A Problem Squared - 097 = Number of Maps & Numbered Pads

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

097 = Number of Maps & Numbered Pads 🗺 Are there enough OS maps to cover Great Britain? 0️⃣ Why does zero come before nine on a mobile phone?  📰 And, of course, some AOB! If you want to see Bec’s friend Amy’s summary of accessibility in Thorpe Park and theme parks more generally, head on over to her instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/longcovidrockstar/ Here is a picture of The Big Tractor: https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/08/giant-red-tractor-carnamah-wa-australias-big-things You can watch a brilliant Phone Phreaking Documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FufYSx2_6Bg&ab_channel=RCW39RJ Here’s that Numberphile vid about Phone Buttons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCSzjExvbTQ&ab_channel=Numberphile And the 17 Designs That Bell Almost Used for the Layout of Telephone Buttons: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-17-designs-that-bell-almost-used-for-the-layout-of-telephone-buttons/279237/ Please send your problems and solutions into the website: www.aproblemsquared.com. If you’re on Patreon and have a creative Wizard offer to give Bec and Matt, please comment on the ‘Sup ‘Zards’ pinned post!   And if you want (we’re not forcing anyone) to leave us a review, show the podcast to a friend or give us a rating! Please do that. It really helps. Finally, if you want even more from A Problem Squared you can connect with us and other listeners on Twitter, Instagram, and on Discord.

Hello and welcome to a Problem Squared, the problem solving podcast, which is a bit like a pair of pyjamas in that we are warm, do our best to cover everything and people often fall asleep with us on. That's true. I'm your host. That's true. I'm your host, Bed Hillow, a comedian very similar to Beck Hill, but much, much sleepier.

And your other host is Mattress Parkertons, a mathematician much like Matt Parker, but more soiled. Oh, wow. Thanks? And on this episode. I've got OS maps and the UK covered. I'll be looking into zeros and phone keyboards.

Oh, and my goodness is our... Any other bedtime. Any other bed-ness. Oh, bedtime. This is good. But bed-ness is better. A bed-ness, sorry. Matt, how are you?

So you mentioned people fall asleep listening to this podcast. Yes. Which is a real occupational hazard for me now, because I'm in Australia as we record, you are not. That's not, I'm not rubbing it in. That's just context for everyone listening. And while I'm out here, I'm doing a lot of my normal work. I'm doing some Australia specific work.

And one of the things I did was meet up with quite an eminent scientist who I'd emailed with previously when I had some questions and Lucy had a meeting at the same university. So I said, oh, I emailed. I said, hey, do you want to meet up? And we did. But then, and I knew this because when I email people

I'm like, oh, hey, I do YouTube or podcast stuff. Cause then they're like, oh yeah, they might know who I am. And they tend to respond. And she listens to the podcast. She listens to a Problem Squared. But she listens to it when she's falling asleep. So I'm not going to name the person. I don't want to dock someone for falling asleep to my podcast.

But we're having a conversation where we we're catching up on science, like and I'm trying to learn science in this conversation, but then she'll be like, like she can't tell things that happened in my life apart from dreams. That was the problem. And she'd be like, did your family have a battle with a tree? Yes. Yeah, we had a, oh, we had stump date on the podcast. It's weird enough when someone listens to the podcast and just knows details about our lives offhand, which is fine by the way, but it's even more surreal when they then not sure if they dreamed it or it actually happened to me. Yeah, because you and I constantly have the thing where we don't know if we've discussed

something on the podcast already and we'll say as much. What's that? Is that the opposite of a para-social relationship? Where we have a relationship where we don't know conversations we've had were recorded for public consumption or not. I guess a crossover relationship? Like para would be running parallel, right? So what's the word for two lines that then cross? An orthogonal relationship, a ripe... I like orthogonal relationship.

Yeah, a orthogonal relationship. Have you ever had a dream about someone in your life, like a partner or a friend or whatever, where they have upset you and then you felt a little bit annoyed at them when you see them in real life? I'm aware of the concept. I don't think I've had that happen to me. Do you hold dream grudges? Drudges, they call them.

