123 = The Science of Fries and Mounting Sea Level Rise

Hello, and welcome to a Problem Squared, the problem-solving podcast, where you could say APS. It's as easy as 123.

As simple as Beck and me, APS 123.

Problem you and me solve. It's episode 123.

Oh, it is. Yeah, which I only realized like minutes ago.

I was like, well, I feel like it was such a waste of a great gag because it took me so long to realize what you were doing because you refused to sing anything. Correct.
Correct.

And on this episode, I will not be singing the following. But I will be looking at the difference between air-fried and oven chips.

I'm going to work out how big a mountain could solve rising sea levels. And there'll be some A-O-B.

It's easy as one, two, three, the number of the episode. Yay!

So Beck, how are we doing? I'm great. I saw the Totoro stage show this week, as in my neighbor Totoro, the Studio Ghibli film that's been turned into a stage show.

Matt is looking at me blankly as if I've just...

He's looking at me the way I look at him when he talks about spreadsheets. Correct.
Actually, because I'm doing the same thing in my head. My brain's going, I have no idea what Beck's talking about.

But I need to work out, does everyone else know what Beck's talking about? Or should I ask some follow-on questions to tease out what it is Beck is talking about?

I took your visual cues and then worked it into my

Studio Ghibli for those unfamiliar with it.

I don't necessarily agree with this description, but it's probably the best description I've heard. It's Japanese Disney.
Right. I think that's unfair.
I think it's far better.

All right.

I think there's so much more substance that's gone into the storylines and the art. And anyway, I don't want to diss anyone away from that.
Have you seen the sequel to Cars?

No. Okay.
For this very reason. No, it would, it would dramatically reinforce your argument.

Yeah.

So it's a beautiful film. They turned it into a stage show with the Royal Shakespeare Company a couple of years back.
And there's some brilliant puppetry in it. Like really, really beautiful.

And, you know, me, I like the way that things are used to create the feeling of something. And you're a sucker for a mechanism.
I'm a sucker for a mechanism. I'm also a sucker for puppets.

And the first time I saw the show, I cried so much that I gave myself a headache just because I was in childlike wonder the whole time.

And so I was like, I do need to see this again because I think I missed some things through the sobbing. yep

and name drop incoming uh the lovely Adam Hills who is a comedian here in the UK and Australia is a friend of mine we'd seen another stage show together and I'd mentioned how good Totoro was yep how I would happily go see it again and then he said hey should I get us tickets and I thought these are gonna be better seats than I got

yes yes you should and we had a lovely time and we both got quite emotional

which was nice so yeah it's a lovely show how about you Matt how have you been I've been good. I did my ESA flight.
Ooh, yes, you did. I've been.

Yes. Tell me everything.
So, to recap, for everyone who wasn't listening to the episode where we prepped this, I went on the Zero-G flight that ESA run out of Bordeaux in France.

And a company called Novospace run Air Zero-G is the name of the aircraft. They normally do...

zero gravity as the name would imply but this was the first time they were doing an exclusively lunar gravity run of flights. And I got to go on one of them.

And the flight involves 31 parabolas where for 20, 22 seconds, give or take, we experience one sixth of the normal gravity on Earth. You never got to do the zero-g no.
How do you feel about that?

I was torn. Yeah.
Because zero-g would be incredible. Yeah.
But lunar G

is far

rarer is the wrong word, but less common.

common it's harder to do yeah yeah because for zero g you just gotta go as fast as falling i guess or faster as fast as falling that is their slogan what's interesting about zero g is it doesn't matter which way zero gravity isn't because you're free floating yeah whereas lunar gravity they've also got to keep the direction of the tiny bit of gravity that's left in the direction of the floor of the aircraft.

Yes. So it doesn't like, you know what, the gravity like pointing in different directions.
So it's much harder to do. They don't do it as often.
Previously, they'll occasionally do lunar gravity bits.

As in, like, they'll do mainly zero-g, and then they'll tack on a couple lunar gravity or Martian gravity travelers.

So when you're doing lunar gravity or zero gravity, really what it is, is it's moving the thing around you at such a speed that in relation to the thing that you're in, it's like that gravity.

Correct. Because it doesn't change the laws of gravity.
But you're still technically bound by Earth gravity in that as a whole, the whole thing is having to move down. Yes.
That's 100% true.

It's equally true of the International Space Station because it's still in the Earth's gravitational field. It's technically falling the whole time.
It's falling, exactly.

So they get a bit annoyed. If you ever say you're simulating zero-G,

they get very upset, they being novice space, the people who run this thing, because they're like, That's the acceleration you're experiencing, or you're not. There's no simulating it.

It's exactly the same as the International Space Station, right? And the only way to get lunar gravity is to either go to the moon

or go on one of these flights.

And it's indistinguishable in terms of your immediate reference frame, which one you're in, because it's just you're being accelerated in that direction that amount in both situations.

When you said it's just either this flight or the moon, is there anything else? Like those like those catapult capsules that you can do at fun fairs?

Like do any of those like achieve that vibe? ESA also run drop towers that do the same thing.

But not for people.

You can put experiments in them.

So the bulk of what was on the flight,

you know, other than me, were scientists running experiments. to see what would happen in lunar gravity.
And they split into two categories.

There were experiments on humans, like medical experiments to see what humans do in lunar gravity. And then there was ways to sort rocks in lunar gravity.

Now, I don't even want to guess which one I was more excited about. Saving lives or sorting rocks.

Team sorting rocks over here had a great time.

