078 = Spinal Taps and Star Maps

Welcome to A Problem Squared, the podcast which is a bit like the film La La Land,

in that it started with me being stuck in traffic on an LA highway for a very long time.

Have you seen La La Land?

No, I haven't.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

It starts with a bunch of people in traffic on a highway in LA.

Do they burst spontaneously into song?

They do.

They do.

Did that happen?

That did not happen.

But you know what?

It's the first time I've been to LA since I saw the film.

And now, whenever I'm stuck in traffic or on one of the highways, I'm just like, oh, it's just like the film.

It's really taken the edge off.

Whereas for me, it just makes me think of all the chase scenes I've seen on film.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Like, or Barry, the TV show Barry.

There's a particularly good chase scene on a highway

in LA.

So it's a podcast where we solve problems.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot about that.

This time, we're in LA.

I'm joined by, I didn't think through the introduction, someone who's a bit like a character in the film.

This podcast is a lot like the film in that I don't know how the rest of it goes.

Yeah.

One, because of bad memory.

Are you saying that I'm Emma Stone?

I don't know.

Maybe.

I'll take it.

Yeah, you got it.

You got it.

Maybe we'll finish with

the bigger musical number.

Maybe.

We're not going to, then we're not going to.

There's a 0% chance that's going to happen.

And I'm Matt Parker.

You're mathematician to the stars.

Yes.

If you're just tuning in, if this is your first time listening to A Problem Squared, I would say maybe listen to a different episode.

Yeah, this is a weird, like, special on-location one.

Yeah, every now and then when we're in the same city, but somewhere else in the world, we'll be like, let's record an episode there.

Which isn't necessary.

We could do it anywhere and you wouldn't know.

Yeah, you wouldn't know.

But we are in LA.

Yeah, we are in LA.

On this episode, we have a lat of LA chat.

That's spelt L-A-T.

A LAD of LA chat.

Yep.

I calculated the distance between the stars.

How vague.

Thank you.

And there's sort of some any other business.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

More chat.

More the chat.

But the chat is worth it.

Trust me.

Stay with us.

So, how have you been, LA Beck?

Oh, my gosh, it's my first time here.

Wow, this is it, really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

And honestly, so many things have happened.

And

if I had told people about my LA trip, like if you wrote a character who goes to LA for the first time and does the things that I've done.

Yeah, you've been bad writing.

Yeah, you'd be like, oh, that's a bit on the nose.

Make it more realistic.

Yeah.

But there's been some great highlights.

You put on

evening of unnecessary detail.

Evening of unnecessary detail.

Thank you very much to everyone who came and said hi.

We had a lot of APS listeners there.

We did.

Yeah.

That was adorable.

I loved it.

Nice to meet you all.

Special shout out to Michael, who was a fan who we first met at Blue Dot Festival.

Sorry, if you can hear a whining in the background.

Small dog.

There is small dog.

Studios in LA come with a small dog.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, we're at studio.

I've accidentally blocked the dog's path with my bag.

That's what the whining was.

There we go.

There we go.

Yes, we're uh

recording this in studio sam keeper who is uh studio sam's place yes who is uh very kindly putting me up while i'm here and is the co-host on my other podcast enemy in paris i have to give it a shout out matt fine it's fine it's fine i'm sat between both of you so yeah

got to meet all the listeners yep that was awesome you had someone sign an abacus someone had you sign an abacus yeah yeah i signed a lot of calculators yeah i don't think have i done an abacus before?

It was a particularly nice one.

That was a very good abacus.

Yeah, that was at Flappers Comedy Club, which is quite like an established comedy club.

It's a legit comedy club.

Sold out.

We filled it.

Thank you, listeners.

Yeah.

5 p.m.

on a Sunday, a week's notice.

Sold out show.

It's nothing to.

That's the power of the problem squared listener base.

Then I got to finally return the favor because you've introduced me to many cool people over the years.

And then yesterday, because I am Twitter friends with Michael McKean, fantastic actor and musician, I DM'd him before my trip saying, Hey, I'm going to be in LA.

If you've got any recommendations of fun things I should do in LA,

he called me and said, Hey, the band's rehearsing.

The band, the band, Spinal Tap.

Spinal tap.

And he never said it.

He never said Spinal Hat Tap.

He just said, We're rehearsing this week at a studio.

If you want to come by.

And then he was like, Oh, make sure you come before too, because we're going to finish early.

Our bassist Harry is feeling a bit under the weather.

Oh, just the bassist bassist harry yeah and then afterwards i was like i think

harry shearer

so then i texted you and i was like hey new plans today matt yeah let's scrap the we're gonna record yesterday yeah like forget that so you sam and i all uh went to a studio in hollywood and we sat we sat in

we had a private we were the audience we were the audience we had a private rehearsal concert from Spinal Tap yep with Harry Shearer Christopher Guest and Michael McKean It was incredible.

It was surreal.

Very surreal.

Very cool.

And then afterwards, we went and had a drink with Michael McKean and he's delightful.

Wonderful.

Wonderful individual.

So that was, yeah, you know, it's a bit ridiculous.

I can't stop that now.