I don't think I hold dream grudges, but usually it's if I dream, if it's someone that I see regularly, then I'm kind of like, oh yeah, you know, I understand it's just a dream. But if it's someone I haven't seen in ages and I dream about them and then I see them not long afterwards, it can take me a little while to shake off whatever

the vibe was in the dream. Usually it'd be something benign like, oh, I just dreamt that we went to a shop and got like milkshakes. And so when I see them, I'm like, are we getting milkshakes? Like there'll be a residual kind of like, you like milkshakes, right? Where that's something I've implanted. And I have to say the, did I dream it versus did I say it on the podcast, sensations are very similar.

Is that same? Especially when the sorts of things that we do are very dumb. Speaking of things that we do, which are pretty dumb. I'm in Australia, you're not. Again, not rubbing it in. There's a new big thing in Western Australia. I got messaged by the father of neighbor Nina, who people may have dreamt is my friends

who live around the corner in Goddaming. We were talking about the fact, cause we're away for a while, so they've got a key to our place so they can help out in case there's a problem. They then said mid conversation I do hope you're going to see the big tractor whilst you're over there. Perhaps that is why you were there. Oh my goodness it is a big tractor. I'm googling it right now. Whatever people at home are thinking of, it's bigger. Yeah, so it's a big tractor. It says made in Australia at the top.

And underneath there appears to be a police car, which are not small cars. They're like those sort of four wheel drive ones, parked under it. Quite easily so. Easily able to drive like an SUV style vehicle under the big tractor. Now very sadly, it's roughly a three hour drive north of Perth, and we do not have any going north of Perth trips planned at this time. If it had been there a year and a half ago when we went up for the eclipse, would have been great.

Would you say Matt, that they unveiled that because they want it to be a tourist attraction? Attractor. Excellent. So, we are driving in a south direction from Perth this time. So on the way down, we will go to the big ram in Wajin. So I'm going to go report our first ever host on location report from a big thing. I'm going to go via the big ram and I will report back next episode. Well, speaking of big things, I went to Thorpe Park recently, it's amusement park.

And I went on, I went on big roller coasters. Just very fun. I'm not, here's to, to, to use our previously coined catchphrase. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast already. But I have two, two friends who the three of us have in the last year become single and we formed the first wives club club because I'd never seen the first wives club and so we decided the three of us to get together and watch that.

So we had the first first wives club club. Yeah. Then we had the second wives club club where we watched big business with Bette Midler in it. So basically we've become a Bette Midler appreciation group now. And then the topic of roller coasters and theme parks came up and we were like, are we going to do this? Are we doing our first excursion as the first wives club club?

So we decided that we would go during a school day so that it would be nice and quiet. We did. My friend Amy has long COVID and she's long COVID rock star on, on Instagram. She posts a lot about accessibility and things like that. So we'd been talking about as if it was a school trip. And I said, how cute it'd be to have little packed lunch and lunch bags. out as if it was a school trip and I said how cute it'd be to have little packed lunch and lunch bags. So I surprised the other two by getting us custom made little lunch bags, little branded bags, the first wives club poster on it with our faces very poorly. Microsoft

paint job. Great. Love it. I can picture it exactly. Yep. And they were club. And I handed them out and Amy burst into laughter and revealed that she had also got us personalized lunch boxes. That's so good. It was such a good thing to do. So that's what I've been up to. Had a really fun time at Thought Park. For anyone curious, I believe that by the time this episode comes out, Amy will have a video up on her Instagram about the process of applying for accessibility at amusement parks. And what is the theme at Thorpe Park?

Is the theme just theme park themes? Just roller coasters mostly. Roller coaster themes. It's just all roller coasters. I really enjoyed Swarm. That was my favorite. It's alien themed. I've went to Thorpe Park once and I was there with my friend Eugenie von Tunselman.

She was involved in the VFX for the film Interstellar of the Black Hole. She's also a huge roller coaster nerd. She's like giving you the stats about the roller coaster. It's got this many inversions, like you go upside down that many times. And then when you do the roller coaster ride, she's counting off all the things that she mentioned before the ride, on the ride, ticking them off as you go around the ride. Never before has being on a roller coaster been so similar to filling in a spreadsheet. I had a great time.

Well, sounds like maybe it was easier to arrange that than for an accessibility pass. It sounds like it was easier than the accessibility access. Our first problem comes from Severin. S-E-V-E-R-I-N. Severin. Severin says, hi. I stumbled across a chapter on ordinance survey maps of England in Matt's newest book.