So the rocks got to go on the fight. They don't go on the drop tower.
No. So they do do stuff on drop towers as well, but it would be things like that.
Like to make a protein shake. Exactly.

Yeah, like an extreme one. Exactly, not like that.
Yeah.

And the life scientists, they're kind of interested in lunar gravity, Martian gravity, zero gravity, places where they're going to actually put humans.

Whereas your more physical science experiments, they're just curious about how things change under different gravity amounts.

So when they have requests come in, life science people are like, we want lunar gravity, we want Martian gravity, we want zero gravity.

And then the rock sorting people are like we want zero gravity then 0.1 then 0.2 then 0.3 then 0.4 because they want data points to fill in all the gaps yep yep but everyone's on the same aircraft okay like you don't get your own special gravity so off they have done flights before where they've done 0.25 0.5 0.75 to try and fill in some gaps but this time they're like look we're just going to do all lunar Come along if that's useful for you.

And a bunch of people applied to bring their experiments. There was nine experiments, which were either life sciences, rock sorting, or seeing how things burn under lunar gravity, which was very cool.

They burn stuff on the plane? They burn stuff on the plane. What? You're not allowed to burn things on planes?

I found out

the hard way.

Yeah. I was trying to roast my marshmallows.

That's why they have smoke detectors in the toilets now. Yeah, actually, I've got to stop doing that in toilets.
Just got to get my kick.

Yeah, so to burn something on a plane, particularly a plane with all these other experiments and everything going on, and extreme gravity situations.

My image of this is like, you know, whenever they show, like, I feel like multiple times in films when they're trying to show that someone's like on a budget flight, it's someone in a stripped out, like, a cargo plane next to a crate of chickens.

Yeah. And now I'm just imagining like a livestock like floating around.
Pretty much that. Was there like a goat? There was no goat.
All the participants were humans. So

I know. I mean, I do think that's better.
I don't think it's fair on animals for them to be. They haven't signed up for it.
No, exactly. Yeah.

They

were burning a thing in a chamber, inner chamber with multiple exhaust ports plumbed to the outside of the aircraft. All their stuff.
It was a phenomenal amount of effort. But then between each...

bit of zero-G, they'd have to like open it up, take out the thing they burnt, load the new thing, seal it all back up again,

and then get ready to ignite it in the next. It's nice to know that the one thing all humans have in common is just how much we like to burn stuff.
Yeah.

There's a big database, which is basically what burns in space. And they were just adding in some more data points in the database of how things burn at what speed and et cetera.

And yet, when I told this to the authorities, they were not listening.

But you also got double gravity.

Because to go into the parabola,

you got to pull up

and then you're, well, it's 1.8 times normal gravity. And that's where you're most likely to be motion sick.

So you've got to be very careful to not move your head around too much because your inner eel is just like, what is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you do take seasickness, you know, medication and all this. I was, I did well.

Because at the beginning, they're like, you got to lie down during double gravity and you've got to do this and be careful. And then I was like, I'm pretty sure I'll be fine.

And then they're like, okay, the second time you can sit up. And then by the end, I was allowed to stand up, wander around.

But did you? Oh, 100%. Oh, okay.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they got, I got them to throw me balls. See if I could catch juggling balls being thrown to me under double gravity.
Could people throw them under double gravity?

Well, the people who were looking after me, my minders, do they're on every flight. So they're like, it's very funny to me that you had minders.

They're like, this guy needs. There's no point in my life where I wouldn't benefit from a minder back.
Beck. Yeah.

Oh, trust me. Yeah, exactly.
I'm in the same boat. Yes.
My mind just won't let me on a flight.

I had way more experienced gravity people helping me out. I didn't realize how much I would notice that all my organs

do different things, like in terms of how they sit based on gravity.

Because double gravity, you could just feel

all your organs inside being pulled down more than normal. How much heavier is double.
Would you believe Beck? I know. I know.

Shut up.

I mean, like, I've been on roller coasters and drop towers and stuff. Do they ever reach that? Oh, yeah, definitely.
Okay, so I have, I've potentially been aware of this feeling before.

I've never been aware of this before. But just not for as long.
It's so fleeting and variable to be for like 20 seconds consistently under that same level of gravity. Yeah.
You're like, that's weird.

And then, you know, that feeling you get like if you're in a car and it goes over the crest of a hill or a roller coaster and you feel like that kind of

weight.

It's that then like that for lunar gravity, but for like constant for 20 seconds. And you know, you feel like your stomach rises or falls when that happens.
It's that be like, oh, all my organs are

my face. My face isn't drooping anymore.
I de-aged. So like everything is just floating.
Like I wasn't even in zero G as well. This is just lunar gravity.
I got three little keepsakes over here.

I've now earned a official ESA patch. Wow

This was on my flight suit. That's

cool. I had to get the flight suit back.
Oh, and then the specific parabolic flight patch. That's a lovely patch.
And my unused sick bag.

When they gave it to me at the same time as the patches, I was like, right, my goal

is to keep this in mint condition. Yeah.
And I did. So there's my, I'm going to get them framed.
Maybe a shot of me on the aircraft. Yeah, that's nice.

Can you tell us anything else, or is this all for,

so I do apologize. It's all on a it's been center from Isa.
I've had, I was able to review a bit of it. It looks pretty ridiculous.