I don't think I could introduce you to any celebrity or situation that's going to beat a private performance by Spinal Tap.

Yeah, you can try.

I'll give it a go.

Yeah, yeah.

I got to meet Harry Shearer.

Yeah.

How about you?

What's your highlight been?

Oh, my goodness.

I mean, likewise, you were there.

So I feel like maybe this is the trade.

I was filming a YouTube video on Tuesday.

Yes.

In Hollywood

about

film formats and aspect ratios.

And I was going to say the mathematics of, it's more the numbers of.

Yeah.

And talking about scale and size and area and alignment and all these things.

But we decided, given we're in Hollywood and we're talking about filming on film we should film on film

so our film about film was filmed on film yeah

very expensive yes 35 millimeter if you're wondering what that is wait for the video it's actually the same film strip that used to be an old like regular

yeah yeah yeah perfectly normal stuff

there you go we uh got 2000 feet Thanks to our friend Truman, who's a film loader.

Like, Truman's job is putting film in cameras.

Yes.

And he's worked on many

work on a bunch of films you would know.

Yes.

He pestered me.

Pested's a strong word.

He was very keen that we film on 35 mil.

And I took very little convincing.

I was like, mate, that's the best idea.

I'm on my way to LA.

Yeah.

Get ready.

And we found a hire house, or they would call it a rental house, like Keslo.

And normally they would have all their kit hired out, but things are still kind of spinning up after all the strikes.

And so they're like, look, we have a bunch of film cameras kicking around.

If you can get like insurance to cover breaking them, because they lent us over 1 million US dollars worth of equipment, which is ridiculous.

But lenses and cameras, like we had like eight lenses and three or four camera bodies.

Yeah.

Because they just wheeled out a bunch of stuff that they had in storage.

And I know the value because I had to get it insured.

Yeah.

Because we tripped over it or broke it or something.

But we just got it.

I'm still amazed that you let me come along.

Yeah.

Just being in the same room as it was brave.

Yeah.

But, you know, I wanted to get my value for money for the insurance.

Yeah.

So

I've never been so pleased to waste money in my life when we did not need any of that insurance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what was terrifying is

we bought 2,000 feet of film.

But then we kind of realized we were going to be tight on getting everything in on that length of film.

And what I really hadn't appreciated was when you're filming on film, you can only load so much at a time.

I think we couldn't have more than 400 feet at a time in a camera.

And it's a real faff to take it out

of one magazine and put it in another one.

So once we had loaded 400 feet of film, We had to do takes that would fit.

And so we're like, ah, there's now like 80 foot left on this one, or there's 30 foot left on that one.

Yeah, there was a lot of maths involved just to work out how to film it, which isn't in the video.

No, but we were doing maths constantly to work out because we were also filming at different rates.

Like they were all 24 frames a second, but we were filming different formats.

So they took up different lengths per frame on the film.

Which meant it gets used faster.

It goes through at different speeds.

Exactly.

And then we did some on 16 mil.

So we were constantly having to work out how much film was left in which magazine

and

what time does that translate to.

Yeah.

And we pretty much landed.

Yeah, you nailed it.

Yeah, we had.

You did not have room for retakes.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

We did zero retakes.

Yeah, this was all.

Every shot was shot once.

You rehearsed several times.

Yep.

And then we did them all once.

Yep.

I'm tempted to.

The only one that almost seemed to go a bit up in the air was one where you needed me to do something.

You had to bring a prop in.

You wanted it off.

I wanted it off because I didn't realize the timing.

Yep.

You know what I've tempted to do is to put just all the footage on the second channel.

Yeah.

Like beginning to end, just in order, beginning to end, every single shot.

And what we've been doing yesterday and today is finding a place

because we've shot on film.

Now it has to get developed.

So it's got to go to development place.

We were going to use one development place who were then going to scan it for us because we have to get it digitized to put it on YouTube.

But then we realized they're like, oh, no, we can only scan at 4K res, and we can only scan inside the sprockets, inside the perforations.

And we're like, oh, we kind of wanted the full over scan.

Yeah.

So Trimin's found another place that will do six and a half K scan, so real high resolution,

edge to edge.

Oh, he found one.

Yeah, that's great.

So we'll have the whole film, including the sparks, the perfs and everything.

Great.

And so we can put that up on the second channel.

I think I'll put it up with

the full six and a half K scan side to side.

Just all the footage.

You've got to see, see the wonders of filmmaking.

I love this.

Oh, I also need to say that my first YouTube video for Yoit.

Oh, yes, your Yoit came out.

Yes.

I just want to say thanks.

There's a lot of problem squared listeners that commented, and that's really kind.

So thank you very much.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to to making more putting more out there you should it's the yo year of youtube yoit

this problem comes from a j

good old aj good old aj capital a capital j correct yes it's like l a but backwards and a j instead of an l

sure you're right that

it's been a long week i just feel like i only phoned in the introduction so now i'm trying to find

little bits of LA, but I can pick them up.

They wrote into the problem posing page, which is a problemsquare.com.

And they said, if you wanted to visit each star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in alphabetical order, how far would you have to travel?

Interesting.

Well, we're here.

