086 = Emoji Editions and Birthday Billions

Welcome to A Problem Squared, the problem-solving podcast, which has an incredible track record of absolutely solving every single problem anyone has ever sent in.

My name is Matt Parker.

I am a mathematician.

We're the only ever triple Fields Medal winning mathematician and performer.

I'm joined by Beck Hill, comedian, author.

And the reason why they had to add the Y onto Egot.

Egoti.

Yep.

Because you also won the YouTube.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yep.

There you go.

You may know Beck from her starring roles in three separate landmark sitcoms.

I feel like...

You're doing something clever with all these lies.

No, no, no.

No, they're just gross exaggerating.

You're just lying.

There's nothing clever.

It's just lying.

Turns out, you can just say

stuff.

Whatever you want.

No one stops you.

Nah.

Except for me.

No one's burst, apart from you.

No one's burst into the room.

Kramer stopped.

Just because that was the best introduction ever done for any podcast ever.

And I'm sure everyone listening will agree, especially any new listeners.

We're bored, everyone.

Who are like, oh, this sounds professional.

Yeah.

On this episode.

Oh, sorry.

On this award-winning episode.

I'm going to get to the bottom of an internet emoji debate.

Oh, I've got a billion solutions to celebrating a billion seconds.

And there'll be some any other billionaires

offered business.

That's what it's called.

Yeah.

So, Bec, have you been?

I've been great.

I've been very busy.

Okay, that sounds truthful.

Listeners might be able to tell.

I did get a little bit sick.

I've not got all of your voice.

Sounding a little bit husky, but I'm otherwise well.

I did the spring Comic-Con, Brussels Comic-Con.

Oh, yes.

I haven't seen you since you did that.

Yeah, yeah.

We had like half a cast of Lord of the Rings.

Wow.

Got to interview Andy Serkis, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Dominique Monaghan, Billy Boyd.

Had a very good time, but also had something that was completely unrelated.

that I was very excited to talk to you about.

Oh, okay.

After Brussels Comic-Con, I went to Paris to visit some of the emily and press locations

the other podcasts we do and two of our listeners of that show jilda and mathieu brilliant couple turns out that they're friends with one of the french actors from the show no jean-christophe bouvet so sam and i got to interview that actor that's great and we we did it at jilda and mathieu's apartment on the way out jilda and mathieu pointed out the buttons on the lift for their apartment block.

Yep.

And I had to take a photo.

Oh, would you like to

see if you could find out?

Oh, that's really nice.

So they've got a few things I like, and one thing that I find hilarious.

Yep.

So the ground floor is labeled the zeroth floor.

Big fan.

Love it when they do that.

Yeah.

Don't use a G, use a zero.

They've gone the next level up, and the basement floors are negative.

Negative one, negative two, negative three.

That's incredible.

Where I find it particularly hilarious is that there are two zeros:

There's zero and zero positive.

So,

I mean,

some programming languages will use a positive and a negative value of zero.

They can mean different things.

Often, when you're doing limits, the direction from which you approach zero is meaningful.

But I don't know in the context of a lift.

Yeah, so zero was a ground level, was the level we came in.

Very good.

I believe.

I feel like it's like a mezzanine on zero.

No, I think zero plus is another flaw.

Right.

Matthew and Jilda believe that there was probably some legal thing saying they couldn't have more than 16

stories.

And so they had to slide one under.

So when they put in the plans.

It's a bit like roulette tables in the US have a zero and a double zero.

Right.

And that's

that makes it more likely you lose your money.

Okay.

So you lose it or you double lose it.

Yes.

Well, so if you do like simple betting systems on roulette, you just play red versus black because they're 50-50.

And you can do some gambling systems based on that.

But because there's also a zero, that's, I believe, green, it means that red and black isn't 50-50.

They're like both 49 and a bit, 49 and a bit, because there's another option.

But if you add in two other options, so two zeros, you lower both the red and black even a little bit more.

So any systems that require on a 50-50 fair bet don't work.

So that, oh, that's very cool.

That's I do enjoy ridiculous.

Yeah.

If anyone else takes photos of of unusual floor numbering systems, send them in.

My update, again,

book related.

I got two things to show you.

Okay.

Sadly, this is not for you to have,

but I want to show it to you.