But, you know, lots of people sent suggestions on what you should do. Everyone who said yo-yo, I did not take a yo-yo.
I do apologize. Heartbroken.
Some people suggested

like an egg timer, like an hourglass. Oh, yeah.
I must take one of them. I took a chain fountain, the mold effect, a bunch of beads.
Oh, yes. Coming out of a pot.
A lot of fun. Yeah.
Pendulum.

Everyone recommended Pendulum. Nice.
They said it was the longest pendulum they've seen on the flight.

And

it moves differently under gravity. They were a bit like...
The grandfather of the clock's a bit much, but. Exactly.

And juggling balls. So they did a bunch of juggling.
That was the main event was me trying to juggle. Well, stay tuned to your YouTube channel.

Once I get that footage back, it'll be out probably early next year sometime.

First problem was sent in by Georgina who went to the problem posing page at a problem squared.com and started typing about how they would like to know why the nutritional value of their frozen chips is different depending on how they are cooked.

Now they do elaborate with some very specific examples and numbers. On the back of the bag they're holding, it said that for 100 grams oven baked, that would be 209 calories.

But then if you air fry the exact same 100 grams, it magically becomes 177

calories. And for both of these, Georgina has given us a breakdown because it changes the amount of fat, protein, and salt.

So they want to know, surely, When both oven baking and air frying, you would not apply oil.

So why are the calories changing? Why are the same amount of chips half the fat and salt in the air fryer? It doesn't make sense.

I'm skipping over a lot of question marks and exclamation points here as well. The point is, Georgina couldn't make it add up.
They want to know more, and they do love the pod.

Thank you for adding that at the very end there, Georgina. So, Beck.
I have an answer to this. Yep.
But I didn't reach an answer until I made a mistake

and answered wrongly. Basically, I misread the problem when I first came across this.

Normally, my first thing I do is I do do a little bit of a Google and then I'll do a deep dive and double check all my references and stuff like that.

So I did a bit of a Google and saw that lots of people had similar questions.

And so I went on a journey there until I realized that their questions

were about the fact. that on their chips, it was almost the other way around.
Oh. Like almost exactly the same, but the other way around.

Where the

calories were more in the air-fried

than the oven ones.

So

I

embarked on a journey to answer that, not realizing that I had misinterpreted this particular one.

And I found an answer to that one. Oh,

which is only going to make this one worse. Which made everything very complicated.

So when I was researching, I found that a particular brand of oven French fries said that it was 216 calories if it was oven baked

or 250 calories

if it was air-fried. And a similar case with the fat.
And so I looked on the company's website where they have the nutritional information for all of their products. Sure enough,

that's what it said. I was like, that's interesting.
Why is this the case? So I did a bit more research, found a few people theorizing and came to realize that, yeah, with the French fries,

when that's frozen, it's a certain weight. If you oven cook it, then it's going to lose moisture.

If you air fry it, it loses even more moisture because there's more air circulating, makes them crispy.

You know, air fries meant to be crispier and all this sort of thing, but it also means that the weight is less. So they're going by weight here.
So 100 grams of oven-baked french fries.

Weighed as they come out of the oven. Yes.

Is going to have

more,

is going to have fewer fries,

technically, than you would have in 100 grams of

air fried. Does that make sense? Yes.

Could I try stating it like this? Please. If you put, let's just say for argument, 100 grams, you weigh that exactly, of chips or french fries into the oven.

When they come out, they're going to weigh less. Yes.
But they're going to have the same amount of fat and salt and everything else.

But they might weigh like 80 grams now. Yes.
I'm guessing. Yeah.
And so you'd have to recalculate, because everything's calibrated to per 100, so you have to recalibrate.

Oh, now the calories per 100 is different because the calories haven't changed and the mass has gone down. But the mass goes down by a different amount in an air fryer.
Yeah.

So if you did weigh out the same amount of frozen chips, cooked them different ways. Yes.
And then eat them, you'd get the identical nutritional

total amounts. Correct.
But just the density would be different. Yes.
Because the amount of water has changed. Yes.
Got it. Yeah.
There is an argument that...

Depending on how you've cooked them, like an air fryer, like sometimes it drips, the fat and stuff drips down, so you end up with less fat. Oh, the fat's escaping.

Yes, but that happens when you cook it in the oven as well. It depends, like, sort of.
And it's assuming you don't then

lick the

base of the thing. Yeah.
And also, I don't know if you've ever made fries in an air fryer. It's not like it's like loads of it.

It's not like a George Foreman grill where it's like, and the fat runs off. Like, it's like, you know.
Straight into a cup for easy consumption. Yeah.
You got it.

Yeah.

So that solved that. And I, what I did is because I didn't want to just take people on the internet, their word for it.
I was not expecting that. I know.
And I was like, oh, that makes sense.

And do you know what? I emailed the company and I said to them, we've noticed this. This is what I think it is, but could you confirm? And they said, thanks for getting in touch.

Your theory is correct. They have more calories when cooked in the air fryer because it dries out the product more than an oven would.

Due to the smaller surface area and more ferocious heat that the air fryer provides, the airflow is higher, so that dries the product out more.

A drier product leads to higher carbohydrates because it is a potato product. Wow.

That was, I was like, great, solved. And I actually solved this in time for the last episode that we recorded.

And then I went to go put it together. And then I reread the question.
I went, hang on. This is the wrong way around.
This is the wrong way around.

So then I emailed Georgina, who had actually said in the problem as well, willing to send a photo. Yep.
And I went, could you send me that photo on the off chance that maybe Georgina had misread it?

Yep. Georgina said it.
Nope. Georgina's not misread it.
Whoa. Same, same company.
Same company. Different type of chip.
Oh.

