087 = Climbing Cliffses and Cloning Eclipses

Hello and welcome to a Problem Squared, the problem-solving podcast, which is a bit like Paris, in that it's cultured, smells a bit like cheese, and has a point.

Do it at the Eiffel Tower.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Well done.

Thank you.

You're saying our podcast smells like cheese.

Honestly, I couldn't think of a third thing that would go in between.

We're famous for cheese.

Famous as a stretch.

Famous as a stretch.

Wow, yes.

We enjoy cheese.

We enjoy cheese.

We are cheesy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway,

just we have Vec McParker, I think.

We?

Yeah, a comedian, mathematician, and author who looks great in a beret.

That is also true.

I imagine.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm just picturing one.

No, did we wear one?

We wore one.

Yes, you've worn a beret.

I've worn a beret in New York.

For this podcast.

Yeah, when we were recreating scenes from a New York York minute.

Wow.

Et Jean-Apelle Beck, a comedian, writer, and presenter who looks great on a bidet.

I was arriving beret with bidet.

Bidet, yeah.

No, good work.

There was a bit of lag between those two things due to us.

Too much chat.

You're a pain chocolate.

We're both having a sugar crash right now.

So I don't know if that's relevant.

That was maybe a mistake.

It's going to be a ride, folks.

On this episode, I embark on Climbing Every Mountain.

I look at some some solar eclipse substitutes.

And we have any other baguettes?

I would use baguette as a pun, didn't I?

Belongerie.

Belangerie.

Hey, Matt.

Back.

Bonjour.

Any other bonjourness?

That's it.

Ah, too late.

We can't go back.

No.

How are you?

I'm good.

I'm good.

I

survived my trip to australia yes which included doing my first ever actual bike race oh yes i saw frodo you did one with your brother yeah yeah do you put it on instagram i think i think i did put it on instagram you don't use instagram much

i was like oh look but i did put up a photo of us i forget if it was the before or after

we both entered a gravel bike race but we entered in subcategories so it's the seven gravel race in a small town called Nanup, which is in the southwest of Australia.

And

it's gravel, so it means it's not mountain biking, but it is off-road.

So you're on gravel roads, basically.

Okay.

And it goes up and down a lot of hills.

So it's hard work.

Yeah.

And I have never even done...

Because we've talked on the podcast previously about how I'm a bike guy now.

Yes.

And at the moment, I'm in the middle of my riding every day challenge.

This morning was ride number 165.

Wow.

Consecutive days going for a bike ride.

Yeah.

But I've never gone for a group ride.

I've not entered any kind of formal bike event.

I've just been a lone cycling, cycling wolf.

So when my brother and I were signing up, you can do, like the race is split into seven segments.

And you can do all seven.

Like the proper race is all seven, but that's 125 kilometers of cycling, 78 miles yeah and over the course of that the elevation you'd cycle up 3 200 meters of elevation that's over 10 000 feet of up that's a lot it's a lot and i'm like there's no way i can do that but we could then choose to do fewer segments you can instead of doing all seven you can opt to just do five you can choose to just do three or you can just do one

okay i looked at them and i was like i'm pretty sure i could do the five, probably,

but I know I can definitely do the three.

So I signed up for the three because I didn't want to do the five and then become a hindrance.

Yeah.

When it turns out I can't.

Yeah.

So I rounded down.

Likewise, my brother rounded down.

He was there for moral support for me, which I hugely appreciate him coming along.

And he does do a bit of cycling, but not much.

And he's like, I'm doing the one.

He just did the one segment, which is still 27K.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Like, it's not up and down hills.

Like, it's still hard work.

Yeah.

He wasn't phoning phoning it in.

So I embark off on

the three segments.

And I discovered pretty quickly

what you were just mentioning.

I'm motivated by other people.

Yeah.

And so when I see someone else, I either want to maintain the speed with them or I want to like overtake them.

Yep.

And I was trying to kind of, I was aware I couldn't just go flat out to start with.

I had to pace myself.

Yeah.

So I'm trying to avoid that urge to just go flat out as we go along.

But then it rapidly transpires that people who cycle in Perth, because a lot of the people doing the smaller legs were locals.

Like the big race, people would fly in to do it.

No one's flying in to do the three.

Yeah.

So it was mainly me and locals who were like, oh, we'll just give it a go.

In Perth, people are not used to cycling up hills.

No, it's pretty flat.

Pretty flat.

You've seen it.

Yeah.

Flat for days.

Whereas here, where we are right now in the south downs of Surrey,

hilliest all get out.

Yeah, pretty good.

There's non-stop hills.

Yeah.

The moment I go for a bike ride here, I'm up and down hills.

Yeah.

Turns out I'm accidentally pretty good at cycling up a hill because that's the only way I can cycle.

You've been hiding those calves.

Yeah.

Well, I got on the first hill and I'm like, I couldn't go as slow as everyone.

And also, a lot of other people were on mountain bikes with lower gears than me.

I was on a gravel bike.

So I was in my bottom gear going what I thought was slow and pacing myself and just overtaking everyone.

And so I ended up having a great time.

Yeah.

I was just tearing up those hills.

But then everyone would overtake me on the way back down again.

So then I'll descend real timid, like, and all the people I just overtook on the hill are zipping past me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you get a medal or anything?

No, I did.

I came 22nd out of 120-something

people in that category.

Yeah.