I got sent the first ever copy of Love Triangle.

Oh, yeah.

So my book now exists.

I've had like mock-ups of it.

Obviously, I've had PDF files.

Yep.

And there it is.

That's the actual...

So very pleased with this.

And it's the hardcover.

So it means there's like a dust jacket.

And if you take that off, off it's just like a blank quite you know slick looking book yep and then you get the dust jacket that goes around it

and i spoke to an artist that's right paul catherall because they do architectural like reduction blocks yeah you've mentioned this yeah

and they tend to do them based on brutalist architecture

and then there's a shape in the book here so i just found

you've got the national theatre one exactly yes i've got a national theatre one at home a huge fan of paul's work this shape here i'm just going to hand the book over to you on the right there is the Siddler solid.

And I always thought it looked a lot like brutalist architecture, maybe a bit Eshery.

It is very ushery.

But it's just like it's a mathematical concept shape.

It was to prove you could build a polyhedron where all the internal dihedral angles are 90 degrees, except for one that's 45 degrees.

Okay.

So it was like it was an existence proof.

This can be done.

So I sent that to Paul and said, hey, what if you imagine this as a building and design one of your prints based on that?

And I have here the print.

Oh,

okay, that's gorgeous.

Isn't that something else?

This print is beautiful.

Isn't that lovely?

It's really nice.

Yeah, that's going to be a lovely.

It's a phenomenal job on this.

It's going to be a gorgeous book cover.

So we haven't got any of the jackets printed yet.

But we are taking...

Pre-order's already going.

Yeah.

He did it in three different color schemes.

And the first two have already sold out.

But we have plenty of the third, the triangle edition print, which will be the blue one of these.

I love this.

We will have those at some point in the near future.

So there'll be a second, like there'll be multiple print runs.

People who want to collect the first edition, that's just the first print run.

Yeah.

Oh,

we found mistakes in the book already.

No.

So I don't want to give them all away, but there are two pictures in the book which were meant to be holding images.

Ah.

And they made it through into the final

print file.

And they will be fixed for any future editions.

Okay.

But if you get a first edition...

There's going to be like stamps.

There'll be extra mistakes in it and you'll have holding images for two pictures.

Ooh.

Which I'll let people try and find.

They'll even be fixed for the US edition.

Just the first run of the UK edition.

So if any US listeners want to get the

mistake-riddled version.

They'd have to pre-order your UK ones from your website.

I do apologize, it's super expensive to post to the US.

But I guarantee, I mean, if you buy it through Mass Gear, it's definitely a first edition.

It's definitely signed by me.

But you've got to pay full price.

It's cheaper on Amazon.

It's cheaper at Waterstones.

I'm talking people out of buying it from me.

Is that because you feel bad?

Well, you know, I know it's expensive.

Like, if you want to wait for the paperback or buy the e-book, it's the same book.

If anything, it'll have fewer mistakes.

Yeah, exactly.

It's way cheaper.

But if you want to own a ridiculous object, then...

Yeah.

Oh, I'm excited.

This has been Matt Parker talks about his book.

Hey.

Which will be over one day.

Anyway, I'm very pleased.

The book is out.

Well, the book will be out.

The book exists as a physical object.

Yay!

Closure.

Our first problem was sent in by someone named Cedric.

They went to the problem posing page at our problemsquared.com and they put in their problem, which is, and this is a little difficult to read out, but I'm going to do my best at it.

And you'll see why in a second.

They say there seems to be quite some discussion on the internet about this emoji.

And I'm not going to mime the emoji or describe it.

I'm going to then just read the rest of what they're saying and then we can try and fill in the gaps because I don't want to pollute what people may think.

Some people

say it is the praying hands emoji.

So if you think you know the praying hands emoji, imagine that one.

While others say it's a high five.

So if you're in that camp, picture that one.

Could you please settle this debate once and for all and find out what this emoji is supposed to mean?

Beck, you've got to the bottom of this.

I have.

And interestingly, so I had not heard of this debate.

Nor had I.

No.

And I'm in one of those two camps.

But in my research, not only is it a debate that exists, it's kind of been around since 2012.

What?

Yeah, apparently.

That's like the first emojis.

Well, no, actually, the first emojis go way back.

The first emojis pretty much have been around since 1997.

Oh.