Great read, by the way. They're talking about luck triangle there, which is available. Yeah, I wonder why Matt chose this problem. Bookstores. It just came up organically. Great Christmas gift. Severin says, are there actually enough maps

of Great Britain that if you were to lay them end to end next to each other to practically tile them, that it would actually cover the whole land? Now, I'm guessing that this is different, like not just copies of maps, right? I took it to mean maps that currently exist. OK, so not like different brands of map or something. Yeah, well, I started off by thinking, are there enough like OS maps that if you put them all out you could cover the UK?

But you can widen it out to are there any maps of any type that if you put them all together you could cover the UK. And what's the difference between an Ordnance Survey map and say road map. So an ordinate survey map is done by the ordinate survey who have been mapping the well the reason and actually Severin's been pretty good at this specifically Great Britain. They are in charge of mapping Great Britain and have been for centuries and that's including Scotland and Wales, not including Northern Ireland. Like a secret society, a secret mapping society.

They did one big triangulation late 1700s, early 1800s and by that I mean they went out with surveying equipment and covered Great Britain in triangles and then measured them all so they know exactly where everything is. And this was a bit revolutionary because we know the thing is how do you draw an accurate map? Maps are so difficult to draw accurately and they're really useful once you've got them. They do have a long history with you're saying secret societies and whatnot but they are well at least they have been historically and things continue to be a military technology For mapping. Oh less fun stuff. Yeah less fun stuff because if you've got to move troops and armies on foot Knowing the shortest way to get somewhere

Factoring in elevation it's not obvious at ground level how to get places faster than someone else moving troops So a knowledge of terrain and distances and elevations is incredibly important. And piracy. And piracy and burying treasure. But famously, maps for burying treasure are often not as accurate as they could be and leads to some ambiguity in where the treasure is and makes it difficult to recover it. The OS maps were the first kind of really accurate maps that covered all of Great Britain. And now we can't take it for granted

that the westmost point on the Great Britain mainland is Land's End. I mean, it's called that. But prior to OS maps, we didn't know that. It's been reported people thought Cape Cornwall was the most westerly point in England, whereas there's actually Land's End. And that was just from like, guessing. Yeah, from looking at it. There was no easy way to get a bird's-eye view

other than drawing a map and then looking at it. And when OS OS maps which are originally done for military reasons were made Available to civilians so anyone could buy them. This was the 1840s. I want to say ish early 1800s They were incredibly expensive, but they became incredibly popular loads of people were buying them Because it gave you the sensation or you could look at something as if you were flying over it. It was the only way to get a bird's eye view of the landscape. There was an extra layer of novelty that we don't appreciate now, because we're so used to views from above, that these were just such an alien viewpoint on the landscape. The first generation of OS maps in the early 1800s cost per map more than the average week's salary at the time.

Wow. Crazy expensive. Yeah. To this day, OS maps, the organization, have an aircraft that they fly over the, that they fly over Great Britain to double check where everything is. And just in case it's all changed. Just in case it's moved. Have a guess how many things in the OS map changes per day? Average number of changes per day. Well, now does an OS map, we're not just talking topological are we?

Well, yeah, so the OS map is like footpaths, roads, hedges, the works, like it's just basically everything in the UK. Right, so probably quite a lot of things change, because obviously trees and stuff change, like plants grow, roads are built, buildings are built. All of Great Britain, hmm. I like, 700 things. 20,000. I was close.

I wouldn't have, I would have guessed you're right. Something, you know, hundreds maybe, but yeah, on average, if you take all the changes they make to their database every year and divide it by the number of days, it's an average of about 20,000 things that change. And they try to fly over every part of the UK at least once every three years.

Their default resolution is one pixel for every 15 centimeters. They're about two gigs of photo and they take thousands per flight. They put them on a hard drive and ship them back to the main office. They're too big to send online. So there could be one map that covers the entire UK

because it's to scale. Yes, and that's part of how I worked out our problem here from Severin. So for people not in the UK, another quick bit of information, you can buy the OS maps printed out, but they come in a special folded up way and they've got a special cover and they're very pleasing. I may have a whole drawer full of them at home. special cover and they're very pleasing. I may have a whole drawer full of them at home. And so these are like classic physical objects

you can buy and then you go for a walk and you'll see people in the countryside all the time walking around with these maps, trying to work out where they're going. So that's why I thought it was an interesting question. Like, are there enough of these maps around that if you got them all out, you could cover the UK. Now, the way that would be logical to answer this problem

would be measure a map, work out its area, and then work out the total area of Great Britain, divide one by the other, and see how many maps it would take. You could do that. You would get the answer very easily. I thought I'd be clever about it. And by clever, I mean Deliberately complicated. I realized the map comes with a scale The Explorer map is 25,000 to one that means every that means it's already telling you how many of that map Like the magnitude. Yes, it is. So it's that's how many It would be yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's already giving the scale. If I was to say this doll of me is one one hundredth Bec hill then you know that a hundred of those would be my size.