So I was pretty chuffed with that.

Yeah.

So I think.

Oh, my brother came 17 out of the people doing the one.

Amazing.

We both rounded down.

We should have both been a section up.

But I'm glad we decided to not overshoot what we were confident we could do.

Yes.

It feels foolish.

We made the right decision.

Yeah.

But now we're working out if we go back next year.

And if anyone does like cycling on gravel, it's such an amazing, amazing ride.

Huge amount of fun.

What have you been up to?

What have I been up to?

I did a hot tub tour of Canary Wharf.

Okay, I understand Canary Wharf.

It's a place in London.

Yes.

I understand the concept of a hot tub.

It's a stationary body of warmed water.

Yeah, it sounds like what we've done is gone to different hot tubs and toured.

You know, like a pub tour.

It sounds like you've gotten one hot tub that's on wheels.

You're so close.

And then toured or is it on a boat?

Yeah.

It's basically a floating

hot tub.

So you got into a hot tub that's floating in the Thames.

Yeah.

And did a tour of Canary Wharf.

Yep.

I've got photos.

It's like the most middle-class duck tour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was.

I was in the hot tub with

two other

lovely ladies.

Did you know everyone else on the tour or you just assigned a hot tub?

Just assigned.

There you are.

Yeah, so it's just two other ladies who had also booked that time slot.

In the hot tub, you're going to.

Yeah.

One of them, she...

You can talk about your love of modern office architecture.

Yeah, well, we were laughing because we were like, the people in these offices clearly hate us.

Everyone would hate us.

You get waved at a lot, which is nice.

And we had one person yelling, what is this?

What's this called?

And we told them,

yeah, we're like, oh, it's this company.

And they were like, thank you.

Is it like the Mario Kart-esque tours in Tokyo that everyone, all the locals, hate?

Probably.

Yeah.

If I worked in an office in Canary Wharf, and every two hours saw someone float past in a hot tub,

at least two of those people in the hot tub wearing little captain hats, then I would be.

Yeah.

But it was very fun.

Did you do it because it was a bit or just you want, just you were bored one day and went hot tub tour?

A friend of a friend on Instagram posted about doing it.

And I was trying to find interesting things to do in London because I've been playing host to various visitors in London.

And I was like, oh, that sounds like a fun novelty thing.

Wow.

And it was surprising.

It was actually really nice.

So there you go.

Yeah.

So I ended up, yeah, making friends with the two of the ladies that were in the hot up.

There was no bubbles.

That was the only thing.

What?

Yeah.

And I get it because they're trying to...

It was hot and they had like a little boiler, like a little steam boiler thing that was keeping the water warm.

But no bubbles.

It is weird.

You're essentially having a bath with some strange

tents.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With an audience of people trying to get office work done.

Yeah, exactly.

But it was the one day that we had nice weather in London last week before it started bucketing out.

Such a weird thing.

What I don't understand is why a hot tub tour of Canary Wharf.

It's like someone saying, oh, have you done the hammock tour of Stonehenge?

Yeah.

Why do that?

Why that thing?

Now I think about that, you could hang a hammock from Stonehenge.

Okay, imagine a more hilarious example of the unnecessary stationary thing you can do and a tour of an unrelated location.

Why a hot tub tour of Canary Island?

I feel like someone was just throwing random words.

Yeah.

And then those two got

hot tub boats.

Yeah, hot tub.

Got it.

Tour.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Canaries.

Oh, Canary Island?

Oh, wharf.

A hot tub tour of Canary Island.

I'm on board.

You would have appreciated this as well.

There was a very low pedestrian bridge.

Very, very low.

At which point the

staff member, who's like, what do you call it?

Capital.

Like a gondola.

Were they there at the back?

No, they've got like the hot tub.

It's an electric boat.

It's floating in the river.

Okay.

So it's an electric motor.

So it's basically a little motorboat, but it's electric.

So it's actually really quiet, surprisingly quiet.

But it works in the same way as like you steer the rudder at the back.

How big is the surrounding boat compared to the size of the hot tub?

It's almost just hot tub.

It's just a hot tub.

It's basically a floating hot tub.

It's pretty much just hot tub.

I was imagining it like in the middle of a yacht.

No, no, no.

It's just hot tub.

It's just a hot tub.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

It's amazing.

It's floating at all, to be fair.

So Emily was the name of our captain, I guess you'd call it.

And so she was...

So she's at the back, and at the front, they've got like a little funnel because there's like a little boiler there that's keeping up

water hop.

And as we come up, she goes, there's a handle there.

If you push this over, it'll fold down.

The chimney will fold down.

Obviously, there's a safe way to do it.

And so it basically disconnects and then folds down.

And she had to to duck.

Basically, a pedestrian bridge was built after the hot tub tours became a thing.

And the little chimney was too tall for it to go under.

So they had to do.

They've got a guy called Steve.

I asked.

A guy called Steve who made the hot tub boats.

And they've also got barbecue boats as well.

Of course.

Which is like a little floating

like ring dingy with a with a barbecue in the middle.

And so

he

had to fold the

stove pipe or whatever it is.

That's it.

And so, and then Emily had to duck as we went under.

But I love the fact they've got a fellow called Steve, and he makes them somewhere in a workshop in Hackney, but they have to test them.

And she was like, oh, when they test them, they do it at this place at Isle of Wight.

And I was like...

But they ship them to the Isle of Wight.