By SoftBank, which is the language I guess used for Japanese phones.

Oh, okay.

Yep.

Yeah.

Apple ended up heavily borrowing from SoftBank's emoji set.

Got it.

In 2008, I think it was.

Oh, okay.

So early iPhone.

Yes, early iPhone.

And then not long after Google made it widely accessible on Unicode, you start being able to type it

in emails and stuff.

Yeah.

It's called the Folded Hands.

Folded Hands.

Folded Hands emoji.

They believe that the first time it was questioned was

in January 2012, Whitney Houston passed away.

Someone had tweeted saying that's crazy.

Just another great singer has left us.

Wow, R.I.P.

Whitney.

And then they've done the paint hands.

The folding hands.

The folded hands.

At DJID4.

on Twitter, quote-tweeted.

And I say quote-tweeted, this is before you could like quote.

So it's it's when it would you would literally write your thing and then in quotation marks you would have the tweet and they've said I believe that's a high five emoji because they're like oh you know you've just high five this this news and that's when it kind of became clear that some people interpret it as a high five but never really talked about that kind of get the same thing with some people thinking lol means lots of love

which then is uh feels like it might be quite horrible if you're like oh you know such and such passed away sorry to hear about the sad news lol yeah exactly so then people started saying like oh I just found out that this emoji is a high five oh that's why I have trust issues those are just people who are going I just found out this because someone had said oh no that's a high five emoji and they've gone with that and then news outlets were like oh maybe this isn't so no one actually did any proper research or looked into it and

the only thing that sort of keeps this debate going is the fact that people bring up the words high five when they're talking about does this mean

high five or high five.

It's referred to far more as a high five only in that context than it is actually in the middle of the morning.

Because I always assumed it was the praying emoji.

Yes.

I'm holding them in front of me right now.

Yeah.

But

now I realize if I just lift these up, now I'm doing a self-high five.

Yes.

I get it.

Now, some people say like when you look at the current version of the emoji, you'll see like a little tip of a finger before the taller fingers.

Right.

So there's a short finger, then some tall fingers.

Yes.

And they're both sort of mirror image.

And some people pointed out, if this was meant to be a high five, it would be the opposite because you high five with the same

right to right or left to left.

You very rarely high five with the mirror image hand.

Really?

I don't know.

Which I thought was a good argument.

It's a good argument.

Do people high five with their dominant hand?

I do.

And we've talked about high fives on the show before as well.

You're now leaning over in a way where my dominant hand is easier because there's a microphone in the way of my left hand.

But we were talking.

Yeah, but we're not.

We're not.

I would do it.

Yeah, there, there you go.

But which one sounded better?

The one where I did it with my left hand.

Oh, I don't know if that's scientific.

I think it is.

I think it's to do with the angle at which you come in.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Huh.

Because you're right-handed, aren't you?

Now, what I want to recap is, I hold up my left hand.

You did, yeah.

So the first one you did with your right that's my left hand oh you did left first because you wanted to match i would if i was going to high five somewhat i would go with my right because it's my dominant hand yeah but you're not in this case you want to match hands was what you're trying to tell me it feels like the less likely scenario yes and what i wanted to find was what it was originally called when it was with softbank yeah like that makes sense what was the name folded hands folded hands which yeah i thought was an interesting term for what it is because you wouldn't describe either praying hands or a high five as folded.

You got to remember that there's quite universal, like

in Japan, it's very common that people put their hands together and bow before they eat.

They'll say, itadatakimas, like let's eat.

It's also seen as a way of being like grateful or thankful.

Obviously, in Hindu, you've got namaste,

folded hands.

So it is sort of a universal meaning of like gratitude or thanks.

It can be also used for begging.

But the earliest description I can find is folded hands.

That was in the SoftBank set in Japan.

Yep.

Started in 2002.

It's very pixely.

I'm just bringing up the fold.

Oh, is that like the original?

That definitely is a high five.

Right.

What makes it high five for you?

Oh, the impact dots.

I want to say lines, but it's too low resolution.

So this is interesting.

Because those impact dots were actually intended to be, if you want to describe the next version, which is Apple's one in 2008.

Yeah, now you've got like a holy glow emanating from the hands.

Yes.

So that swings us back to prayer.

Is what it was meant to be, is some sort of like holy glow.