Yeah.

We went there.

We did.

We went there yesterday.

We did after

Spinal Tap.

Smile tap.

We went from peak coolness to peak

tourist.

It's such a tourist trip.

It's a lot less glamorous than you would expect from the name Walk of Fame.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it really is less glamorous than you'd think.

We went outside the Chinese city.

That's cool.

Yep.

Where all the handprints and stuff in the cement.

Yep.

And we went past the place where they host the Oscars now.

Yep.

And then we walked right to one end of the stars.

Because when I looked it up, I thought...

The stars just go

along one street.

Yeah.

And so I thought, well, well, this is easy.

I just look up the location of all the stars and then calculate the distances between them.

But they don't go along one street.

They go along two streets.

Two orthogonal streets.

What's orthogonal again?

At right angles.

Yeah, so it takes a corner.

Yeah, it takes a corner.

And even like looking up where they all are,

I struggled to find a nice, neat database.

We've discussed this many times on the podcast.

Half the challenge with these sorts of problems is just tidying up the data yes and so i started tidying up the wikipedia data and went no this is a mess yeah and then i found walkoffame.com and that's the official website that's the official well it looks like it i don't know if it's how official it is

and i did actually it's the same thing i did for the earthquake data which was a previous problem where i was looking i was trying to get a database of locations and dates of earthquakes.

But I realized I could just do a like the null search and they had an option for show all results.

Okay.

And so I got all the results on one big page.

Yeah.

Copy, paste, tidy, done.

Except they gave all the positions as addresses.

So instead of saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is like at

latitude or longitude or some kind of other useful coordinates, no,

Arnold star is at 6764 Hollywood Boulevard.

Oh, okay.

And there could be several stars at that address, I imagine.

But also, US addresses are weird because they don't use all of them.

Like, they're real dense, which is why there's thousands of them on a street.

Addresses?

Yeah.

What do you mean they don't use all of them?

You can put in a number on a street and it may not come up with any kind of building there.

I don't know if that's like they've become obsolete or they skip ones where they end up putting a road.

Okay.

I haven't looked into why.

I I just find the numbers are not necessarily neat and sequential.

Okay.

Although I did check they are in

ascending and descending order as you go up and down the street.

Sure.

So I, in the end, I thought, you know what?

I'm not going to try and get clever.

Because I was like, oh, what if I put every single address into Google Maps and then extracted the GPS coordinates of that precise address?

And I was like, oh, it's going to take so long.

And I was on hotel Wi-Fi.

And and I didn't want to get like the hotel's Wi-Fi banned by Google for hitting Google Maps too many times in a row to scrape because I got like, you know, there were, let's have a look, I had 2,619 stars.

And there's some overlap of addresses, but it's still thousands of addresses I'm going to have to look at.

Yeah.

So what I ended up doing was just

working it out on average.

So the Walk of Fame starts at 6,100

on Hollywood Boulevard, and that's where it crosses North Gower.

And that's where we started?

That's the other end where we started.

We went up to the other end at the bigger numbers, which stops at house number 7,095 where it crosses North La Brea Avenue.

Okay.

And so that's, you know, a span of 995 house numbers.

And I then worked out the distance.

It's 6,900 feet long,

which means it's an average of 6.93 feet per house number.

So now I had a simple way to convert from house number to distance along the street, which is not 100% accurate, but it's 100% easy.

Yeah.

And won't get me yelled at by Google or the hotel Wi-Fi or anything like that.

And I did the same thing for Vine Street.

So I worked out where it starts and stops.

Distance, they're actually a little bit further apart on Vine Street.

All right.

They're an average of, what do I got here, 8.8 feet per house number.

Not wildly different, subtly different.

Then what I had to do was to work out the distances between them.

I had to factor in that if you're at one on Hollywood Boulevard

and you need to get to one on Vine Street, you have to walk to that one intersection and then walk up the other way.

So you've got your horizontal street and your vertical street.

Yeah.

Like axes.

Yes.

Which I was very excited about.

And then I realized at the horizontal street, the horizontal axis starts with an H for Hollywood.

The vertical one, vine, starts with a V.

So I had the H street and the V street, which is both horizontal Hollywood and vertical vine.

That's great.

So pleasing.

And I take it to, because obviously, if you want to visit them in alphabetical order, seeing as it's on a, it goes around a corner, you could theoretically try and take a shortcut.

Yes, you could.

But you wanted to look at if you're walking along the walk of fame.

It's very true.

And what I find interesting about walking in US cities, when like a lot of LA's grid,

is it doesn't matter what combination of streets you walk down, it's always the same distance.

It's what we call isometric.

Because it doesn't matter.

like if you go all the way straight and then straight or you zigzag all the way up the middle you're covering the same horizontal and the same vertical distances yes so I can walk in a very carefree manner.

It doesn't matter.

There's no longer or shorter path.

They're all the same.

So even if you did take the back streets, if they're all grid, it's still the same distance.

I never even considered that, but that's a good point.

So I ended up doing the whole thing in a spreadsheet.

Yep.

I'm not surprised.

Put everything in alphabetical order.

And then if from one star to the next was on the same street, I just subtracted the two locations.