I was like, that's such, that's so far to go.

Sail them over there.

Test the...

I don't know.

I don't know why you have to go over there to test the waterworthiness.

Maybe they, maybe there's someone who gives them a license there or something.

Maybe they've got to be like

signed off.

Like they call it a boat MOT

to prove that they are.

I was going to use the word seaworthy, but I feel like I'm overfloating hot tub.

Man, I'd love to see one of those in the sea.

Crossing the channel.

Yes.

Well, Tim Fitzheim, who's a comic

who I know, he crossed the channel in a bathtub.

Oh, there you go.

It's got a whole show about it.

There you go.

If anyone's been on the hot tub tour or a more ridiculous tour,

let us know.

Our first problem comes from Anthony or Anthony, depending on how you pronounce.

Choose to pronounce your name.

Or Ant.

Or Ant.

I think they use Ant in their email address.

I don't want to give away too much.

That's true.

Don't email us.

Someone might email.

My name is Ant at email.com.

Yeah.

Anyway, Ant says, is climb every mountain an achievable task?

They put climbing every Mountain in quotation.

I'm assuming they're quoting the song Climb Every Mountain.

From Sounding Music.

Yes.

Well, I confused it with Move Every Mountain by the Shaman.

Anyway, it's not that song.

No.

I'm glad we covered that.

We should not eat this much cake before we do a podcast.

No, we shouldn't.

So

the question was from our mate aunt.

Can you climb every mountain?

So what do we need to know?

How many mountains?

Yep.

How big are they?

How many people have climbed them?

How many people have climbed them?

How long does it take?

How long does it take?

Can we climb every mountain?

Yeah.

There's a lot of mountains.

There's a lot of mountains out there.

So I decided to look up to see if there was a database of every mountain

that I could then work out if you could climb them all.

And I found an app slash database called Peak Visor.

Ooh.

And I guess I should link to their app.

You can pay for like a pro version and it kind of gives you 3D views over the terrain and like hiking maps and stuff

for every mountain.

Yeah.

Which is great.

And I found an article they wrote, which was titled How Many Mountains Are There on Earth.

Ooh.

And then they say there are 1,187,049 mountains

in the world

that are named.

Oh, God.

There's a bunch of unnamed ones.

So I found an article they wrote a couple years later called Unnamed Mountains.

And they they found 108,706

additional mountain peaks with no names.

But now we need to just briefly discuss what is a mountain and what we care about.

Yeah.

So here's the thing about climbing every mountain.

It actually doesn't matter what the absolute altitude is of a mountain compared to sea level.

Because you don't start at the ocean and climb to the top of a mountain.

You start at the base of the mountain and then climb to the top of the mountain.

In fact, if there's a chain of mountains, and most mountains, if you exclude volcanoes, are in chains.

Yeah.

And so if you've climbed one mountain, you don't have to go all the way back down again to climb the one next to it.

You've just got to go down enough

to where it meets the other one and then go up.

Yeah, like going up the back of a dinosaur.

Like going up the back of a dinosaur.

I think that's exactly the example that's used in the industry.

Yeah.

And you famously, you slide down

saying, yeah, but I have a dude.

And then you've got the other one.

That's right.

You can just go next.

So, platelet.

It's called the topographic prominence of every mountain.

Because that's the highest you can possibly start.

Yeah.

And if you're doing them in change, you'll come down one, then do the next topographic prominence, then come down, then do the next topographic prominence, and you'll tick them all off.

So I spoke to the fine people at Peak Visor.

Oh.

And Dennis there was very helpful.

That's awesome.

So, Dennis, I got in touch and said, Look, this is what I'm trying to work out.

I think I'm going to use the topographic prominence.

Can you share your database with me?

To save me doing something ridiculous or try and scrape it off a website or whatever.

Yeah.

I just emailed and said, Can I have a CSV?

They were super helpful.

They're like, What do you want?

We'll sort it out.

They sent me a CSV.

Great.

So, huge thanks to everyone at Peak Visor who made this possible.

And Dennis pointed out: actually,

of those 1 million plus mountains,

some of them probably shouldn't count

because

they're barely a sub-peak.

And he said anything under a 300-meter

prominence doesn't really count as a whole separate mountain.

It's just a hill.

It's just a hill, as you well know.

Or it's just like a peak on the way up to a mountain.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And he even said some things that are counted as a mountain, if they're under 300 meters from the base where you'd start climbing from, is like pointless.

So Dennis gave me a collection of every mountain, named or unnamed,

with a topographic prominence of over 300 meters.

Okay.

Which gets us down to a much more manageable, much more reasonable 77,698.

I'm like, oh, that's way easier.

Yeah, because I did do a very quick look.

Oh, yeah.

At just, just, you know, you mentioned something million.

Yep.

1,187,049.

And I only needed a million to go back.

I was like, quick, I had a quick look.

Let's say it took a, let's, this is being kind.

Oh, yeah.

Let's say it only took you a day.

A day per mountain.

Per mountain.

I was like, oh, okay, that's already 2,740 years.

Oh, yeah.

Yes, is yes.

So already I was like, well, the answer is no.

You can't.

Yeah.

The moment I saw that 1 million, I'm like, one human...

can't do over a million days.

Yeah.

And that's assuming that all these mountains that only take you a day to climb are next to each other.

Yeah, exactly.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

So you're right.