And then there was a version by KDDI in 2003, which if you put in that code,

you would actually get someone with closed eyes

bowing and praying.

Or just high-fiving so hard.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's a really interesting article about it all by John M.

Kelly, which came out in 2019 on the emojipedia.org website.

Definitely worth a look.

We'll chuck a link.

A lot of time to be alive.

Show notes, yeah.

But ultimately, it does seem to point out that yes, it is intended as praying hands and folded hands.

Yes, folded hands.

Is there a separate emoji for a high five?

Not currently.

There should be.

That would clear things up.

I tend to use, there's like a single hand.

Like the hand, yeah.

Or I'll use like the clapping emoji.

And weirdly, doing this problem, I was like, I'm sure there's a high-five emoji.

And then I realized, I think that I've just

occasionally used the praying hands one

without realizing.

Like, I've just been in such the zone that I'm like, oh yeah, there it is.

And not really thought about it.

You can get, like, there's like a hand facing one direction that's up another.

Yep.

Like face.

palm out and then one two of them or you can do it sort of sideways oh right yep and you do one the other way but even though that could also look like someone's about to clap.

Um, the other one I like, there's yes, there's the clapping emoji, I tend to use that, and then there's one that this is the one that I got.

There's one with like two hands raised, and like a little, I would say it say like shout lines in

to me.

That was like high 10.

Oh, okay,

yeah, so I would use that.

I was like, Yeah,

but apparently, that could also mean like praise,

like, like, which is another way of showing it, yeah, with different religious contexts.

Is it, I mean, in normal language, we have homonyms.

Like, we have words that sound the same, we use them for different meanings.

Whereas they're spelt the same, we use them for different meanings.

Yeah.

Surely, why doesn't that extend to emojis?

I think, yeah, emoji can be both.

Exactly.

I think as long as the context makes it clear what you're using it for, you've got to be careful that you're not...

offending someone by making them think that you're high-fiving over something really sad.

sad, or yeah, but that's the nature of language, right?

You know, well, that's it, yeah.

But

I guess context clues would be okay.

Yeah, yeah, I'd like to vote for both.

Look, no one's gonna come at you.

Well, no, people might come at you, but no one's gonna arrest you for using it as a high-fiving.

It just depends on how people are gonna perceive it.

I'm gonna use it to mean just squashed a mosquito.

I think what they need is one that genuinely is undeniably a high five.

Undeniably a five.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

I'm going to give you a ding.

Thank you.

I know I'm going out on a limb, but I feel like you've done the research, you've given us a good answer, and you've given us a lot to think about.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Go back to UI say high five.

See how I'm like leaning over my head?

Yeah, you are.

Sounds better.

Yeah, okay.

This next problem comes from Nick and says, a friend has their one billionth second coming up.

I'm kissing birthday.

Birthday, yeah.

Yeah.

I want to give them a gift that contains exactly one billion of something.

If exactly one billion is not possible, how close could I get?

Great, great plan.

Did you celebrate your one billionth second?

I don't know.

It's already happened.

Yeah, cool.

Then no.

Oh, I did.

Maybe I did by accident.

Maybe.

So a billion seconds is just over 31 years.

If I'm actually just shy of 32 years, it's 31 years, 259 days.

Okay.

Ish.

Depends on leap years.

Give or take.

You'd have to know what second someone was born, though.

Yeah.

If you want to get real precise, I did one day have a phone call with my mum.

I was like, exactly what time was I born?

Which sounds like you're about to do one of those numerologies.

It does, doesn't it?

What's my rising sign?

Exactly.

And you don't get it to the second, but you can know, like, you know, the day on which your billionth second occurs.

And it's a couple months out from your 32nd birthday.

Okay.

And I very much enjoyed my billionth second birthday.

Uh-huh.

I'm looking forward to one day two billion.

Yeah.

Three billion, who knows?

That's, you know,

you'd be in your 90s.

It's possible.

I'm not ruling it out.

Yeah.

I want to get to pi billion seconds, but you know, we can all dream.

That would be an achievement.

Yeah.

A billion seconds is a good birthday to celebrate.

Yeah.

And so I'd never thought to celebrate it with a billion or something, though.

Well, now I know that we've talked about how the a billion and a million are very, very different.

Correct.

