90 just before 100%

highly likely is just before that

very good chance just before that very chance

interesting ones where

there's some interesting ones where

it's more specific as to what people think it is.

So for instance,

about even

is very heavily just on 50%.

It's very steep bell curve.

Whereas

something like

we believe

can vary from 50% to

around 90%.

It's very interesting.

It's pretty much the exact opposite to we doubt, which is very pleasing.

It's like a mirror image.

Yeah, exactly.

Greg also sent in some Any Other Business.

They phrased as a problem, though, and their problem is one of their favorite podcasts, could be any,

will tell me they're sharing pictures on social media, but the only place they share is on Twitter.

Since Twitter is now terrible,

correct, Greg.

How can they convince the podcast hosts who seem to be very lovely people to use alternatives such as Blue Sky?

Okay, Greg,

we know you're talking about us.

Good point.

point.

What do we do at the moment?

Do we do Instagram?

Hypothetically, yes.

So hypothetically.

We mean it by hypothetically.

Well, I'm the one who's in charge of the Instagram, and I've maybe dropped the ball on this one.

Oh.

I don't feel like Greg is checking Instagram, regardless.

Not a grammar.

I do apologize.

They're a bit behind.

So I will.

At least, by the time this episode comes out, have put up all of the the ones that i've missed i don't think there's too many i think i'm pretty much up to i might be an episode or two behind uh the problem is is that normally what i would do is i would listen to the episodes as they're released and

be reminded of myself no to do that there are things in there there are things in check there's a lauren armstrong carter a lovely producer has put things in check to remind me and i've ignored all of them and gone i'll just wait till i listen to the episode but i got busy and i am behind on listening back to our episodes okay that's the But I feel like we could, I mean, there's very little extra effort.

I mean, there's some extra effort, but it's not me who has to do it to put everything out on Blue Sky and Mastodon and is MySpace.

Can we still put stuff on MySpace?

Did we just put it on everything?

Threads.

Let's get it on threads.

Get on threads.

That's what we're missing.

And we heard from Miles,

who said,

Hello, regarding the rainbow problem in episode 92

092 just in case I realized that the word rainbow has seven letters and have thus come up with a mnemonic for it I can't believe I didn't pick up on the seven letters in rainbow I feel like a fool I'm so glad that we have listeners like Miles who are looking out for these things

yeah so Miles said I may have taken some liberties with how well the colour named actually appears in the rainbow but I've done my best so cut me some slack miles I'm already cutting you some slack So here we go.

Ready?

We got slack to spare around here.

Red?

That one's easy.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Love it.

Then the next one, A, apricot, which I love again.

We're going Roy G.

Biv, so that's red, orange, apricot, orange.

I'm pretty happy with that.

Solid.

Ictarine.

What?

It's not a word.

Miles adds, look it up.

It's on the Wikipedia category page for shades of yellow.

I feel like if a mnemonic requires further reading, it's defeating some of the purpose.

I think it's a good way of teaching people the word ictarine.

Well, that's the only way

as it currently stands.

Yeah, I feel like an ictorine is what happens when you bite into your nectarin and it's got like bugs in it.

Ugh, ictorine.

This one I love.

This is for green.

Letter N.

Nature.

I love it.

Blue.

Got lucky there.

Yep.

Blue.

Wow.

Nailed it.

Then...

O, which would normally be indigo, they've gone for orchid, which I think is...

They've said this one's a stretch, but I disagree.

I think orchid orchid and indigo, I think they're pretty good.

Maybe it's maybe orchids are slightly more purple when you think about them, but

I'll go with it.

I prefer that to them claiming octarine as a word.

Well, for violet, they've gone with violet,

which you have to pronounce like a German.

Yeah.

And then they've added, so basically it's perfect.

Hope you enjoy.

Miles,

this cracked me up when I read it, and it still brings me great joy.

I love this.

So, Miles,

thank you so much.

And that's it.

But before we go, we'd like to thank three of our Patreon supporters at random.

And if you want to be a Patreon supporter, get yourself a membership card at Christmas or indeed access to our bonus podcast, I'm a Wizard, which is very silly.

Solid bounce.

And this episode, we want to thank, by mispronouncing your names, the following Patreon people.

CA

Mdum Lake

Johan, nah,

I'm free.

Yak.

Get out of this podcast.

Yeah, no, I got it, I got it, I got it.

Yak Egg You Staff.

Now at it.

Thank very much for making this podcast possible.

And thanks to everyone else for listening, for telling other people to listen.

We appreciate it so much.

It's the only reason we can keep it going.

Otherwise, it is just us on a very long Zoom call with Paul Lauren Armstrong Cardo, who just sits there silently.

I'd also like to thank my co-host, Mattress Park Curtains, who I'm drawing to a close.

Oh, well done.

Thank you.

Myself, Bed Hillow, and Lauren, armchair car.

bye.

Okay,

so

I'm going to go with

well, hang on.

Previously on Battleship,

Beck had a hit,

so now we need to find out

if you're going to get the rest of my ship.

You've got choices.

I'm going to go with

H2

miss.

Ooh.

I think that might be all the time it's going to buy me, though.

I'm going to continue

my

logical rampage with F6.

Hit.

Yes!

I knew if I just believed in the system.