As a ballpark figure, instantly,

it's not possible by one human.

I think I said, this is in my first email to Dennis, in reality, for one person on their own, it would require about 50 mountains climbed per day for their whole life.

Yeah.

So it would definitely take a team.

Yeah.

So the question now is, well, I mean, climb every mountain doesn't specify one person doing it.

No, exactly.

Can humans climb every mountain?

So now...

have they?

We have not.

Oh, we have not climbed every mountain.

I didn't know that.

So, first of all, to work out if it's possible by a team of people, Dennis said a standard kind of mountain climbing person can do about 1,500 meters of ascent in a day.

A pro, a real top-of-the-game mountaineer, can do about 3,000 meters of ascent in a day.

Okay.

It's a long way up.

If you add together all the prominences, it comes out to 41,940,284 meters

of ascent.

Okay.

Which means it would take a regular human 27,960 days,

which is 76 and a bit years.

Yep.

It would take a pro 13,980 days, which is just over 38 years.

Yeah.

But if you had 38 pros, pros,

it would take one year.

Yeah.

If you had like twice that, say you had 100 pros,

doing one every two days,

you do it in a year.

Well, there's a lot of people on Earth.

And by one every two days, I mean doing the 3,000 meters in a day.

And they have a rest day.

Yeah.

So

you could get enough climbers together to climb every mountain in a reasonable amount of time.

Yeah.

Now, I've ignored traveling time between mountains.

I've ignored the extra time it takes to get up to like two and up to the topographic prominence of the first mountain and all that jazz.

Well I think let's assume that there's people that live near each of these mountains.

That's true.

We'll hide local mountains.

Yes.

So

on on in that regard, I'm like, oh, okay.

Now

I would say just from running the numbers, yes.

If we got a dedicated, big enough, distributed team, we could climb every mountain.

But what is that team, if not the human race, Matthew?

Exactly.

But you're saying

not every mountain has been climbed.

No mountains.

And that surprises me because humans like to do stuff.

We like to do stuff.

So why hasn't every mountain been climbed yet?

Dennis did raise some other concerns.

Not all mountains can be climbed.

Yeah.

Now, some are for religious reasons.

Oh.

So there's one in Tibet.

I'm going to probably mispronounce this.

Kailash.

Isn't accessible for religious reasons.

Uluru.

Is that a mountain?

I don't think it's over 300 meters.

Well, I mean what, like it's a big rock.

I guess mountains are rocks, aren't they?

Yeah, I mean, who are you to gatekeep a mountain?

Yeah, that's true.

I'd just never.

348 meters.

I'd never thought of Uluru as a mountain.

It's a mountain.

So,

yeah.

And then it also said that a lot of them, getting a permit.

to even get to climb them in the country is difficult

like mountains are in some difficult to get to places and maybe

getting permission to be like maybe you could solve this by hiring locally,

but it'd be a real challenge to get to some of the mountains.

Yeah.

That are in all sorts of difficult to access parts of the world.

I just feel like humans by nature haven't always adhered to things like that anyway.

Correct, correct.

So, I mean, so now it comes down to, you know, if you're prepared to ignore

legal stuff, yeah, and cultural stuff,

everything stuff.

Yeah.

If you don't care about anything but the mountain with your couple hundred other buddies, yes, you can climb every mountain in a big enough team with a sufficient lack of sensitivity.

But generally, no.

But generally, no.

There are too many things, and you couldn't do it individually.

Well, then what happened was

robots.

I was, no, not robots.

Although Dennis dennis did say there are some mountains you can drive to the summit and i'm like well that that's gonna but then the problem is climb every mountain does that count i think you need to invent a climbing robot they get a climbing robot yeah they don't have souls they can go up

exactly yeah yeah so i happened to mention this to lucy when she was asking um what i was working on and i said oh we've got this problem about climb every mountain and i'm trying to calculate if it's this is back when i was still kind of looking at the database i was like i'm trying to calculate if if i can

i can put an upper or lower bound on kind of what it would take

and did she point out that it doesn't just mean Earth ones?

Correct.

She says,

what about Olympus Mons?

And I'm like, oh, come on.

So, yeah, she made the very valid point.

There are mountains on other planets.

Yeah.

And you know what we've done there?

Robots.

Robots.

So maybe you're onto it.

Yeah.

Does a robot count?

Can we have a little wally?

Do we have to include other planets?

I mean, you can't argue.

So Olympus Mons is like a huge mountain on Mars.

You can't argue it's not a mountain.

No.

By every definition, other than being on Earth, it's a mountain.

I'm going to see if the song gives us any boundaries.

Is the title of the song Climb Every Mountain?

Maybe Ant's not asking, can you climb every mountain?

Ant's asking, is the entire song an achievable task?

Well, I can tell you what the lyrics say.

Can you break down what the lyrics say?

I should

have been part of my research.

Climb every mountain.

Yep.

Search high and low.

Oh, okay.

I did that.

Follow every byway.

Oh, what?

Oh, I know.

I'm going to have to do a lot more scraping.

Any apps that are.

It's do all roads lead to Rome again.

Yeah, every path you know.

Well, that's then it's climb every mountain, forward every stream.

Oh, come on.

Follow every rainbow.

That's not possible.

Till you find your dreams.

Oh, what?

Now everyone's got to find their dreams.

A dream that will need all the love you can give every day of your life for as long as you live.