But it reminds me of, I want to say it's a Mitch Hedberg joke where he says, I really.

I'm hungry.

I want rice.

I really want rice.

It's great when you want something that you want it.

You're hungry and you want like a million or something.

Oh, actually, no, it's a thousand, I think.

You need a thousand or something.

Yeah.

I feel like we told it as well as he did.

Yeah, yeah, because I think we did him justice.

So,

yes, yeah.

But I know, like a lot of YouTubers, when you get to to a million subscribers, you'll often do something involving a million.

So when you turn a billion seconds, you can do something involving a billion.

Yeah.

Now, there's two issues here.

One is a billion is a big number.

Yeah.

A second problem is the use of the word exactly.

Now, so here, okay, here's, here's the problem in a nutshell, combining both of those together.

If you want to give someone a billion or something, and you've got to count it, or you've got to arrange it, or you've got to check it, or you've got to do anything like individually, it takes you a second per thing yeah

that's going to take you almost 32 years well yeah because we know that a billion

exactly so so to celebrate it because it is such a big milestone

to do a billion or something is going to take you that long you need a ready-packed billion something exactly yeah so any something you're doing already know is that and you can't do like you know, weighing something to approximate a billion because we want exactly a billion.

So whatever you do, it's either got to come pre-packaged in a multiple that you're confident is correct.

Yeah.

Or you've got to do something kind of algorithmic or automated.

Didn't you say you've done a billion millimeters before or something like that?

We did a million digits of pie printed out on a continuous piece of paper

for a million number file subscribers.

Because I feel like the metric system is our friend here.

Yes.

Because then you could just

you could choose something that is like, let's say

a kilo of ham yeah okay you want to give your friend a kilo of ham yep and then you just work out like a thousand kilos divide well just go a kilo divided by a million is going to be like whatever micrograms or something right and then you just go oh that's a billion

whatever the tiniest version of grams are no so you're telling me right i'm going to give you I'm just going to use my book as an example, this book.

It's a billion of whatever a billionth of this book is.

Yeah, exactly.

But you don't know what it is.

I don't think you could weigh this book accurately enough to precisely know what one billionth of it is.

Or ham.

Or

whatever the gift may be.

Then I did also think, well, hang on.

What if you just gave someone a drink that's like a billion molecules?

Right.

But it would be very small.

It'll be a negligible amount of...

The thing is...

Once you go to atoms, because I was talking to my wife Lucy about this, and she's like, oh, like, how much gas would that be?

And then we're like, Well, Avogadro's number, of course, she thought, what, how much gasoline?

How much gas, exactly.

An astrophysicist.

Yes, exactly.

But gas on Earth, Avogadro's number is like 10 to the 23, so 23 zeros.

And that amount of gas at normal temperature and pressure that we would experience right now is about 22 liters.

Give or take.

And 10 to the 23, like a billion is going to be 10 to the nine.

So that's like multiple billions more.

So you'd have like a fraction of a fraction.

Like it'd be so like molecules are too small.

Atoms are tiny.

And how do you count them?

You wouldn't be exact.

I'm thinking more in terms of if you took something like a hundred right go back a kilo of ham

isn't necessarily going to be exactly one kilogram.

However,

we've we've universally decided that rounding up or rounding down, it is pretty much a kilo.

So I feel I, yeah.

Can I direct you to a a gift that contains exactly one billion of something?

I feel like you need to know what that something is.

Like a kilo of ham.

We don't know what it's a billion lots of.

We know it's roughly such that it's a roughly a kilo.

You can't.

I think you need a billion discrete things the way you know what they are for the true sense of what Nick here wants.

Microgram.

Microgram.

That is a billionth of a kilo because it's a millionth of a gram.

A micro.

Yes.

So you're going to say, here's one billion micrograms

of ham.

Yeah.

That means you've got to be, your kilo's got to be accurate to the nearest microgram.

Yeah, just get some, get a good microphone.

Micro ham, we call it.

Micro ham.

Yeah, I got you a billion microhams.

There we go.

Solved.

Solved.

Done.

I hate to unsure

your

scientifically accurate answer, Matt.

Well, I think it's going to beat 1 billion micro hams.

1 billion microhams is in the mix.

I will give another suggestion.

Yep.

And Nick can decide.

So I thought, here's what you do.