Yeah.

Oh, and because I'm doing it as an axes, there's a positive direction and a negative direction.

Yes.

Which means technically my ant, I was getting like negative distances.

Yeah, because you're going back.

I don't want that.

So I just saw the absolute value.

If they were on different streets, I just had to add the two values because you got to walk all the way back along one to get to the origin intersection of Vine and Hollywood and then up the other one.

So dead easy.

Like I thought I was going to have to write some terrible Python code.

No.

Nice.

All done in a spreadsheet.

Wow.

Very, very pleased.

Now,

there were two ambiguities I had to deal with.

One was some people have multiple stars.

Yes.

Yeah.

And tell us about how the stars work, Matt.

So to get a star,

you have to put together a big application.

And I think it's currently $75,000.

Wow.

To get a new star.

And the person that the star is for has to not only agree with the application, but commit to attending the opening ceremony.

Okay, so you can't like

nominate

Keanu Reeves

because you want to meet him.

Yeah, exactly.

Because he could be like, I'm not going to that.

He's number one, he's got to agree to the application and he's got to commit to attending the ceremony.

Does this mean you could nominate yourself?

Yes.

I'm looking at the FAQs on the website.

Oh, okay.

What do they say?

You can nominate your favourite celebrity with their permission.

There you go.

By completing the nomination dashboard.

Who can do the nominating?

Anyone, including a fan, can nominate a celebrity as long as the celebrity or his or slash her management is in agreement with the nomination.

There you go.

If there is no letter of agreement included from the celebrity or their representative, the committee will not accept the application.

As you said, 75 grand.

75

grand.

After selection, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not like an application fee.

It's a staff fee.

Yeah.

The money is used to pay for the creation and installation of the star as well as the maintenance on the Walk of Fame.

Can someone who is deceased be nominated?

Yes.

One

posthumous

posthumous award may be given each year.

But apparently, our posthumous nomination has a two-year waiting period.

Oh,

after their death.

Yep.

After their death.

Okay.

Oh, I think that's a good idea.

They can't wait.

They're going to be dead for a while.

Okay, got it.

They can't come back.

You want to check.

The six categories.

I'm going to try and remember what they are on the camera.

Okay, here we go.

So it was film.

Yep.

The picture of an old-timey film camera.

Yes.

Which you and I know well now.

Yep.

Yeah, we do.

Radio?

Yep, picture of a microphone.

TV?

Yep, picture of a TV with like the bunny ear antenna.

Uh-huh.

All these icons have now aged out.

Yeah.

They were like accurate representations of what was happening.

I'm going to guess there's one for stage.

There is.

It's got like the happy sad mask.

Yes.

That sounds about right.

And

did I say mute?

No, music.

Did you say music one?

Yeah, there is.

It's a picture of a record.

Great.

And then I believe the sixth one is now sports.

Yeah, I don't know what the icon is for sport entertainer.

No, we didn't see any, did we?

Like the lunar astronauts have stars.

Yes.

Although they're shaped like moons.

Very funny.

And they can.

Are they?

Yeah.

Wow.

So they made like a weird exception.

But I think I read somewhere someone involved in the process of like,

like, we were pushing the limits when when we classified them as TV stars because so many people watched the moon landings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, because there's, can I nominate someone who doesn't fit into any of the six categories?

And it says, no, the categories do not change.

Apparently, one's been added.

And the nominee must be or have been active in the field of entertainment.

I'm wondering how long until you start getting content creators.

Oh, yeah.

Like online.

YouTube icon or a little triangle.

Computer.

Yeah.

Maybe a floppy disk.

Maybe a floppy disk.

But you can get more than one category and you get a new star.

Like there are multiple stars for the same person.

Yeah, so that's why you've got some people that have done film and television and TV and music.

Or your egots.

Yeah, you gots.

I decided that I would do the distance because the problem as stated by AJ

It's a little ambiguous, but I decided that the most obvious interpretation of the problem is the distance from star, as in the plaque,

not star

the person.

Yes.

So I was doing just physical star to star.

Yeah.

So if someone's got multiple stars, you visit them all.

Yep.

Oh, and I didn't, I possibly could have optimized the code to try all the different orders in which you could visit the same person's star.

I didn't do that because I didn't do Terrible Python code.

It was in a spreadsheet.

So I assume it probably averages out.

It's fine.

And the other problem was

alphabetical order.

What does that mean?

Yeah, so I mean, I would have assumed by surname because of because my mom's a librarian.

Yep.

And a lot of the databases are done by surname.

Like you'd put, you know, books by author surname.

Yeah, and your roll call.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I did not do that.

Because not all of them have an obvious surname.

Yeah, like

in the past.

Yeah, or rugrats.

Yeah, there was one for rug rats which is confusing because that's not a person yeah that is a tv show but big bird big bird i can accept

because big bird is a character oh okay but rug rats is like a concept yeah that's true it's like you don't have one for like surprise like for emotions suspense why do tv shows get them yeah yeah good point

um so what i decided to do in the end was i i decreed

that I'm just going to treat every star like just the string of text on the star.