So I was like well we've already got the scale that answers the question sort of. So the two complications are one yes, it is 25,000 to one So like every centimeter on the map is equivalent to 25,000 centimeters in real life 250 meters. That's only Distance so like you said if your Bechill doll was 10 to 1 you'd need to stack 10 for your height But they wouldn't be the same area as Bechill. They wouldn't be the same volume as Bechill. You've only done the same area as Beck Hill. They wouldn't be the same volume as Beck Hill. You've only done length, one dimension. I see.

The maps, we care about area. That was if it was instead of 100. Oh, you did say 100 to one, but that would be a very small doll. That would be ridiculous. Doesn't that work in, not volume, but doesn't that work on the X axis as well? Like if we're going vertically, yes, but it would also be ten dollars across correct.

It's ten in each direction or for the case of the map twenty five thousand in each direction so area you gotta multiply two of them together so the area is six hundred and twenty five million to one. Which is just twenty five thousand squared. million to one got it which is just 25,000 squared So it means at that scale a map you would need 625 million of them assuming Great Britain is flat Assuming Great Britain is flat and in a previous episode We've covered you the ups and downs of the terrain count towards the surface area We're not going to get into that here the answer is yes a bit because that's only if you had a map Which was all of Great Britain you would need 625 million OS maps, but each one is the entirety of Great Britain to then cover Great Britain

But you don't get all of it in one you get a little bit in each one So that's the complete collection That's if you had one of every map that covers the entire country. Then that would work. So the answer is yes, the OS maps could cover all of Great Britain if in existence was 625 million complete sets of maps, which based on the current UK population, admittedly not Great Britain but close enough, which is almost 67 million,

is nine complete sets each. I don't even own a complete set. I love these maps. I've got an above average number of these maps in my house, and I haven't even got the complete set. There's no way on average, the average person the UK owns nine full sets of maps that cover. The UK and OS maps at this scale is like the best case scenario most maps are smaller scale. So they cover less each so in conclusion. I don't have to work out the area of a map I don't have to work out the area of a map. I don't have to work out the area of Great Britain.

All I have to do is square the scale and compare that to the population. And I can say definitively, there are not enough OS maps. Well, specifically there's not enough of the explorer style maps, but given we're out by an order of magnitude, even if you factored in all the other maps, no one owns on average enough maps to cover the UK 10 times over. Which is roughly what we're saying you'd need to have. So the answer is no.

What about places that have just loads of maps to offset people who don't have maps, like map shops? Yeah, map shops have a lot of maps, but they haven't got enough to drag the average up. You could ask OS if they can give you the number of maps they've printed. I did look online to see if they already made that number public. Even if people don't own them. to see if they already made that number public. Because the maps might exist even if people don't own them. Are you saying somewhere there's a warehouse that contains enough paper equivalent to the surface area of Great Britain?

That feels like another problem. It's not a... it's... now, I could have done the area calculation because I knew, like, the answer is going to be no, because the area of Great Britain is so big, and paper is, in this sense, quite thick, the volume of map it would take to cover Great Britain is gonna be off the charts. But I thought it was more interesting to do it using the map scale factor,

because that's kind of fun. Yeah. OS maps, I couldn't find their actual sales figures, they do release, and I think this is a bit mean, the 10 least popular selling maps in Great Britain, and they're all in Scotland. And then they specifically release the top 10 least popular maps just from England. So the least popular map in all of Great Britain is Explorer Map number 440, which covers, and I apologise if I mispronounce this, Glencastle and Glen-oical? That's obviously wrong.

In Scotland. That's the map the fewest people bought. If you limit it to just England, it's Explorer Map number 248, which is born and Hekington. Hekington. No one likes to ramble in Hekington. To Hekington they say. They don't say that. They're not going there.