You get yourself a piece of paper.

A4 paper.

A4 paper is 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters.

Which means, if you were to imagine it as square millimeters, which is an imaginable size thing.

Yep.

62,370 of them.

Okay.

I would say that's enough space to print 50,000 very small letters.

Yep.

You got margins and all that jazz, but you're printing a letter per square millimeter.

That's within.

That's a good printer.

It's doable, though.

Is it?

You could definitely print it.

Are printers that good?

I don't know if they are.

One per millimetre, sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's go ahead with yes.

How much is a dot of ink?

Let's say you're printing at 600 dpi

dots per inch.

Yeah.

23 dots per millimetre.

So you've got a 23 by 23

grid.

You can print a letter.

You could do the whole alphabet.

It was like, you know, when we were doing the

segment, seven segment displays.

I've been using that, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

If you had a grid of 20 by 20 dots, I'm rounding down.

You could display every character.

Mm-hmm.

So

you're now printing 50,000 tiny,

tiny characters per page.

Yep.

But that means you know exactly how many you've got.

Yeah.

And if you want to have a billion characters in total, that's a mere 20,000 pages.

Okay.

Or, if you print double-sided, 20 reams of paper at 500 sheets a ream.

You want them to write them a book with tiny, tiny letters?

I want to say it's a birthday card.

That's a fat birthday card.

It's a fat birthday card.

It's a book.

You just say happy birthday over and over again.

Oh my gosh.

And you.

You hate everything about this.

That's great.

Here's your birthday present.

Boom.

20 reams of paper.

Uh-huh.

And you go, this just says happy birthday, and it uses precisely a billion characters.

I feel like going into the.

If you did happy birthday with a hyphen instead of a space and two exclamation marks, it would fit perfectly.

You wouldn't have like half a happy birthday at the end that would match.

Oh, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I still

used to go into a butcher and get a kilo of ham.

Okay, you.

So I did, I printed.

Or like vegan substitute.

In 2016, when a prime number was discovered with just over 22 million digits, I got it printed out.

Double-sided paper, A4, spiral bound, three volumes, and I was printing that at 15,000 digits a page.

And it was easily readable.

Yeah.

I think you could absolutely get down to.

How long did it take you to sort all that?

Did you have to lay it all out?

I had to write some terrible Python code to generate

the PDF file to print.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Because then I wanted on each page, there's a reference so you know which digits you're looking at on the page.

Yeah.

And that took a bit of faffin.

Have you written terrible Python code of how they would do this happy birthday?

Oh, I could absolutely generate the file for this.

No worries.

That's easy, terrible Python code.

Then they could choose between that or a kilo of billionth micro shams, I'm going to say, in case they don't want to is that sham ham yeah that's sham ham gotcha micro shams yeah okay fine there's your there's your options so i pitch birthday card that contains a billion characters

and by card i mean a massive stack of reams of paper yep but it's achievable and you're pitching a billion micro hams

non meat substitutes are available yeah okay nick you can decide which one

Choose.

Which one?

Which one are you going to give your friend?

Report back.

Yeah.

Or did you decide on your own?

Or let us know if you did something different.

Yeah.

That's also acceptable.

And now it's time for any other best business in the world,

which unusually we have guests.

Yes.

So.

Do you want to recap the problem that you solved?

Yes.

In episode 084,

we had a problem about what cake should be designed.

Yes, a birthday cake.

Yes, what birthday cake should be designed for a forest-themed birthday party.

Turning nine.

That's right.

And

I did not know.

You can confirm.

No, yes.

Well, we had two mysteries because when you referred to Nina who sent the problem in, I was semi-confident that was my neighbor, Nina.

Or rather, my neighbor's...

child, Nina.

Yeah.

Who lives around the corner from where I am.

Nina is still your neighbor.

She doesn't live in a different house.

That's true.

She lives with her parents.

That is correct.

And I was like, I'm pretty sure that's the Nina I know.

But we didn't know 100% because you didn't pick the problem based on nepotism.

No, no, I didn't realize

I was accidentally choosing.

I just went, this is a great problem and I want to solve it.

Yep.

So we can solve that mystery because I messaged the parents afterwards and they confirmed it.

They said it sounds a lot like their child.

Yes.

So we take that off.