It is what it is, from the first character to the last character, rank them in alphabetical order.

Also means, because I've got like over two and a half thousand of these, I don't have to come up with some way to search for, because it's not necessarily the first space in the name where the surname starts,

and it's not necessarily the last space in the name, because some surnames have spaces in them.

That's true.

So the automated process to pull out all the surnames would have been a nightmare.

Oh, yeah.

So

I just went by alphabetical order.

Now, if I remember correctly, and you can tell me otherwise, you were not 100% convinced by

the first three

stars

in my ranking system.

I was not impressed.

Would you like to voice your concern?

Yeah, because

of the way you've done it, it counted punctuation.

Yep.

as being right at the beginning.

I just used

built in.

I would have been so fine if it was numbers.

If it was like,

I don't know, if it was, I'm trying to think of like one direction that they spent with the one with a one, probably, I don't know, probably but yeah, but anyway, if it's something that started with numbers, if it was 007, the character.

Do you know they put James Bond actors who get a star?

They put them at address 7007.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, that's really good.

So they're at 007.

Well, 007.

What are you going to do?

That's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But what I'm saying is, if the names, sure, I would have been like, yep, yep, that makes sense.

Yep.

But the punctuation, because some people, I guess, have like nicknames, whatever, so it's in quotation marks.

So, for example, Weird Owl.

Exactly.

Quote, open quotes, Weird Owl.

Close quotes, Yankovich.

Yeah.

Or actually, Weird Owl is beaten by Shotgun Tom.

Shotgun Tom kelly who we we saw their star we found it we did with the quote mark is right there yeah we also found n sync

which i didn't realize has an asterisk before asterisks i always thought it was after

like n sync and asterisk sync yeah it's like n sync is a footnote yeah asterisk in justin timberlake's biography yeah so it's in some band asterisks yeah and then you look at the bottom

yeah exactly and i the problem i have with that is that it's only three i look if it was like 20 of them, I'd be like, okay, I understand.

But you could have so easily have gone, well, clearly these are meant to go under W, N, and S.

But I don't agree with the word clearly in that sentence.

No, that's the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that you could have done that, but you're like.

The surname thing was like, oh, that's technically a pain.

The addresses versus GPS was, oh, that's a pain.

This is a philosophical.

Yeah.

I'm sorting.

I'm a purist sorting by a string.

Which I think is a problem because I think once you start just accepting the way that computers tell us how things should be done, like you're accepting this because Excel told you that the...

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's different.

Because if Excel hadn't counted punctuation and had placed them where they should be in the list,

it wouldn't.

It sorts by string.

But what I'm saying is,

if it hadn't.

I would have disagreed with that.

I don't think you would have even noticed.

If it had ignored punctuation.

I don't think you would have noticed.

I probably wouldn't have noticed.

Not at all.

But had I noticed,

I would have manually put them where they should go.

Whereas I'm the opposite of that, whereas I've noticed, yeah, and I think you should manually put them where they should go.

They'll come back when they're not meant to go.

Yeah, because that's the problem with AI and everything, isn't it?

Is that some people are just trusting it.

And it's like, maybe we should

put a little bit of human intelligence into this.

Context.

I'm checking.

It's doing what I want it to do.

Sure.

Agreed or disagree.

I do not have an opinion on if the asterisk should come before the quote mark

in alphabetical order.

Okay.

And if it had put them the other way around, I would have been like, oh, okay, fine.

And if it had put like quote marks first and asterisks at the end of the alphabet, I'd be like, oh, okay.

Sure.

But all I care about is I am sorting based on the punctuation.

And quotation marks came before the asterisks, didn't they?

Yeah.

Which is interesting because asterisk starts with an A.

It's very annoying.

Whereas

a quote mark is number two

on the keyboard.

Yeah.

Asterisk is number eight.

I wonder if like their Unicode, because they're not there.

There is a punctuation alphabet

in Unicode.

Because you've got your lowercase alphabet, your uppercase alphabet.

Yep.

And they do pack in some punctuation marks to not waste space.

But then there's a whole separate alphabet for all the other punctuation marks.

Okay.

Which goes space, exclamation mark.

I forget the rest.

But those are the first two.

Cool.

So maybe that's what I was using.

Maybe that's why.

Well, if you're listening on Spotify,

we, and by we I mean Lauren, is going to put a poll up

saying, do you think

that punctuation should have been taken into account or do you think weird owl Jankovich should be in the back?

Back to W.

Lauren will find a better way of wording it than I have just now.

But if you're on Spotify, check it in the episode notes.

Let us know as you vote.

I want to make it very clear that the quote marks in Weird Al are there in the brass, in the star, yeah, yeah, they're on the star,

yeah, yeah.

I'm not, I'm not discounting that.

Everyone vote, although it's only three of them out of almost 3,000, so it's like 0.1%.

Yeah, it's not gonna make a big difference.

Okay, so then I ran the code, and let's just get to the answer.

Where's my results tab?

Total distance you would need to walk to visit them all in alphabetical order, starting at shotgun tom

6,782,987 feet.

Feet.

Feet.

We're in America, I thought.

And what would that cost you in film?

Oh, my goodness.