No one's going to Hekington. Hekington. Oh, no way. Born in Hekington. Wait a gosh darn minute. Whoa. So Hekington is in Lincolnshire for anyone wondering. And hello any listeners from Hekington is in Lincolnshire for anyone wondering.

And hello any listeners from Hekington. One of its best known features is a eight sailed windmill. Wow. Hekington falls within the drainage area of the Black Sluice internal drainage board. So, you know, it's pretty exciting stuff. Great place for a walk. Yep. I can really put them on the map. That was a bit... No one bought. Fine, I'll buy the map. I think we know why.

No offense, Heckington. I'm sure it was wonderful. I will say the OS Maps people, their media team have been very helpful in the past. I've contacted them with questions and they've been great. So I could have gotten in touch and said, how many maps do you sell? They might have said, so I could have gotten touched and said how many maps do you sell they might have said we can't tell you Given that I couldn't find like they do a lot of press releases, and I couldn't find the sales figures anyway I found that six million people have downloaded the app

That's probably not a bad metric for the number of people who use OS maps in 2015 if you bought a paper map That's when they started including the digital version with the physical maps. So 6 million OS map users at a civilian level is probably about right. And that means I'd have to have a hundred full sets each for there to be enough to cover Great Britain. So I could square the scale and look at the population and say no, not possible. Wow. I think you've gone to great efforts to triangulate that answer. Hey, thank you.

And you went to the additional effort of flying overhead to check for any changes. So I'm going to give that a ding. Excellent. Sorry. It was a bit ramble ding. Well, if you got a bit lost, I know a good rambling map. Next problem was sent in by William, who went to the problem posing page at aproblemsquared.com and said hello Beck and Matt. Lovely opening William.

It seems like many people they point out for the second completion, they've listened to everything in order and they've just caught up to the most recent released episode which means they remember our older episodes better than we do and they would like to dredge something up. They have a problem with telephone keypads. So they remember an old episode where I was saying that zero is a perfectly valid number, which it is. They've got an extra issue with that.

They think the buttons on a phone pad are out of order with zero coming after nine. They want to know why is this? And how can this be changed so that zero takes its rightful place before the one? You preach it, William. They then want to say, will this always be a problem? Bec, you looked into this. Is this a problem?

Can we fix it? Well, I mean, no, yes, sort of. No, it's not a problem. Yes, we can fix it. That sums up a lot of this podcast. Yeah. So, I don't think I had really made note of this in the past. The only time I have was when I found it really funny that in Australia, our emergency number was 000. Yes. Which means that on an old rotary phone, it would be the longest number to call. The longest one possible. Yeah. In an emergency.

Hrnk. Dik, dik, dik, dik, dik, dik, dik. Yeah. Which I found very funny, but also upon realising that, kind of accidentally answered the problem. Can we quickly define the problem though? Because on a calculator, I've just brought up the calculator app on my phone, the numbers very neatly go from 0, 1, 2, 3,

4 and count all the way up. Yeah. Calculator keypads make sense. Very happy with those. If you then switch over on exactly the same device, not only do the numbers go in a different direction, they come down the screen as opposed to going up the screen,, not only do the numbers go in a different direction, they come down the screen as opposed to going up the screen, but the zero is at the wrong end of the numbers. It starts at one, gets to nine, then you got zero. The zero is relegated to like the other weird symbols, the hash and the asterisks. So I don't know why calculators got it right and phone keypads have got it so wrong

and that lives on in our smartphones to this day. Yeah. So it goes back to rotary phones. Oh. So what would happen is you would, with a rotary phone, if anyone is imagining it's like a circle, you got your numbers, it goes from one to nine, zeroes at the end. So the way that you would operate a rotary phone dial is you would stick your finger in the little hole

where the number is, and you turn the dial clockwise. And what would happen is that there was a finger stop, there's a little metal bit there. So as you would turn the rotary, I realized I'm doing this visually, but for you guys listening, can't hear this. Becky is miming, I think it's wax on, but with the single finger. Yeah, basically.

I feel like I used a reference, cultural reference from the time of rotary phones that may not have helped. No. So you would turn that until you hit the finger stop, which is as far as you could rotate the dial. The rotatory. You take out your finger and then if you remember it'd go dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, you made the sound before Matt, dig, dig, dig, as it went back. And that's because the dial was spring loaded. And as it turned anti-clockwise, as it returned to its starting position, it'd be at a fixed

rate controlled by an internal mechanism. As it turned, it would open a contact which sent a series of pulses along the phone line. Can I add something in? The pulses it sends is actually it briefly hanging up. They're tiny hang up pulses. Yes, on and on. So. It's like binary.