And the other thing is we didn't know because you pitched a cake solution.

Yep.

And we didn't know what the cake was going to end up being.

And we can actually answer that as well.

Yeah, we can answer that right now because we have Nina in the room with us.

And her sister Carrie.

Yes.

Who have brought you cake?

They've brought us both cake.

That's true.

We've both got cake.

No, we're going to have to take photos of these because they're stunning.

They are spectacular.

Yes.

So to describe it, it looks like a wooden log with some leaves.

It's wood-themed.

Yes, it's lovely.

And yours is as well.

We've both got little Lego figures.

Pretty Lego figurines of ourselves.

Now,

when these cakes came in,

you realize that they're figurines of us because the one I was given didn't have any Lego hair on it, which I find mildly insulting.

But it works.

And you've got a little figurine of you.

And they even put together a figurine of substitute producer Laura.

Yeah.

It doesn't match.

You're happy with it?

Yeah.

And they all look like us.

And you've got little headphones on.

Yeah.

That's great.

This is why earlier today, I didn't say why, but I got a message saying, can you just send us a photo of everyone in the room?

Yeah.

And I was like, I can do a quick photo.

Yeah.

And that was because they were Lego matching us.

Yeah.

I like how yours is sleeveless because your muscles are.

I'm famous for wearing tank tops.

I think it was because you went, oh, and your t-shirt sleeves.

It explodes off my arm.

That's exactly what happens.

And I'm drinking a cup of coffee.

Yep.

And my dog is next to me.

So there's a tiny sky on

the phone.

We'll take photos.

And you appear to have a very small

peanut.

Oh my god, do you know what?

Oh my goodness.

Oh my gosh.

I didn't realize there's a little hamster.

It's a little peanut.

Oh my gosh, it's so cute.

That's a choking hazard though.

I will eat that.

You will.

Then it will come out looking.

We will take photos.

So what cake did you have for your actual birthday?

I had a giant tree cake.

It looked like a giant tree.

And that was a picture of me sitting on one of the branches.

So what we have is like the trunk aspect of a much bigger cake oh wow oh it's beautiful yeah look at that yeah that's great

i'm glad we uh caked you into a corner yes iced you into a corner iced you into a corner now the real question remains is what type of cake is it we've seen the outside we had chocolate fingers for like the branches we put icing on them and then we had um

chocolate Swiss rolls as well which we put more icing on as well.

Oh, perfect.

We can't go wrong there.

I think everyone gets a ding all around for.

I mean, it wasn't my suggestion, but I think

the fact that we brought it up.

You enabled it?

I think decoration was one.

I think we said just anything you like and you decorate it, would we?

So I think that counts.

Can we have an official ding?

Is it a ding that we get from you?

Ding.

Hey.

Yes.

We're going to have to eat it.

I want to eat some of this cake.

Yeah.

We'll have to pause to do it because we've had listeners tell us off for eating on the microphone.

Very, very true.

We're going to eat some cake and then we will conclude this episode.

That was delicious cake.

I can say with no exaggeration, best cake.

Yeah.

And it was genius.

Maybe ever.

That was, you know, not to, not to do it,

not to pass any judgment or whatever, but it was, what do they call this chocolate Swiss rolls?

Yep.

That you can just

buy off the shelf.

With incredibly decorated.

It's what you do with it.

It looked great.

It tasted great.

I ate all of it.

I wasn't going to eat all of it.

But it's very moorish, wasn't it?

I ate the whole thing.

But there's so much sugar.

And you don't have much of a sweet tooth.

I do not.

My body is not equipped nor experienced

to deal with this much sugar.

I think I'm having a nap right now.

Yeah.

So, first ever guests for any other business.

That's pretty special.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My favorite thing is that Nina sent in that problem without her parents realizing.

It wasn't until you messaged that they had to check.

They're like, wait, that sounds like our daughter.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much to everyone for listening to this episode, even though no one else brought us cake.

We like to thank all our listeners, but specifically, we like to extra thank our Patreon listeners.

And within them, we extra extra thank three Patreon listeners whose names have been picked at random

and we will mispronounce them.

We should miss them

if you can somehow spell your name in a way that we pronounce it correctly.

You win a prize.

Our Patreon names this episode include

Nah Van Khruby.

Khribi

or Nat.

H.