So much money.

That is 1,285 miles.

Round of the nearest mile.

Just over a kilomile.

Yeah.

It's a long way.

And I was like, well, that kind of makes sense because...

The whole Hollywood Boulevard is 1.3 miles.

Yes.

From Star to Shining Star.

And Vine Street's about half a mile.

So

on average, that's almost exactly half a mile per walk.

It's 0.49 miles

per interval.

And I feel like if they were just randomly placed on the street, you'd expect the average to be about half a mile.

Okay.

Now, I've got a confession to make, Bec.

Or rather,

thanks to give.

All right.

When we were out walking around yesterday, I'd already run the numbers.

So I'd already worked out the distance.

Yes.

And I then, because I had the same, I was thinking, it's probably the same as if they're randomly arranged.

I then also did it random.

Like in Excel, instead of sorting alphabetical, I put in a new random number column, sorted by that.

Totally random.

And it was about the same.

Yeah.

I told you that.

You did.

Which I want to say I did a very good job of acting surprised when you just told me the result.

Yeah, well done.

Congratulations.

And then that's because you're a professional.

Yeah.

And then you should nominate me for a star.

I will.

Who's going to pay for that?

The listeners.

Yeah.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, everyone.

Patreon.com slash problem squares.

Yeah, yeah.

So

you said

very insightfully.

I said, how many times did you run that?

And you said once.

And I said, well, I'm not going to trust it until you've done at least three.

Three is a pattern.

Yep.

I want a a minimum three

runs of this before I believe that it's just going to be roughly the same each time.

And you were right.

I was like, you know what?

You're completely correct.

Well, I did it 10 times.

Oh, you don't.

So,

to remind everyone,

the distance in actuality is 1,285 miles.

1,285.

I did it randomly 10 times and averaged them, and it was 1,309.

Oh,

not only that,

but all the lengths I got randomly were all over 1,300.

Really?

So the true value wasn't even in the range of random

values I was getting.

So I was like,

from this sample, statistically,

alphabetical order is unnaturally short.

Yeah.

Compared to if they were randomly placed on the streets.

Yeah.

And so I'm curious, why?

Why would alphabetic.

I looked up how are they arranged?

Why are they put where they put?

And there's no rhyme or reason other than they put Oscar winners near where the Oscar ceremony is.

They put like famous people

in the more touristy areas.

They put people places where it's funny.

Right.

And they put James Bond actors at 7007.

Yes, yeah.

And sometimes they move them too.

And sometimes they move them if they've been naughty.

Yes, apparently some less savory slots have been moved.

Way down the other end.

Which I still want to know why they don't just take the star away.

I read up on that.

Oh, wow.

And they say it's a historical record.

Huh.

And once you're in, you're in.

Wow.

So if anyone out there has been cancelled but has 75 grand and enough people vote for them.

Well, you know you're likely to get cancelled.

Yes, that's what it's actually.

Get the star in now.

Get it in before you've been cancelled.

So I was like, wow, I can't think of a possible reason why that the alphabetical order is 97%

the length of the random average.

And then I thought, oh, hang on, hang on.

There's multiple stars from the same person

and they're likely to be near each other.

You reckon?

Well, that was my theory.

And so then if you're visiting all the ones for one person, you're probably not going very far.

Right.

And that would bring the average down.

Yeah.

So I took out all the duplicates.

Okay.

And so I have now also answered how far would you have to walk if there were no duplicates?

That gets it down to a mere 2,377 stars you have to get to.

Now, that would change depending on where some of those duplicates might have been.

I have to admit, I randomly picked one.

Okay.

I just want to acknowledge that we're aware of that.

We're aware of that.

Yes, we're aware of our limitations.

And that's a lot quicker.

That's 1,180 feet.

And so then I randomly did that 10 times to see if it's now closer.

It's not.

It's still 97% of the random distance.

Wow.

On average, it was 1,217.

So it's still the same proportional amount longer when they're randomized compared to alphabetical.

Wow.

So there's an open question.

Why is the distance to walk between them in alphabetical order

significantly shorter?

Not significantly in like the, you know, effort sense, but like

in a statistical sense, they appear to be closer together in alphabetical order than picking a random order on average.

We're going to have to contact someone from Walk of Fame and send them to this podcast

and ask them if they can help us.

Can you answer this question?

Yeah.

Or, unless anyone listening knows, or would have to iron out maybe some of my rounding and assumptions.

But it's the same rounding and assumption.

Yeah.

Well, I always thought, if you want want to do it properly, what you'd do, I thought this through, I was like, well, how would I do it properly?

I would walk the length of both of them,

both streets, and photograph every single star, because then you could OCR, you could like just automatically

pull out the text programmatically.

Oh, yes, yeah.

And you'd have in the metadata the

coordinates.

Yes, yeah.

So then you wouldn't be relying on anyone else's database.

Because I found mistakes in the databases.

You did, yeah, you told me about this.

Yeah, it's like it was trying to tell me Sarah Silverman was at 6,000

Hollywood Boulevard.

The stars don't start until 6,100.

On the map, we'll screen grab it because they might fix it after this episode goes out.