So I found that product on the website, and sure enough, it's the other way around. And I was like, what?

Is it naturally resistant to ferocious heat?

Yes,

in a sense. So, and then I had to think about it a bit more.
And then I had to.

Is that what's happening? Well, no, they were specifically chunky style chips. Oh, it's a a volume to surface area thing.
Exactly. Dang.

That was a sound of me clicking and pointing at Matt because it's exactly. Love a good volume to surface area.
I had that theory, but I didn't want to give it to the company.

So I was like, I wrote back to the person called Kyle and I was like, hey, Kyle. Hey, Kyle.
Hey, thanks for that answer earlier. However,

this is weird. What's the case with this? And also in some cases, it was like pretty much the same.
And I was like, why is this different on the different products?

And I didn't want to tell Kyle my theory in case Kyle was like, yeah, yeah, that's what you said. I was like, no, I want to, I want to.
Kyle's got to earn it. Yeah, yeah.

And then also you get a verification that your theory is not spot on. Yeah.
And so basically, it's exactly as you were saying.

It's like, because they're chunkier chips, there's more potato because the surface area has like the fat and oil and everything on it. With French fries,

the amount of potato to surface covered in that fat and oil. Yeah, very little.
Yeah. And then you end up with, that's why French fries taste so good, good, right? Because most of it

is delicious. Is that with a little bit of soft deliciousness in the middle? Whereas the chunkier style chips, you've got more potato in it.
There's a spectrum from baked potato to crisp. Yeah.
Yeah.

Exactly. It's exactly that.

So Kyle said, as water content decreases during the cooking process, the concentration of potato solids increases, which means that a cooked portion may contain more nutrients and calories compared to its uncooked weight.

Chunky style chips, being larger in size typically have a higher moisture content before cooking compared to thinner cuts such as fries.

During oven cooking these chunky chips are exposed to heat for a longer period allowing more time for moisture to evaporate.

Okay so putting it in the oven is less dependent on that ratio because it's just heating it up.

Because the air fryer is so dependent on the ratio, as the ratio changes, the end result from air frying drifts from one side of the oven that doesn't care about the change to the other side. Yes.

That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And they've even come back saying, regarding crinkle cut chips. Oh, yeah, at last.
Those are the ones that

were like, their slightly larger size compared to straight cut chips does not usually result in a notable difference in cooking time. Because of the surface area of the crinkle.
Yeah.

However, it's important to note that potatoes are a natural product and the nutritional composition can vary, et cetera. Yeah.
All the, all the, you know, just in case you're testing.

Yeah. But I just thought that was fascinating.
How it

is fascinating. I don't own an air fryer.

I housed that for someone that had one and

I did use it. And I was like, oh, this is easier.
But in the sense that I was like, I can make single portions very easily without having to turn on a massive oven. And my oven is rubbish, by the way.

My oven has two options, which are on and off.

And the on is just hot. It's not ferocious.
It is. I mean, it is ferocious.
And there's no in between.

I have to like burn a thing and then quickly turn it off and hopefully it'll cool to the is your oven actually just a toaster it's basically a toaster yeah I just I it was interesting because everyone always talks about how healthy air fryers are like it's a healthier option.

It is a healthier option if you were cooking chunky style chips.

Well it's healthier but that assumes that you then decide how much to eat after the cooking based on mass.

Which I do to be honest. Oh okay.
I just kind of portion food out cook the food eat the food.

Yes, but I am more likely to portion like i know that french fries i want more because it's going to be less okay once it's cooked maybe if you're consistently doing it you know you just cook less if your version of cooking is putting frozen things into things that heat them correct this guy the old oven shovers you start to get pretty good at working out eyeballing it yeah

you know it's like when you go is this enough pasta and then you've made pasta for 12 people and you're like what like you just get used to how much you need after a while yeah that was interesting to go okay if you're making fries, if you're the sort of person like me who will make the same sort of amount to feel satisfied, not necessarily healthier.

I was expecting this to be the obvious answer is how much extra oil you have to add, but that was a distraction. I thought it was going to swerve to like.

The amount and way things are cooked changes how much we can digest it and extract energy. Oh, right.
Yeah. But it wasn't.
It was a surface area to volume ratio. Yeah.

so pleasing. So I think I've dinged that.
I'm pretty confident. But Georgina, write in again.
Let me know.

Let us know. I think your satisfaction area to problem-solving volume ratio is great.
Thank you. And whether it's of any nutritional value, national values to me

per mass. Georgina, let us know.

This next problem comes from Frederick, who says, I was thinking about sea level rise. Oh, no.

Wow. Fun loving Frederick, we call him.
Yeah. I do everything in my power not to think about it.
And thought, what if we simply

scraped a layer of the seabed corresponding to the expected sea level rise? Why did we not think of this? The doi

takes an outsider like Frederick. And they've said 2.2 meters by 2100.
2,100. How large a mountain could we make from those materials? Or probably more importantly, how many molehills?

It's a reference to a previous episode. Yep.
Thanks. Love the show.
Thank you, Frederick. We love you too.
I like the fact that this isn't about can we,

in theory, scrape a layer of the

ocean. Assuming we can.
Yeah.

What can we do with what we're doing? What do we do with what we basically? Yeah, that's what we got.

Matt, you have an answer? Well, Beck, we are going to get an answer. Great.

So I've taken Frederick's 2.2 meters just as red. I'm like, yep, sure thing, Fred.
Yep. Let's go with that.
And I guess it does make sense.