Yeah, yeah. But it means you could dial by just tapping the hang up part of where you put the phone. Wasn't a rotary phone. It was just like a, at the time, more modern phone. But when you hung up, you put the physical phone down, it would disconnect the line. By tapping the disconnect button fast enough,

you could manually tap in a phone number by doing the correct number of taps fast enough with little gaps as if it was a rotary dial, because the system still allowed rotary phones. Yes, because then when tone dialing became a thing, and that would work on different tones, so if you remember, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop,

you know, as you're dialing, that would basically be using the same idea as like a pulse, but it would use a different tone for each number. And so that was faster because you didn't have to do loads of pulses for one number. You just had one tone for each number, which meant that sometimes if you played that tone, if you were able to recreate that tone down the phone line, it would still dial even if you couldn't press the buttons on your phone. So if you could record the tones of something dialing, you could play that down the phone line and it would still dial.

Okay, two dumb facts. One, I'm pretty sure it was a Casio watch that would store phone numbers that would then be able to play the tones from the watch so you could just hold it up to the phone. I may have misremembered that. I'm pretty sure that was a thing that existed. Could have been a dream. Could have been a dream. Also there were people who worked out that when you use some pay phones or you put money in it would signal the amount of money you put in by using tones over the line. So you could just record those and then play them back to get free calls.

Amazing. line so you could just record those and then play them back to get free free calls. Amazing. Back when just the frequency of the pulses encoded all the information you could record it and replay it back and there was no way of telling. There was definitely a phone freaker called Captain Crunch who realized a free... I'm sorry you're gonna have to start again. What's a phone freaker? Oh like an old school hacker. Like a hacker before there were computers.

A phone freaker was someone who would... it was like what they called hacking. They called it freaking. I'm glad they changed the name. Now I think about it. They realized you could get this children's whistle that came in Captain Crunch cereal and it would recreate tones to be able to pick up a payphone and use the whistle to load money onto your call to then get a free call. Yeah. Old school. Old school freaking hacking.

Oh, I love this. So that's what would happen with the pulses. So it would go like one pulse and that would be sort of turning it on and off, then two turning it off and off twice. Now, because zero is a number, but you can't denote zero with zero pulses, because then it's just not on. There's no way the telephone exchange would know. Very similar to Morse code. If you think about that, you'd have to leave quite a long gap. Yeah, to indicate the end of one and the start of the next bit of course. So what they did is they decided that to dial zero, you would need 10 pulses.

So the zero was put after the nine. Gotcha. So that when you were dialing on the rotary phone, you let go, it has enough physical distance to come back and hit that mechanism 10 times. So that's why the zero came after the nine. Then the design just naturally carried over to modern push button phones. Some countries did adopt different systems. So in Sweden, a zero sent one pulse, a one sent two pulses going from zero to nine. That works.

Now, Matt, when I started answering this, you weren't sure if we'd already covered this. And I suspect that the reason that you're not sure if we'd covered it is because Numberphile did a video. That did then dawn on me. We did a whole bunch on Numberphile. Yeah, talking about the 17 designs that Bell, as in Alexander Bell, almost used for the layout of telephone buttons when buttons were introduced

There was the 10 pin which is reminiscent of bowling pin configurations the rainbow Such a good sort of like a nice little arc the staircase not a fan of that one personally. That's awful Well, yeah, it's more like a sort of diagonal Yeah, it's funny what hindsight does, because you look at it and you're like, these are all chaos apart from the obvious one. But that's just because we've been staring at that now for decades.

Yeah, what's interesting is one of them is basically the calculator layout. Yeah, she'd done that. But I suppose they've gone for the one where it's counting from the top left to right going downwards. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine in that sort of configuration of three by three square. And then the zero is just put on the end, which I can sort of understand as being like, cause if the nine was just an additional one, there's something kind of like, if the nine was just an additional one, there's something kind of like, ugh, ugh. If the nine is just like sitting there, I would maybe have accepted if the zero was in the top and then you had the three below it.