They got her star way out, and we walked past it, like in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard.

And a bunch of other ones.

But it was just like a typo in the address or something.

I found a bunch as well that were

again,

I only found the obvious ones because some of them were at 1600 Hollywood Boulevard, and that's nowhere near the Walk of Fame.

So some of the really obvious ones I fixed, but there may be other mistakes in there as well.

So

you'd want to collect all the data yourself, get more accurate positions, but I still think you'd end up, I mean, that'd be a lot of effort for nothing particularly important.

What this tells me is I think that there's a star missing for academic.

Oh, the seventh category.

Yeah.

That'd be pretty amazing.

Yeah.

I think whoever can sort this out should get a star for it.

What would be the icon for it'd be like a little Excel, like a little spreadsheet?

Well, I mean, academic isn't just STEM-based stuff.

What?

It's all spreadsheets.

Pretty short.

It'd have to be a little hat, wouldn't it?

Like a little.

Oh, yeah, a little mortarboard hat.

Yeah, no, you're right.

You're absolutely right.

We'll make our own.

There's a bunch of blank ones.

I didn't include them.

Yeah, there were blank stars.

Yeah, that threw me because I looked up how many stars there are, and the number didn't match the number I was working on.

I wonder if you can choose this.

This is now, this has gone from us solving someone's problem to us just getting a bit obsessive about

stars.

Well, Matt, you answered it.

Oh, as written, yes.

Yeah.

1,285 miles.

Yeah.

And after we went to the Walk of Fame, we went to Dave and Busters, which is a video game.

Dave and Buster's.

And we're delighted to find out that Dave and Busters, one of their company mottos is ding, ding, ding.

Ding, ding, ding.

Yeah, we got very excited by that.

So I'm going to give you a ding ding.

Ding, Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, Matt.

Some of them were Steven Busters, but Dave and Matt and Beck.

This problem

was starting

Beck

and starting.

No.

Oh, come on.

No, no.

Can't just put ding at the end of stuff, right?

I'm pretty sure I can.

If it ends in ING, stop trying to make starting happen.

Did we mention we've still spinal tap?

Welcome to Any Other Business, which is a bit like the bit in La La Land, where it's like five years later.

Yep.

And they wrap up some loose threads.

I'm saying yes.

I haven't seen it.

You've not seen it.

I've not seen it.

So many of you were so lovely after the evening of an A3.

We'd like to apologize, actually, that they made you wait in the cult.

Yeah, by they, you mean the venue, the venue?

Yeah, because they had another show going in.

They needed the...

so I spoke to them, and this is actually this is a recurring thing.

I spoke to them and said, look, a lot of people are going to want to say hi to us afterwards.

And they're very good at forming a line, as long as there's a system.

And the staff were like, oh, it's fine, send them out to the lobby.

We'll make sure there's a place they can all line up.

What I didn't realize is I was just going to send them straight out into the courtyard.

And it is warm.

in Southern California, but it was still pretty cold.

Yeah.

Winter at night.

Yep.

No cloud cover.

The line went out of the courtyard and then down the sidewalk.

So I'd like to apologize to all our wonderful, wonderful listeners who came along and we made them stand on a cold sidewalk.

Yeah, I mean, we had to stand outside too.

We were there too.

We were all too.

It's not like we were in the warmth while they waited in the cold.

We were all in it together.

I don't think the staff believed me.

They probably thought it was a joke when I said I'd be signing calculators for a long time afterwards.

Oh, yeah.

And it was not.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for waiting around and saying hello.

The other feedback we got was a lot of people saying, you know, I can't believe I made it, even though you only announced it

a week ago.

Yeah.

People are, oh, can we not have more notice and stuff?

And you're absolutely right.

The only reason that it was so little notice is because

we really struggled to find a venue that believed you that there was demand.

It's a combination of this bit last minute and obviously venues book up in advance.

But I didn't even get responses from most venues.

Yeah.

Because we got recommendations.

These are all venues where either our friends or friends of friends have performed and know people at.

Yes.

And I get on paper, hey, I'm a maths guy from the internet.

I want to come and get some nerds on a stage.

It's a tough sell.

But we're able to fill

200 seats in a week.

I think we need to leverage that into, we'll come back one day

and get a new, bigger

room.

Flappers were wonderful.

They were.

I'm not disrespecting the flaps.

But somewhere where people can line up and not.

Somewhere we can be inside.

Yeah, yeah.

And the sight lines are a bit better for the screen.

It was a comedy club.

It wasn't.

It was my flip chart.

I lost some of the audience.

Yeah.

So, oh, and by the way, if you were in the audience and you didn't see my flip chart, some of you were asking where you could see it at YouTube.

Just look up Beck Hill, YouTube.

Yep.

You'll be able to find my flip chart stuff.

But

if you want us to come back, if you want Matt to come back, the best thing you can do is if you know of any venues you think would be fantastic, they've got the tech, the screen,

they can seat at minimum 200 people, then please let us know and let the venues know.

Let the venues know because a lot of the time it just comes down to them.

And do you know what?