And then it repeats itself.

I think I can say with some confidence, that song is not an achievable task.

They need to lower your standards, Rogers and Hannestine.

Goodness.

Well,

that's a late-breaking bombshell.

The answer is no.

Follow every byway.

Does Dennis have a CSV for that?

Hang on, let's just have a quick think.

If you could somehow communicate with every human, like for a byway to exist,

there must be a use case for it.

Like, there's people who will use it.

What's your...

Can you define a byway for me?

It's, at least in the UK, it's a track or some kind of path, too minor to be called a road.

That's the upper bound.

It can't be as good enough to be a road.

You know what I'm going to say?

It's a lower bound.

If someone has made it, they've walked it.

They've followed it.

Yeah.

Can it be a byway if it's never been walked?

No.

No.

It's not a byway.

That's just a natural

path.

So we're taking care of that.

Yes, that's done.

Streams.

Forward every stream.

Ford every stream.

And that's streams feel...

Like, a stream's not a permanent feature.

Not all of them.

But what is it if you're forwarding F-O-R-D?

You just got to walk across it.

Forward every stream.

So it's crossing.

You've got to cross every stream, yeah.

You're not supposed to cross the streams.

That's one thing I've seen.

That's

an important rule from that documentary.

Yes.

I think the answer is no.

The answer is no.

You know what?

I think on technicality, follow every rainbow.

You can't follow a rainbow.

No.

A rainbow follows you.

Yeah.

By definition.

That's right.

So

if you move, it might be.

You move, it goes with you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, no.

The wiki for this song says...

Yep.

As Hammerstein was writing the lyrics, it developed its own inspirational overtones along the lines of an earlier Hammerstein song, There's a Hill Beyond a Hill.

That's what you call your mum.

Yeah, the hill behind the hill.

That's right.

Yep.

I'll tell you what, though.

Going back to the ding, you answered it.

You can't climb every mountain.

Sorry.

Chase every rainbow.

Ant.

Sorry, Ant.

Yeah, no.

Good question.

I liked it.

It was a good problem.

Yeah.

It was great.

Great problem.

It was fun.

And it has a proper answer.

Okay.

No.

No, you can't.

It's not an achievable task.

Oh, well, we gave it a go.

Next week, we'll be looking at...

Do you really want to hurt me?

Can you actually cry a river?

Yeah, yeah, there we go.

That's much better.

Next problem was sent in by Aaron,

who says they have a young family.

and cannot currently travel to experience any of the solar eclipses.

This is referring to a couple episodes ago, I gave advice for seeing the 2026

solar eclipse in Spain.

That involves traveling.

Like, eclipses are rarely convenient, which is kind of part of the attraction.

But if you just want to see an eclipse, they're a real pain to get to.

And so, Aaron is wondering what is the best way to simulate the experience without leaving the country, specifies UK, and having to travel too far.

You've had a look at this book?

I have.

Now, they gave you some suggestions.

Aaron says, Should they sit in a field on a sunny day and hope a sufficient number of starlings will blot out the sun temporarily?

They actually say a murmuration of starlings.

I feel like I should

give them the credit for using the correct name.

Should I hire a load of archers like that scene in the film 300?

They will continue to view the eclipse in the shade.

Yeah.

What suggestions do you have?

Well,

at first I thought this was

a tough one.

And then I saw that they said that they live in the UK.

Yep.

I mean, because Aaron said, should I sit in a field on a sunny day?

Good luck, mate.

Finding it a sunny day, I reckon.

I mean, it's a sunny day today, but it's been like the first in a week.

It's one of the two weeks of summer.

I feel like if you want to truly experience what it's like to have the solar eclipse, two things.

Wait until night.

That's one thing.

Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep.

When the sun's blocked out by the earth.

Got it, yes.

That's the technical term for it.

Yeah, you're in the middle of the eclipse.

Yeah.

The other one is just wait for clouds.

I mean, and also you've experienced some cloudy eclipses.

Yes.

Now, here's the thing.

You're correctly describing what it's like to experience an eclipse when it's cloudy.

And you see this a lot when there's an eclipse.

eclipse in a country that gets a lot of media saturation.

So the one that was in the US recently came up as a topic of conversation on like a lot of, you know, news and TV shows and the like.

And the sentiment of,

oh, if I want to see darkness, I can do that at home or indoors or at night, etc.

And that's true if you go to an eclipse and it's cloudy.

So famously, we traveled all the way to Antarctica to see an eclipse.

Yes.

It was cloudy.

And all that happens is the sky, everything goes dark unexpectedly in the middle of the day.

And then you wait a bit in the dark and then it goes light again.

To be fair, we have-a very long blink.

I mean, it's also still kind of weird.

Like, it is, you know, of all the astronomical things to go and see, if it gets cloudy, you still get something, you still get the going dark.

You don't get nothing.

Whereas, other things, like a comet or something at night, if it's cloudy, nothing.

Yeah.

So, in that regard,

it's better, but it is pretty underwhelming.

Now, we knew it was going to be cloudy because it was like over 90% chance of clouds, but we also got to see Antarctica, so it's not all bad.

An actual eclipse, if you see it clearly, is more than just the darkness, because what's particularly amazing about it

is

you're not blocking all of the Sun.

You're just blocking, yeah, you're blocking the really bright middle bit.

And suddenly you can see the Sun's atmosphere that's not normally visible because it's swamped by the brightness from the main chunky bit of the Sun.