Like, if sea levels were going to go up by 2.2 meters, what if we just move the oceans down

by 2.2 meters? Why don't we just like drink that amount?

We'll just get a straw. Everyone gets a straw.
I know. You just have to retain the water.
Yeah, you can never pee. Yeah.

You just roll around.

What if we just shoot that water into space? Shoot it into space. There are very few problems that cannot be solved.
We shoot it

something into space. Yeah, there's like no, none of us are worried about the building amount of space junk there is.
No, that's just a lack of shooting it into space not hard enough. Yeah

Imagine if Earth got taken out by a trash ball from another planet that eventually just ended our orbit. We would have earned that.
That would be our deserved way to to go.

I don't want to be interesting. But we would have earned it.
This is why I don't think about rising sea levels. Because real dark, real quick.

Okay, so I looked up the surface area of the ocean, roughly 71% of the Earth's total area.

And according to my sources, 361 million square kilometers. Cool.
Which is a lot. That is a lot.
Well, a kilometre. A square kilometre is a million square meters.
Yeah.

Because a kilometre is a thousand meters, thousand times a thousand for area. So it's 361 million million square meters.
That is a lot. That's a lot.

And we need to go down 2.2 meters.

So it's a bit of a double that cubic meters. We are going to end up with roughly eight

times 10 to the 14 cubic meters of seabed to dispose of. Right.
That's roughly 800 trillion cubic meters. I think I got that right.

You could put any word after that, and I would be like, it's too big for my brain to handle. Eight times 10 to the 14.
That's what we're doing here. Can you compare that to, let's say,

Everest?

Well, that's where we're going. Yeah.

I mean, considering that they say that, what, the Earth is two-thirds ocean? Yeah, 71%.

Give or take. That's

That's a lot of land. Yeah.
And just at a two-thirds approximation. Yeah, that's a big country.
We would have to add 4.4 meters to all the land. It's going to be a really tall country, isn't it?

It's not a mountain. You've piled it up.
Yeah, because you get to a point where the... We've talked about this on the Molehills one, didn't we? Like when you get to a certain point, it starts going

and coming down. That's the exact same thing.
And there's a big mountain on Mars. Yes, Olympus.
Olympus Monson. Which is bigger, really big,

way bigger than Everest. And I think that's only possible because Mars has less gravity.
Different angle of repose.

And, would you believe, that's the sort of fun experiment you can do.

Did you stack some soil on each other on a limit soil? There were two different experiments looking at angle of repose of

moon soil, regolith. Well, I suppose it's very similar to an egg timer.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And that's why the people doing soil sorting sorting and slumping stuff were very interested in the egg timer. Because they're like, oh, that's...

And spoiler, one of them was like, oh, we put one of them in a drop tower once because they were so curious to see. Does time go backwards? It does go backwards.
You're right.

Yeah, the Superman theory of backwards time spinning. Do you get a big enough egg timer? that is longer than it's been since the drop tower was built.
Yeah, you know,

and time goes backwards. Does it go back to before when the drop tower was built?

Every now I try to bring us back to Frederick's problem and I realize that it's not going to be a useful answer. So anyway, what I thought I would just do is see

if we got the top 2.2 meters of the seabed and put it in a pile,

how tall would that pile be? Assuming it's on Earth. So we need to know what

makes up. the top 2.2 meters of the seabed.
Oh, of course, yeah. And some of it, like the new bits, is like volcanic rock.
Of course, yeah. Most of it, though, pretty old.

It's things that have fallen to the bottom of the ocean.

Silt.

Silt. I mean, that's the answer is silt.
I would also argue, in some areas, incredibly biologically

important coral reefs. Oh, that's a rounding out.
We're just going to dredge all of them up. Scoop them up.
Is it just to get it all?

No, it's like if you're vacuuming, you pick stuff up first yeah then you'll take the 2.2 meters out yeah and you put everything back on top oh okay okay yeah so we're gonna pick up all the coral reefs yeah sure sure i call them reeves reeves yeah reeves yeah

reeves

you played superman didn't he i think you did yeah

so i then started looking into different types of marine sediment

Because it varies a lot. Oh, here we go.
This is just on Wikipedia, actually. The material comes from several different sources and is highly variable in composition.

And I started to look into that because a lot of the ocean is covered in what's called carbonate ooze. And so I looked up carbonate ooze thanks to the fine people at CMAP Australia.

Oozes that are formed primarily from the calcius, so calcium,

shells, and bits of plankton. Oh, okay.

But it varies based on depth because the amount that carbonates dissolve changes on a bunch of things. So in the, I'm like, it's silt.
Most of the. Sea mud.
It's sea mud.

Look up my handy list of angles of repose. Yes.

19 degrees. Okay.
That's pretty slumped. Like, that's not a.

Yeah, I could walk up a 19-degree angle. It's good to be.
It's real. It's not, it's less of a mountain.
Yeah, it's more of an angle. It's not a lot.

Like a 19-degree road would have a sign saying steep road ahead. So it's not enough.
Yeah, but I feel like if you're climbing a mountain. You'd notice 19 degrees.

Yeah, but is that a mountain or a hill? Well, that's a good question. I don't think it's a mountain.
No. It's a hill.
Now,

I don't know if that's wet or dry silt.

Some things

stack steeper if they're wet, like topsoil.

That's I've just got a big list of soil types. Stickier.
It gets stickier, so it stacks higher. Other stuff, like loam,

will slump more if it's wet because it can slide over.