This goes for anyone because I, like, just as on my own, as a stand-up, I get people saying, oh, can you come and do Pittsburgh or

I'm like, yeah, if a venue will take me, but we need to convince them that enough people want to see it.

So if you want something to appear at a venue that you think would be good, tell them.

Tell the venue.

Contact the venue.

Let them know.

Be part of the demand.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That is so useful.

And it means that we as a collective

are more likely to come and perform.

So, because we all want the same thing.

Do you have any unfinished business in LA now, Beck?

You've done everything you came here to do on your first ever trip?

I've almost ticked everything off my list.

Magic Castle will have to wait for another time.

We were going to go to the Magic Castle.

Sadly, we couldn't make it.

It's got a dress code and we have not packed for that.

Did you do the tar pits?

No, I haven't done the tar pits.

Okay, I'm going to put that on the list.

Went to the Universal Studio tour.

Oh, yeah.

Got to do the

Springfield walk because they've all made a bunch of stuff that's like Simpson's.

That was very cool.

Super Nintendo World as well.

That was awesome.

Super Nintendo World.

You didn't tell me this.

Oh my gosh, did I not tell you you?

No.

I'll show you the Super Nintendo stuff after this.

But I'll be back, hopefully.

Yeah, we'll be back.

Yeah.

This has been great.

Send recommendations at A Problem Squared on Twitter and Instagram.

We look forward to the next one of these ridiculous on-location recordings.

Yeah, thanks for sticking around.

And look, if you are a new listener and you decided just to stay with us.

So stand through this one.

Look, you've got some really professional episodes coming up.

Oh, my goodness.

So bro.

Yeah.

How about you, Matt?

Have you got any unfinished business?

No, no.

I mean, I had a great time.

I think I did everything I wanted to do this time.

I enjoy LA.

It's nice.

My one final thing I have to do is record

my other podcast.

Oh, yeah.

Have you not done that yet?

No, I've got to do that tomorrow.

Back.

Enemy in Paris.

That's fine.

I'm off tomorrow.

Yeah.

I'll wait until you left.

I appreciate that.

We would also like to thank our fantastic Patreon supporters who went to patreon.com slash a problem squared.

And they give us the money that make this possible.

Make it very clear, they did not pay for this trip.

No.

No, no Patreon money

goes towards these ridiculous trips.

No, we didn't even get paid for doing the gig because we need to legally

charity gig.

Yeah.

It's ridiculous.

So, to thank our Patreon supporters who fund the making of the podcast, we pick three names at random and then we thank them.

Yes.

And

I randomize the names the same way I randomized.

the stars.

I put in an extra column, random numbers, sort by that.

And so I thought what I'll do this time is I did both at once.

So I've got randomized Patreon names, three of them.

Yeah.

But I've also assigned them a random star name.

Oh, nice.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

That's not problematic.

And there's so many stars.

I only recognize one of the three names

that came up.

Oh, they all start with the same letter.

That's a coincidence, by the way.

They've definitely been shuffled.

I want to make that very clear.

Sure.

So, this time, we'd like to thank Rory Hennell James,

also known as Clyde Cook.

Don't know who Clyde Cook is.

NF Nuf.

And they've been assigned Colin Firth.

CF.

The old CF.

Maybe it's N.

Firth.

Nolan Firth.

And Chad 3814 or Chad-3-8-1-4.

The numbers are spelled out.

They're spelled out.

That's some classy stuff going on there.

Oh, also known as Charles Butterworth, which is definitely

Charles Butterworth is a character that I made up.

It's not.

It's apparently a star, but it's a great name.

Charles Butterworth sounds like the name that I would give a butler.

They look like a butler.

I just googled them.

They're an actor who died in 1946.

Okay, so they could get a star in 1948.

Butler-esque.

Awesome.

I also want to thank Matt Parker.

That's me.

Or the Ryan Gosling.

The Ryan Gosling of the maths world, they say.

Yep, that's what they say.

That's what they say.

Myself.

Not many of them.

Beck Hill.

Yep.

Special thanks to Sam Kiefer.

Oh, yeah.

For lending us his recording equipment.

And his dog.

And his dog.

And obviously a huge thanks to our wonderful producer, Lauren Armstrong Carter.

Who's asleep right now?

Yes.

Better known as

shotgun Lauren.

Sorry, quote, open a quote.

Open quote.

Shotgun Lauren

close quote asterisks.

Yep.

Armstrong Carter.

So, uh,

actually, do you know what?

Um, have you had any interesting uh crisps?

I was gonna say, if you had an interesting crisp, weedly, I'm not gonna open them up because I know that some people didn't like the sound of that.

Oh, yeah, but uh, I've been told that they don't do tasty cheese-flavored Doritos here.

Oh, yeah, which surprised me.

Well, I've been told

but I feel that that's a different flavor.

Oh,

so after this, we're gonna try some.

I found jalapeno crisps

as in like dried jalapeno.

No, like they're potato chips, yeah, but they are very spicy, jalapeno flavoured because you can get a lot of chips in the UK that are jalapeno flavours these are more jalapeno flavoured than I've come across before.

I'll take a photo, okay.

Cool.

Well, good post-credits chat.

Yeah,

and

Los Angeles out.