Yeah.

I can understand how that would be pretty spectacular.

It's pretty spectacular.

It's difficult to describe.

Yeah.

And to be fair, I'm laughing at this as someone who's not witnessed an eclipse.

Yes.

Which is, I mean, I think the closest I've been is,

you know, when you're like, when it is a sunny day and you're like just out in a park or something chatting to people, and then like a low-flying plane briefly blocks the sun, and for a moment you go, what was that?

Like, like it just throws you for a second because you feel that there's something,

yes.

Like you suddenly blank.

I feel like the darkness aspect,

while cool and part of it,

is

like the least impressive part of an eclipse.

Imagine if rainbows were super rare and you had to travel somewhere in the world to see a rainbow.

And everyone's like, why would you go all the way there?

I think at Aurora Borealis.

At this time, which is a nighttime rainbow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In a kitchen.

But imagine it's like, imagine in a world where you don't get rain much and you have to travel a great distance to see rain and then the rainbow at the end.

And everyone's like, why would you go all the way to see a rainbow?

I can splash water around at home.

And you're like, no, the water's not the point.

No, I have to follow everyone.

No, but the point is...

You can achieve this song.

The rainbow.

Exactly.

I'm trying to fulfill a song.

No, the rainbow is like this fantastic...

visual experience.

Yeah.

And everyone gets fixated on the rain.

And you're like, it's not the rain.

It's the rainbow.

And it's like that with an eclipse.

Everyone gets fixated on the darkness.

It's not the darkness, it's the

light display show you get from blocking out the center of the sun and leaving the rest of it.

And it's a sky-wide horizon-to-horizon, weird, very weird light experience you don't get any other way.

And on top of that, you get this incredible corona stretching out across the sky.

So, what is your

what is what would you say is a decent simulation?

So,

there's no easy way to do it.

Without a Mr.

Burns-style block out the sun?

Without a Mr.

Literally that.

So now there's a lot of cool physics you can do during an eclipse because you're blocking the sun out and you can see the sun's atmosphere.

And you think scientists would find a way to artificially fake an eclipse to be able to do that.

Yeah.

And they kind of do.

So you put a spacecraft up.

And I can speak about this pretending I'm an expert because my wife is a solar physicist.

And so I have second-hand space science knowledge.

You get what's called an occulting disk, which is like a big metal disc, and you put it a little bit in front of your space telescope to block out the middle part of the sun as if it was an eclipse, but not block out the sun's atmosphere around it.

But it doesn't work particularly well because the light kind of refracts around the edge of the disc.

You can't block it as far in as an actual eclipse does.

You've got to make it a bit bigger than you'd really like to be able to get it to work.

So at the moment, Lucy

has a space mission proposal in the works and proposing a space mission.

I love that your wife has a space mission proposal.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's very cool.

I'm very proud.

You basically, a lot of people apply for a little bit of funding to develop their concept.

And so if you're, you know, the European Space Agency or NASA, or in this case, Lucy's going to the UK Space Agency, they will get in, let's say, 100 proposals.

They will then weed out some terrible ones, whittle it down slightly, and then give all those people a little bit more money to develop the idea some more.

Yeah.

And then they all go away.

Like our TV shows, and the funding is, yeah, it's like a pilot.

They go, go away and make a pilot.

Yeah.

But then they iterate so many times.

So then they'll all come back and they've all developed the proposal a bit more and they'll whittle it down some more and say, here's a slightly bigger amount of money, go away and keep developing the mission.

Because it's so expensive and so long to develop these things.

And Lucy's mission is currently two rounds through that

process.

And she's at the point now where for the next one,

they're kind of partly working on the engineering slightly, but the main focus is developing the science case.

And the project they're working on is a better way to do a fake eclipse.

And to do a fake eclipse, it's actually not a fake eclipse, it's to do a real eclipse.

Is it where they fly behind the moon?

They fly behind the moon, yeah.

And the orbit is complicated.

They've come up with an orbit that you can put a spacecraft going in orbit around the earth such that you get an eclipse for about 20 minutes once a month that's pretty decent it was way better on earth you get like a couple minutes yeah less than once a year yeah so 20 minutes once a month is incredible and because it's the actual moon and they're a long way back from it it fixes a bunch of the occulting disk issues

and you can do the science that you need to wait for an eclipse for in space so part of what the research is at the moment is the engineering behind taking these ground-based telescopes that like Lucy and people have used to view an eclipse from Earth and space harden them and work out how you're going to put them on a spacecraft so they function in space and can send back the useful data.

So, it's early days.

That's

still amazing.

If it's successful, it'll be like a decade or two from now before it launches.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's amazing.

So, Aaron,

if your young family is still young, a decade ago.

It's going to take take a couple decades.

You need to apply for funding from a space agency

to put your children in orbit.

I feel like maybe the recommendation of launch your young family into space is technically more travel than going to Spain.

I would, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

I would agree with that.

Oh.

What if they were to sit in a, like in a shed with a

hole?

Yep, yep, like a pinhole camera yeah okay you know what that would do something different but awesome because you can pinhole camera the sun and look at sunspots and stuff that's very cool

in like a shed or similar what you actually can do if you want to experience an eclipse from the comfort of your own home is there's a bunch of websites that get the data from spacecraft that have a colding disks and there's a if you want to go right in i don't know how tech savvy aaron is but i imagine them and the young family given they're emailing emailing us, are probably up for a little bit of a mild challenge.