I think they should have just had one to nine in a square and then if you press all of them at once, that's a zero. Like a hand smash. Yeah, all, yeah. This has been quite good for me because I'm going to show you an impulse purchase that I made recently. Which I didn't realise until answering this is an incorrect phone now. So this is a handbag that I recently bought. It's definitely a phone. That's so great.

Well, zero is the only one in the right place. Yeah, so the numbers are going anti-clockwise and has a zero at the start. So is everything wrong with this number pad? And I did not realize that. I did not notice until I started answering the phone. Answering this phone. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is the great thing about this. Oh what, you can plug your phone in. Yeah, let's see what it sounds like if I plug in.

Oh, okay. Now I'm talking to you through the phone. Hello. Okay. I'm sorry. This line is busy. Goodbye. Yeah, so that's um... That's hilarious. That was a great impulse online purchase, which I'm still very happy with. You should be. Well, Beck, I think some people would have just phoned that in. You have answered the call and I'd never thought that it was the rotary heritage that had left Zero

abandoned on the incorrect end of the run of numbers. So I'm going to give you a ring a ring a ding There it is already for it. I was like Matt you better. I mean it's right there. Oh, yeah Yeah, it was it was waiting so yeah great work. I didn't realize that and now you've inspired me to check if Modern phone networks they slip set pulse dialing or has that been discontinued? Oh That's someone let us know that's a video. That's a that's so yoy to ball Now on to any other business where we will cover things relating to previous episodes. Matt, would you like to hit us off with the first one?

Alex sent in some Any Other Bed-ness regarding finding enough prefixes for kneels. This is our various size kneels problem. How do you describe all the kneels? Apparently, there is no need for such an ordered list of size words. Huh. They've defaulted to a list of olive sizes. Okay, so allegedly olives come in different sizes. There's a few variations depending on where you're on the world. In Europe at least it's a relatively standardized range of nine different size kneels going from bullet kneel all the way up to mammoth kneel. Assuming we're not

using any ones with extra or super prefixes. Ah, there you go. So thank you Alex. We can use technology already developed for the olive industry for our various sized neels. They do say however unlike olives, there are probably fewer than hundreds of neels per kilogram in all cases. That is very true. Well I should also add that whenever I drive to stay with my dad in South Australia, I go past the big olive. What? Which is surprisingly small for an olive.

There might be more of them in Australia, but there's one in South Australia that it's not as big as you would expect, but it is big compared to an olive, I guess. Yes. Is the macadamia not all over again? And on the same subject of Niels, we heard from Laura Pigeon on the Discord.

Which by the way, we do have a Discord. We got Discord and Reddit for anyone interested. And it said, The Neil's stuff last ep is the most I've laughed in like a month. Thanks Laura. Us too. I didn't think Neil's was going to be this popular. Yeah. It was so fun. I will say that our WhatsApp group for Problem Squared with

Producer Lauren Armstrong-Carter. And Matt and I. Does in brackets have I will say that our WhatsApp group for a problem squared with producer Lauren Antwokata and Matt and I does in brackets have Intense Neil increased Neil increased Neil Ben crazy Neil on the end of our WhatsApp group name enhanced Neil Anyway Laura pictures that I imagine it'd be possible to do something like this for size words, but I don't envy people whose job it is to get people to survey on things. And then Laura linked to perception of words describing sizes of groups. There was perceptions of probability.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's a really cool plot. So it's people have obviously been surveyed to come up with the probability So almost certainly comes in at about but you know 90 just before 100% Highly likely is just before that Very good chance just before that for each of these interesting ones. Which is kind of fun. Yeah, there's some interesting ones where the It's more specific as to what people think it is. So for instance, about even is very heavily just on 50%.

Bam. It's very steep bell curve. Whereas something like we believe can vary from 50% to Spread right out. Around 90%. It's very interesting. It's pretty much the exact opposite to We Doubt, which is very pleasing. Yeah. Like a mirror image. Yeah, exactly.