So, silt just has a fixed value that I've looked up of 19 degrees. There's a reason that you, when you're making a sand castle, you don't do it with dry, super dry sand.

But silt's gonna be much finer and sludgier and oozier, as we've seen. Oh, true, yeah.

So, there's gonna be ooze, then there's gonna be an optimal moisture where it's quite buildable, yeah, and then dust, and then

so I'm going to go 19 degrees, which is around about a one in three incline. Okay, so that's not a lot.

Now we're going to stack it. It's going to form a massive pile.
That's going to be a cone.

Yep. So we need the volume of a cone,

which is a third

pi r squared times the height. A cone, here's a sub fact.

A cone is a third of the volume of a cylinder with the same base.

Huh. So I've got a coffee mug here in front of me.
That's a cylinder. If I had a cone with exactly the same footprint and a point at the top of the mug, that would be a third.

That always strikes me as weird. Is that the same for if you put a triangle in a circle? Is that the same as if you put a triangle in a circle? I see what you're saying.
Yeah, a dimension down, no.

Although it's true of pyramids, any object which is a base and then a apex above it is a third of the volume of if it was just a prism all the way up. Fun fact.
That is an interesting fact. Yeah.

It makes sense to me because if I imagine a square base pyramid, if you got six of them and touched the points, you'd have the six faces of a cube and they'd all kind of meet in the middle if they were nice and neat.

Yeah. But that would be twice as high as the pyramids.
So I remember that. I'm like, oh, one pyramid is a sixth of the cube.

And so it's a third of its height. Yep.
Yeah.

So we're just going to work it out. We're going to do the equation.
We're going to do some

algebra.

Maths.

Matt's doing this by hand. Yep.
So the volume. So he's writing down volume.
Volume equals.

Now we had pi. Glad that's showing up.
R squared times the height of us. Big old pile.
You've done the dot for time. I've done dot for times.
Is that acceptable?

I mean, sure, it would confuse me, but why not? Shall I rewrite it with a time symbol? He's just crossed it out. Equals.
Here we go again. Okay.

Pi. Would you mind if I put the divide by 3 out the front under pi like that?

Sure. Great.
Please go. Be my guest.
Times the radius of the pile squared times the height of the pile. And that's what we care about.

But we just looked up.

It's on a 19-degree slope. And the tan of 19, the tangent value, 0.344.
That's our one in three slope. Could you explain what that means? That means

that

if you go a meter forward

if you're going up a 19 degree incline yep you go a meter forward you will have gone up 0.344 of a meter it's the ratio of how far across to how far up like uh the old um hypoth um that guy the old soccer pythagoras pythagoras it's a bit pythagorasy it's the beginning of trigonometry is just the gradient of a slope it's called the tangent because it's the gradient at that point so we now know that

the height

is whatever the radius is times 0.334.

Yeah. All the other way around, the radius is the height divided by 0.334.
So I'm going to replace radius in this equation.

It now equals pi on 3 times,

that's now the height divided by 0.334

squared

times the height.

So I've replaced the radius with the height divided by the slope. You're on board.

Look, I'm one of these people who I work my way, like I do cryptic crosswords by guessing what the answer is and then and then trying to pass it against the clue. Right, yep, yeah.

To see if that makes, to see if I can make it fit. And you get a bunch of plausible answers, and then you just.
Yeah, it's the same way I write jokes.

I do the punchline first and then work out how to get to the. Yeah.

So right now, i'm understanding as much as i can knowing i'm gonna have the answer sued and then i'm gonna yeah and then you can stop paying attention yeah yeah yeah no that's that's valid so anyway i'm just gonna rearrange this um that's gonna equal the volume times three so i'm just mentally flipping everything times 0.334 squared divided by pi

right so i've rearranged it to put the height cubed on one side and everything else we know on the other side because we know the volume that's what we worked out the amount of sea floor. We know pi.

We know these values. So

h is going to equal

the cube root of volume, which we said before was

8 times 10 to the 14. This is going to all be a meters times 3 times roughly a third

squared. I think that's going to cancel out, interestingly, divided by pi.
That's probably going to cancel out. Huh.
Right. Now we work out what it is.
I'm going to chuck it in the calculator.

It's really nice watching someone like the thing is I understand with practice

that this would all be like if I'd kept doing math since high school, I'd follow this much more easily because I do remember learning this sort of the way to rearrange things to try and get the answer that you need.

So this all makes sense, but seeing someone do it so smoothly and it's so second nature to you, it's like watching someone.

You know, when you go on holiday with someone, and then they like if you go to France and then they speak like fluent French and you're like, Yeah, I knew you could speak French, but I've never heard you use it conversationally, and it's just really impressive.

It's like that. We do a maths podcast together, but I so rarely see you do live calculations.
It's fun. I mean, I could have just chucked it in a spreadsheet and got the answer.
Yeah, but this is not

like to do the algebra. I mean, of course, it's it's partially pointless for an audio medium, but it does give

hey we have an award-winning producer yeah as of

this is what she wins awards this is what she lives for

the moment i start writing some maths down she's like ah this is gonna be really test my skills this is the premier league of podcast producing making this listenable

we will take a photo of this of this sheet of paper that matt's been working on we'll put it on socials

so you can have a look at the glory, at his beautiful mind. Yes.

The answer is

44 kilometers. High.
High.

That's quite high. It's wider than that.
It's high.

That's five Everests. Yeah, that's pretty high.