There's some software called J Helio Viewer, which gets the as live as it can be data from various spacecraft and displays it.

So you can see the sun's atmosphere and the like

using that.

And it is pretty, the visuals sent back from these spacecraft are amazing.

Speaking of which, as soon as you said that, it gave me an idea.

In the Oculus Metastore, you can view the 2024 total solar eclipse through the eyes of Massachusetts.

In VR, honestly.

in VR.

If you can get your hands, I mean, I imagine it's probably cheaper to get an Oculus Quest than it is to fly a space.

To launch a family,

yeah, or to take them to a

so yeah, maybe invest in a VR headset.

Maybe that, yep.

That's not a bad suggestion.

I think that would get closer than sitting in a shed.

Yeah.

I'm going to try.

I'm going to see if I can do that.

And then you can report back.

We'll do our own AOB next time.

Yeah.

You download the J Helio software.

Done.

And I'll do some googling on my VR.

We'll compare notes.

Yeah.

Hope that helps, Aaron.

Now we're up to Adieu Oof.

Oof.

Bonsoir.

Wow.

Which means goodbye, egg.

Good night.

That's, yes, that's the best way to describe any other business.

That's actually good evening.

Good night, I think, is bon nui.

Any other business?

We heard from Natan or Natan,

who wrote in to our problemsquare.com, selected solution.

Yep.

And said, ding.

Just wrote the word ding.

A solution mark.

Regarding the dreaming animal problem.

Thank you.

All right.

So yeah, there were quite a few people who came back and had their own thoughts about whether animals can dream or not.

You know, that felt more conversational than it, you know.

Felt like we'd be, it felt like we'd end up back in Arctic Krill.

Oh, we don't want to do another krill.

A lot of people had thoughts, but they were all in the same vein as our discussion about animals dreaming.

Yes.

And we enjoyed reading every single one of them.

Yes.

But we didn't want to open up.

We're not opening it back up again.

No.

Like Pringles, we didn't want to.

We've popped.

And we had to.

We had stopped.

Yes.

And now

we have a ding has dinged us.

So.

Case closed.

Exactly.

Michael jumped on.

the problem posing page, picked solution, and brought up...

Now, okay, now we mentioned this in a previous episode about a Muppets phonetic alphabet.

Yes, because I was

085.

I think I said

any other big bird for any other.

Oh, that's what it was.

That's it.

I forgot how we got onto it.

Yeah.

They have made...

Animal Oscar Big Bird, actually.

That was it.

Yeah.

They have made the full Muppets phonetic alphabet.

They had to also dip into the Sesame Street pool of characters to fill it out.

And it is very impressive.

We will share it on socials.

They did maintain the integrity of Animal Oscar Bert.

Oh, Animal Oscar Bert.

Big Bird is out.

Well, I guess Bert comes first

alphabetically.

That's good work.

I give them a Dr.

Teeth,

Irvin, Natasha

Gonzo.

Well done.

Thank you.

We heard from Nerdy Girl, who says, dear Beck and Matt, thank you very much for your wonderful podcast.

I'm a big fan of you both outside of the podcast, too.

Enemy in Paris is a super fun listen, and I love stand-up maths.

Oh, nice.

In reference to episode 085, I would like to suggest a method for displaying the enamel pins.

Okay.

I use my enamel pins as push pins in the corkboard I have hanging in my office.

Oh.

A similar method to the fridge magnet solution.

Cheers and thanks again.

That's a great idea, actually.

If you have a corkboard you're using for notes and things, just use your enamel pins instead of the push pins.

And you solve two problems.

Because if you're also collecting like business cards or other things,

you can hold them in place.

Or if you're solving a separate collection.

If you're solving a murder and you need something to tie the red string around.

There you go.

Several people wrote in about the two Euro coin problem.

This was someone who asked how long would it take to collect all of the commemorative two euro coins, which I compared to a mass problem called the coupon collector problem.

I did some simulations, and one of the big points I brought up was the rarest coin, of which there were only 500 produced.

Yes.

It was a coin from Finland because every country can do up to two a year.

And they were commemorating something about the EU flag.

Because I said, just buy that one.

And several people then looked up how much they would cost.

And I want to shout out Jamie V, who gave us a link to an eBay auction for that specific coin, which was under $5.

And other people pointed out it's very cheap.

for a coin of that rarity.

I was like, that's odd.

And a few people raised the point.

And

Chris and Crispy both brought this up.

I want to specifically call out Jim, who did a good job mentioning this, saying that they were cheaper than expected.

And their theory was that

the database I used, well, the Wikipedia article I scraped to get the number of coins issued of each type

actually was meant to have 500,000 coins,

but they used the European dot instead of a comma to separate the 500 from the three zeros of a thousand.

Yes, because in Europe they use a comma in place of a dot.

Yes, they swap them over.

I did a thing years ago.

There was a Pokemon game that had an issue with the translation thing where it was breaking because it was switching to a dot for like the German language version, but then it was breaking the maths because it was being interpreted as a decimal point.

Yes.

And actually ages ago,

I worked out.

We're traveling somewhere.

Or you know you're going to stop there, but you're staying in an intermediate country in transit, flying to a different destination.

Yeah.

And so you weren't expecting to be in that country.