Ruby.

Nathan is the name that Becca's saying.

Just

Mr.

A.

I'll put the R's together.

Oh, you did, yes.

Instead of Mr.

Ray.

One's a little R, one's a capital R because it says Mr.

Ray.

Yeah.

Mr.

Or is it a Mr.

E?

Mr.

Ray.

And

Joe John.

Ah, oh my goodness.

Joe Joe.

The name is John.

Lou

is

Louise.

I think he goes by Jolu.

Yeah, Jolu.

Jollu.

Jo Lu.

Thank you to those people for supporting us.

Thank you to everyone else who supports us on Patreon.

And thank you to everyone else who listens to us.

You don't have to fund this.

People who do, we appreciate that.

But everyone else, you get it for free.

Thank you so much for listening.

This has been the best podcast episode ever recorded.

I'm Matt Parker, joined by Beck Hill and our substitute producer, Laura Grimshaw.

Old Lagri.

Laughri.

Law Grey.

You can't mispronounce everyone's name.

I can and will.

Can and will.

Challenge acceptance.

Too late.

Okay, back.

We're back in the room with the jar of dice, which is behind you.

Actually, if you ever look at it, you may have noticed it's changed slightly.

I don't know if you can spot what's different.

I mean, some of them a little more jumbled.

Well, the colours have separated out.

There's now all the yellow ones are at the bottom with black dots, and all the

which are reject grime dice, and the ones at the top are all mixed up because I had to borrow a bunch to take with me.

I was in Norway filming a video about probability and I had to bring a bunch of dice with me.

So I had to go through and filter out all the real dice.

Real dice dice at a one to six.

Oh, yeah, because the ones at the bottom are.

But I put them back.

Uh-huh.

And I checked it's the correct number.

A number you were yet to guess.

Yes.

Which, by the way.

I have been telling so many people about how the dots are called pips.

Really?

Yeah.

That's like so new.

It's been really fun.

Like, did you know?

They're pips.

Yeah.

Because that's the sort of thing that comes up in a pub quiz.

That's a nice quick fact.

It's a good quick fact.

Yeah.

I want more quick facts, actually.

If anyone has any quick facts, tweet them to us.

This is becoming part of the episode now.

You're meant to guess a number and then people will stop listening.

No, that's true.

Okay.

I've done the theme song.

So we worked out last episode that I had been.

You had misunderstood the game of higher-lower.

I'd just forgotten, and I'd just been looking at the last two numbers and think it was between those.

Yes.

In my defense,

we'd not be making note of whether you'd said higher or lower.

Correct.

I don't want to blame you for producer Lauren Armstrong.

Oh, that's true.

I was going to say it's not my fault, but that does feel like a producer job.

She'd been writing down what the guesses were, but not saying whether it was higher or lower.

Yeah, correct, correct.

Which I agree.

I think is a very good idea.

I feel like that's vital information.

That is a producer issue.

And that's why we have a substitute today.

I know, yes.

Okay, so I believe from last episode, we ascertained that it's between 457 and 461.

For safety purposes, I messaged it to producer Laura.

Yes, because you remember the first time we talked about it.

And then she said it out loud.

And then you had to...

You had to change the number of dies.

Yes, yes, yes.

And I addressed her.

You weren't here when she read it aloud.

She read it aloud while I was in the room with you.

You could have pretended and I I wouldn't have.

But I would have,

there's no way I would have forgotten.

And that's why we have a substitute producer now.

Okay.

Okay.

So

Lauren's still going to edit this episode.

She's still going to hear this.

Sorry.

Right.

I feel sorry for anyone who stops when they reach the music.

This is the gold.

Yeah.

This is the real podcast.

Just remember when you listen to CDs and there'd be a bonus show.

It was the hidden track, yeah.

And it wasn't until we had CD players that would display how long a track was.

Oh, yeah.

You'd be like, why is this track 40 minutes?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Right.

So I'm going to go right in between.

I'm going to guess 459

lower.

Oh,

guess what?

We've got one other episode to record.

All right, well, let's wrap up this one and record the next one.

Let's see how long I can get this.

Oh, boy.

I'm going to forget between now and if you listen to these episodes in order, you'll hear how excited we are at the beginning of the next one.

Yeah.

Because it's about to happen in about five minutes from now.