Yeah. It's weirdly almost exactly two Olympus Mons.

Right. It's a big one.
That's a big one. That's...

Well, I mean, a kilometer is a thousand meters. Correct.

And

we fly at roughly 10,000 meters. Like, very roughly 10,000 meters is the height at which we fly.
Yeah.

So

planes would fly into it, is what we're saying. Planes would fly.
Correct. Yes.
Yes.

And it would be roughly, give or take, six times as wide as high. It's 44 kilometers.
How tall is the Earth's atmosphere? What height is the Earth? Is it tall? How high?

It's like we mark it up against a door frame.

Oh, haven't you grown? Yeah. Atmosphere of Earth.
Now, obviously, people argue about this.

Oh, how's this pronounced? The

come on line is one definition of the edge of space. Yep.
That's 100k. Okay.
So we're not in space yet. Oh.
So it's not that high. It's not that high.

Do you meant Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from space? Yes, had the record for the highest skydive. That was about 36.5 kilometers.
Oh, higher than that. So it's higher than that.
It's high.

It's pretty high. It's not.
You wouldn't want to roll down it. Yeah, no, exactly.
Yeah. It's nice and shallow.
I mean, the bulldozers are going to have trouble getting up there, is what I'm saying.

I'm just pleased it's small enough. I don't really have to care about the curvature of the earth.
It's pretty wide. How wide is it?

263k. And I did double check.
I was like, well, I wonder how wide Everest is because mountains tend to be a lot pointier. And according to a,

or admittedly, a tourist website about Everest, uh, they say it's about 20 kilometers wide at the base. But I've seen different numbers around.

For me to compare this to, say, the size of a continent, can you give me a rough? I know we're talking a circle. It's not wildly different to all of the island of Ireland.

Or like the big chunky bit at the bottom of the UK. Okay.
We could comfortably fit it in like the US or in, you know,

somewhere in Australia. Yeah, this has just made me realize,

because I'm like oh that's not that this got it sounds more plausible all of a sudden I mean it's not no fun I think it's all it does is make me realize how small the atmosphere is compared to yeah everything and how much we don't appreciate how big countries are yes yeah and volume humans aren't good at estimating volume does this mean that if we dug up rather than dumping all this soil on a flat bit of land yeah and crushing a country or whatever, if we were to dredge up even more to make an island.

How to make an island on top of which you could put this.

Yeah.

I'm not asking you to do that maths, but I'm saying in theory, you could do that. Yeah, you could, yeah, yeah.
Because everything below the sea level won't make a difference to overall sea levels.

But you pile the rest up on top, and then sea levels would drop enough that that'd rise back up to where they were. And we melt the ice caps.
We would give the Earth just a pimple.

Turns out this is not a practical solution to the problem. Now, I do apologize.
I haven't converted that to mole hills.

What we're saying is, firstly, we can't make a mountain technically but we could make a very big hill.

A very tall country.

Yes. You can make a very tall pointy country.
So that's how large the mountain is. Great.
Big.

You're welcome, Frederick.

And now it's time for AOB.

As easy as one, two, three. And first up, Beck, I believe you have some dings for us.
Yes, more importantly, Morgan of the card game slash problem in episode one, two, zero says, ding, ding, ding.

Thank you both so much for answering my card game probability problem in episode one two zero. I have been listening to the episodes in reverse order.
Oh, so I'm not sure how you're going to get this.

Hell no. Well,

so I just got around to the newest episodes yesterday. Water trip.
Wait, what? Come on. How does that work, Morgan? It's the Superman paradox again.
Do yeah.

Reverse order

got to zero rollover back the tone

yep yep yep thank you for solving another problem matt beck's commentary when playing cracked me up oh thank you and having matt write some terrible python code for my problem is a dream come true wow morgan i didn't know it was an honor to be bestowed

General consensus from my family was that the chances of winning were higher than we expected. And my mother is convinced the problem.
I said mother because Morgan wrote mom.

And I was like, I'm not saying mom.

It's convinced the probability is somehow not applicable to her. That is so true.

Yep.

To answer your question, my father is not a mat nor a ben. No.
Just lucky. The first time he played was while my mom was.

I'm sorry. I'll do the opposite of rolls off your tongue.
It throws me every time. Was teaching him.
So he would not have had the knowledge slash opportunity to stack the deck.

I've thought about giving my mom. You say mom like it's too big to fit out of your mouth.
I don't. It just.

Yeah, it doesn't even.

It's so close to nom.

It's the opposite of a norm.

I have thought about giving my mom a nation a winning deck. But I know she will shuffle as soon as I hand it over, so I have never executed on that idea.

I do love the idea of having everyone else in my family win as a prank. I will coordinate that with my siblings.
Excellent. Now that is funny.
Excellent. Do you have any other business, Matt?

Okay, Alyssa,

who posed the gullibility problem in the same episode. Oh, yeah.

Slamming episode 120. Shit.

If it was a physical thing, I'd throw it out the window. Yeah, we're done with it.
Dinged.

Donged.

Take it off Spotify. Get it down.
Alyssa says they tried out Beck's responses for trying to reduce the amount of gullibility in the world. And they took him out for a three-week road test, my words.

And they're reporting back with their findings to their favorite twockly podcast. Because it comes out every two weeks.
Alyssa says, listening immediately led to introspection for themselves.

And longer discussions have improved understanding. Ah, so they are definitely giving it a ding, or at least that's what we tricked them into believing.