It's not like you've got currency for it.

You didn't do any research.

You're just in this country for like an hour in the airport before you fly on.

And we were in a country such that the exchange rate was pretty much 1,000 to 1.

And

they used a decimal point instead of a comma.

Right.

So actually, all the prices were still, to my eye, in pounds.

because the exchange rate and the change of symbols cancelled out, which I thought was hilarious.

I then went to the Wikipedia page and had a look.

And

it has 500,000, as we suspected, but with a comma in it.

It's not a full stop.

Do you think someone's fixed it?

Someone has.

I then checked the recent changes and brought up.

And someone has.

Someone's listened to the podcast.

It's none of the names of the people who wrote in.

Someone else, a listener, I assume, on Wikipedia, they're Gerd Sefert Seifert.

I've mispronounced that.

I'm very sorry, Gerd.

They've gone on, realized this was the issue, and fixed it.

They've swapped out.

It used to be a decimal point and they've changed it to be a comma.

So when my code imbibed this massive, messy table to convert it into a spreadsheet, I say code, me messing around with a bunch of documents and

ridiculous, like tiny bits of code.

It just took that to be a point, and so it switched it to 500.

Wow.

So everyone's absolutely correct.

It's a fantastic example of that problem.

I'll add it to my collection.

And I did it, which is quite pleasing.

Yeah.

It's nice to have one of my own examples.

And I will say I stand by my previous answer because I then said ignoring this one coin that there's only 500 of and then I continued to solve the problem ignoring that coin.

I'm like, buy that coin and then we dealt with the rest of it.

Technically, I would have to have included that coin with 500,000, but there were so many coins and everything, it wouldn't change the answers or numbers I gave.

Thankfully, my answer stands if you ignore that one finished coin.

So

what's the rarest after that one?

Oh, you make it make me find my other spreadsheet.

Yeah.

Hang on, let me see if it's still in my recent spreadsheets.

The second rarest coin was from Monaco in 2015

to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the construction of the first fortress on the rock.

Oh, yes.

Which we did mention last time.

Yep.

10,000 coins.

I should have realized, because it was an outlier, maybe it's an error.

I just went those crazy fins and then moved on with my life.

I probably should have realized that.

I should have dug a bit deeper into see if that was a mistake or a true outlier.

So thank you everyone who both pointed out my mistake and reverse engineered it and then fixed the issue on Wikipedia so no one else would have the same problem.

That's what we like from our listeners.

And much like the French thanked the US

with the Statue of Liberty.

Oh, that's good.

This is good.

We like to thank our Patreon supporters

by choosing three at random and reading them aloud on each episode, mispronouncing their names.

And on this episode, we would like to thank.

Okay.

Eli ass

Ardonis.

Will Scarold.

No, hang on, that probably is right.

As written.

Yeah, I was so thrown by.

Poor Will's like, oh, I was so thrown by

ass.

Will's

car rolled.

That's a sentence.

I hope you're safe, Wills.

I'm never happier than when it becomes a sentence.

BC

K.

Oh, right.

Like, K-Y.

Ren Olds.

So thanks to those people.

But also we would like to thank, I mean, the rest of our Patreon supporters, thank you very much for making this podcast possible.

It is the only reason we can financially justify doing this.

So thank you very much.

We also want to thank everyone who listens and everyone who tells other people to listen.

Word by mouth is so important.

I can't stress that enough.

Big special thanks to my co-host, Matt Parker,

Mercy Buku,

and grande Merci Buku to our substitute, well, sound engineer and producer, Laura Grimshaw.

I was going to try and Frenchify that, but there'll be no winners.

No.

And thank you, me.

Yeah, I agree.

Thank you, me.

This has been A Problem Squared.

Bye.

I mean, adieu.

Avoir.

Bon voyage.

Beck.

News.

You've been trying to guess how many dice are in that jar for a good number of episodes.

And we happen to be in the same room as the jar, which is very exciting.

Yes.

You'd previously established there are more than 457 dice in the jar.

And as of last episode, there are fewer than 459.

Yeah.

Would you like to have a guess for how many dice are in that jar?

I so want to say the wrong number.

I know, I know, I can't do it.

I think so much for the bit.

Yep, I get it.

I get it.

But for all of our sakes, everyone would appreciate.

Is it 458 dice?

That is correct.

Woo-hoo!

Dice!

What happens now?

You win the dice.

Can I leave them here?

You can leave them here.

I'd appreciate that because I use them.

So I want every dice things.

Everyone Everyone who watches stand-up maths to know that whenever you see that jar of dice in the background of one of Matt's videos or anytime he uses those dice, they're mine.

They're your dice.

That's mine.

Your 458 dice.

Matt, I want you to credit me in the description of every video.

Oh my goodness.

I will if and only if the dice appear in the video.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I can do that.

I want to thank Bec for lending me her dice.

Done.

You're on.

I'm going to have to remember now.

Can people remind me, if I put a video up and I haven't done done that?

Someone comment and tell me.

You know what we should do now?

We're gonna go out for a celebratory drink.

Yeah, we're gonna have a dude.

Let's find a quiet corner of the pub and celebrate the end of the dice-guessing game.

Yay!

Vomit up all this cake.

No, no, it's good cake.

It's good cake.

That sounds horrible.

Such good cake.

Too good.

The cake has long worn off.

Yes.

Yeah.

We need to stop having so much sugar.