Greg also sent in some, any other business. They phrased as a problem though, and their problem is one of their favorite podcasts, could be any, will tell me they're sharing pictures on social media, but the only place they share is on Twitter. Since Twitter is now terrible, correct Greg, how can they convince the podcast hosts who seem to be very lovely people to use alternatives such as Blue Sky, okay Greg, we know you're talking about us, good point. What do we do at the moment? Do we do Instagram and Twitter? Hypothetically, yes. So I wanted to say that-

Hypothetically? What do you mean by hypothetically? Well, I'm the one who's in charge of the Instagram and I maybe dropped the ball on this one. Oh! I don't feel like Greg is checking Instagram, regardless. No. Not a grammar, you're Greg. But I do apologise. They're a bit behind, so I will, at least by the time this episode comes out have put up all of the the ones that I've missed I don't think there's too many I think I'm pretty much up to I might be an episode or two behind the

problem is that normally what I would do is I would listen to the episodes as they're released and be reminded of myself. Oh, to do that thing. There are things in, there are things in check. There's Lauren Armstrong-Cutter, a lovely producer, has put things in check to remind me, and I've ignored all of them and gone, I'll just wait till I listen to the episode,

but I got busy and I am behind on listening back to our episodes. Okay, that's the problem. But I feel like we could, I mean, there's very little extra effort. I mean there's some extra effort That's not me who has to do it to put everything out on blue sky and Mastodon and is myspace we still put stuff on myspace. Do we just put it on everything?

Threads, let's get it on threads. Get on threads. That's what we're missing and we heard from Miles who said, hello, regarding the rainbow problem in episode 92, zero nine two, just in case, I realized that the word rainbow has seven letters and have thus come up with a mnemonic for it. I can't believe I didn't pick up on the seven letters in rainbow. I feel like a fool. I'm so glad that we have listeners like Miles who are looking out for these things. Pick up the slack. Yeah. So Miles said, I may have taken some liberties with how well the colour named

actually appears in the rainbow, but I've done my best. So cut me some slack. Miles, I'm already cutting you some slack. So here we go. Ready? We got slack to spare around here. Red. That one's easy. Oh yeah, that's true. Love it. Then the next one, a ap We got slack to spare around here. Red, that one's easy. Oh yeah, that's true. Love it. Then the next one, A, apricot, which I love again. Now remember if we're going Roy G. Biv,

so that's red, orange, apricot, orange. I'm pretty happy with that. Solid. Icturine. What? Miles adds, look it up, it's on the Wikipedia category page for shades of yellow. I feel like if a mnemonic requires further reading it's defeating some of the purpose

I think it's a good way of teaching people the word ictarine That's the only way as it currently stands Yeah, I feel like an ictarine is what happens when you bite into your nectarine and it's got like bugs in it Eww, ictarine This one I love this is for green Let it end nature. I love. This is for green. Letter N, nature. I love it. Blue, got lucky there.

Yep. Blue. Wow. Nailed it. Then O, which would normally be indigo, they've gone for orchid, which I think is, they've said this one's a stretch, but I disagree. I think orchid and indigo, I think they're pretty good. Maybe orchids are slightly more purple when you think about them, but I, I'll go with it.

I prefer that to them claiming octarene as a word. And well for violet, they've gone with, violet, which you have to pronounce like a German. Yeah. And then they've added, so basically it's perfect. Hope you enjoy. Miles, this cracked me up when I read it, and it still brings me great joy.

I love this. So, Miles, thank you so much. And that's it. But before we go, we'd like to thank three of our Patreon supporters at random. And if you want to be a Patreon supporter, get yourself a membership card at Christmas or indeed access to our

bonus podcast, I'm a wizard which is very silly. Solid bounce. And this episode we want to thank by mispronouncing your names the following Patreon people C A M D M Lake Johan, nah, I'm free Yak Get out of this one now

I got it, I got it, I got it Yak Eggustaf Nailed it I got it, I got it, I got it. Yack egg you staff. Nailed it. Thank you very much for making this podcast possible. And thanks to everyone else for listening, for telling other people to listen. We appreciate it so much. It's the only reason we can keep it going. Otherwise it is just us on a very long zoom call with Paul Lauren Armstrong Cato who just

sits there silently. I'd also like to thank my co-host, Mattress Parkurtens, who I'm drawing to a close. Oh, well done. Thank you. Myself, Bedhillo and Lauren Armchair Cato. Bye. Bye! Okay, so I'm going to go with... Well hang on, previously on Battleship, Beck had a hit so now we need to find out if you're gonna get the rest of my ship hmm you've got choices I'm going to go with H2 miss. I think that might be all the time it's gonna buy me though. I'm gonna continue... my...

logical rampage with F6. Hit. Yes! Ha ha! I knew if I just... believed in the system.