So, Alyssa has really gone to town on taking your advice on board back. And so they'll give us a bit of a breakdown on what their life's been like for three weeks.

Now they say they are obviously biased. I mean, that's what got us here in the first place.

But they think that their own gullibility may largely be from trusting claims with no obvious monetary or political incentive. That makes sense.
That makes sense. Because you go...

I literally asked you earlier about a browser I'm thinking of using. Yeah.
Because I don't trust it. Because I'm like, where do they make their money from? Exactly.
Yeah.

Yeah. But also, if you think, why would someone make that up? You're less likely to

think they have to gain from it. Yeah, exactly.
Why would they do it? Turns out some people are just jokes.

Until recently, Alyssa had never really reacted to optimistic trust beyond a short expression of uncertainty or surprise that the source was interested in the subject at all, aiming to neither accept nor outright reject.

So, what they're saying is that when someone believes a fact,

they're more like,

I don't know if I fully believe that because you want to have a level of skepticism.

But you also don't want to outright go, well, that's not true. Yeah.
A healthy background level of skepticism.

Yeah, but then not, doesn't go into any further to work out could it be or why would, you know, just doesn't delve any further, which most of us.

Don't do it. We're busy people.
We're busy people.

But they said discussing the reasoning for placement of trust has been very helpful in understanding better, which is one of the things we mentioned in that episode, just saying, like, ask people, what is your understanding of this subject?

Rather than like, you know, explain yourself. Yeah, exactly.
Well, instead of giving me your opinion, you ask what makes you think what you think. Yeah, how does that work? Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.

Elaborate on your clearly wrong opinion. Explain it to me like I'm five.
And they said, the most stark difference is that I tend to skeptically view claims that may make someone money.

Like we're just saying

instead of reasoning that someone who sells only a few things will know the products well. Oh that's interesting.
Yeah.

So if you do know a lot about a thing and you might make money from it but it also could make you an expert in it.

A more touching consideration I've learned is that distrust might be seen as an accusation of dishonesty. Yep.
So character is weighted over qualifications which I find very kind despite disagreeing.

Thank you again. I really enjoy listening to the podcast.
Twockly and your solution has been really quite helpful. Thank you, Alyssa, for how

you've summarized that in a way that I would have taken much longer and indeed have to explain.

Oh done. Alyssa seems very happy with our solution.
So we fooled them. Great.
I trust Alyssa in that we solved that problem.

Alyssa is a specialist in one particular problem.

So I feel like they know what they're talking about. And we also heard from Chris, who says, ding.

Hey guys, I posed the measurement problem from episode 119. Oh, the bananas.
Bananas for scale. Love the episode and the introduction of the Bechtrick system.
Yes.

I work as a land agent. Ah, Chris, we could have used your help.
Oh, goodness.

We got a slump to put somewhere. Yeah.

So I spent a lot of time measuring land and acres. From now on, I'll be referring to an acre as 30,900 standard becks.
Thank you. Wow.
It's only a matter of time before it catches on.

Yeah, how much time? P.S., can I pre-order my 3D printed standard reference Beck for when it hits the market?

Matt, you've got a 3D printer

here in the Nudio. I think you'd have to do it in various body parts and reassemble it.

For a one-to-one scale? Well, how else? What I would need is a small... A Desibec.
Yes, and then you would have to scale it up. If we have a way to scan you, I'll make you a Desibec.

Keep up the great work, guys. Blah, blah, blah.
Thanks, Chris. So many dings.

Well, I'm afraid we are now reaching the end of episode one, two, three.

As easy as one, two, three.

And

I'd like to thank all the listeners for listening along. No, thank you so much, everyone who listens to this.
We hugely appreciate it. We appreciate everyone who writes reviews for us.

on various podcast platforms, tells their friends about it, et cetera, et cetera. Or just, you know what, listen, enjoy, and keep it to yourself.
That's also acceptable.

And massive thanks to our Patreon supporters who keep this entire operation up and running. And we like to thank three of them selected at random every single episode by mispronouncing their names.

That this episode shall include

he, near, ick,

iform,

i,

benb,

Rain Don

So, I guess in the ongoing,

are we the Jackson 5 in this

theme? I guess.

I want you back.

Oh,

well done, well done.

And the other ones they do. The other ones they do.

Let's just go.

ABC.

You're B. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Laura R.

Oh, nice. Grimshaw.
Producer. Thank you for being here.
Award-winning. That's where the A comes from.
I've been C.

Matt plus C. That's my nickname.

Bye.

Well, just pull me out of my misery. Why don't you? Do you know what the most offensive thing is? I have to take the first shot.
All right, Beck.

Hit me with with a shot.

So I believe you have another three that I'm looking for.

I'm going to go for

H7.

H7.

Would you believe?

Miss. Yeah, I do.
I do believe. You would believe that because it's statistically very likely.

Now, if my deductions are correct,

I've got one hit in, and I now know the direction of your next ship that should be too long.

And I've still got a three that's floating free across the mighty ocean. Yeah.

The temptation to shoot everywhere else first.

Knowing.

Waiting until I get one away. Find the three and then bam.

That's so mean.

I'm not going to do that. How about a B10?

Would you believe?

You know, I probably would

say the words. Hit.
Yep.

And you have sunk my final battleship. I feel like we save the post-game analysis for next episode.
Oh, no. I have brought

a game for the next episode. No.
Oh, that's exciting.

But hey, if you've got analysis, by all means,

break it down.

If there's one thing I've learned from this, it's don't play battleship with planets.