A Problem Squared - 123 = The Science of Fries and Mounting Sea Level Rise

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

🍟 Why does the nutritional value of frozen chips change depending on whether they are cooked in an air fryer or in an oven?⛰️ How large a mountain could we make from 2.2 meters of dredged sea bed (combatting sea level rise in the process)?🃏And there’ll be some AOB, as easy as 123.Head to our socials for pics of LIVE MATHS, chip nutritional values, post-Totoro Bec, ESA Souvenirs.If you’d like to ask Matt and Bec anything for our special 2^7 episode in February go to the Problem Posing Page at aproblemsquared.com - select ‘Problem’ and start your message with AMA!See Matt on tour in 2026! http://standupmaths.com/shows Here’s how to get involved with Matt’s Moon Pi Kickstarter:https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/standupmaths And here’s how to volunteer for Calculate Pi By Hand with Matt: https://forms.gle/w44THpNJ3jWUPqHy6Join us on Patreon for early releases and our monthly bonus podcast I’m A Wizard. If you’re already on Patreon and have a creative Wizard offer to give Bec and Matt, please comment on our pinned post!  If you want to (we’re not forcing anyone) please do leave us a review, share the podcast with 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 BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram, and on Discord.

Hello and welcome to a problem square at the problem solving podcast, where you could say APS. It's as easy as one, two, three, as simple as Beck and me, APS, one, two, three. Problem you and me, solve. It's episode one, two, three. Oh, it is. Yeah, which I only realized, like, minutes ago. And 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. Oh, right. I think there's so much more substance that's gone into the storylines and the art. Anyway, I don't want to diss anyone who works. Have you seen the sequel to Cars? No. For this very reason.

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 like wandered 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 in coming, 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, how I would happily go see it again. And then he said, hey, should I get us tickets?

And I thought, he's going to 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. Oh, yes, you did. I've been back. 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. It's harder to do.

Yeah, yeah. Because for zero G, you just got to 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, 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 parabolas.

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. Like 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. So they get a bit annoyed. If you ever say you're simulating 0G, 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 catapult capsules that you can do at fun fares?

Like, do any of those, like, achieve that vibe? Issa 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 was 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 know if you 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 rock's 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. 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, want Martian gravity, we want zero gravity. And then the rock-sorting people are like, we want zero gravity, then point one, then point two, then point three, then point four.

Because they want data points to fill in all the gaps. Yep, yep, yep. But everyone's on the same aircraft. Okay. You don't get your own special gravity. So they have done flights before where they've done 0.25, 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 were nine experiments, which were either life sciences, rock sorting, or seeing how things burn under lunar gravity. They're all very cool. They burn stuff on the plane? They burn stuff on the plane. What?

You know how to burn things on planes? Do you believe? I found out the hard way. Yeah. I was trying to roast my marshmallows. That's why they have smoke detectors in the torts now. Yeah, I've got to stop doing that in toilets. I 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 of 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.

It's pretty much that. Was there like a goat? It was no goat. All the participants were humans. Oh. Yeah, 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, in a chamber, with multiple exhaust ports plumbed to the outside of the aircraft and all their stuff. It is a phenomenal amount of effort. But then between each bit of zero-g,

they'd have to 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 etc and yet when I told this to the authorities we're not listening but you also got double gravity because to go into the parabola you've 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 ear 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've got to lie down during double gravity and you 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 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 to know. No point in my life where I wouldn't benefit from a minder back. Yeah. Oh, trust me. I, I'm in the same boat. Yes. My minders won't let me on a flight. Yeah, 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, 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, you get that kind of, ooh, wait a. It's that then last. For lunar gravity, but for like constant for 20 seconds. And you know, you feel like your stomach rises or falls where that happens. Is 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've got three little keepsakes here. I've now earned an official ESA patch. Wow. This was on my flight suit. I had to get the flight suit back

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 You should frame that Is to keep this in mint condition

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 a video? Oh, I haven't got any footage to show. So I do apologize.

It's all on a, it's been sent over from ESA. 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 sand timer.

I took 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. What? And it moved differently under gravity. They were a bit like the grandfather cocks a bit much. Exactly. And juggling balls. So I did a bunch of juggling.

That was the main event was me trying to juggle. We'll stay tuned to your YouTube channel. Once I get that footage back, it'll be out. Probably early next year sometime. First problem. We're sent in by Georgina. who went to the problem posing page at a problemsquared.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. keeping 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 pot. 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 their chip packaging. 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. 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 theorising and came to realise Like, 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 crisp. You know, air fry is 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. Wade 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 cook them different ways and then eat them you'd get the identical nutritional total amounts but just the density would be different

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 fry it like sometimes it drips the fat and stuff drips down so you end up with less fat on it because of 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 the the base of the thing yeah and also i don't know if you've ever made fries in an air fry it's it's not like it's like loads of it's not like a george form and grill where it's like and the fat runs off like it's like you know straight into a cup for easy consumption yeah got it's right 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 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 friar because it dries out the product more than an oven wood.

Oh, back. Due to the smaller surface area, a more ferocious heat that the air friar 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 round. 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, no, Georgina has 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 a theory. Are they wedges? Is that what's happening? Well, no, they were specifically. chunky style chips. Oh, it's 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 great volume to surface area thing. 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 Carl was like, yeah, yeah, that's what you said. I was like, no, I want to. Carl's got to earn it.

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 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 my French fries taste so 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 chunkier 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 with the, like, they're 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 was swam. That is fascinating.

I don't own an air fryer. I house sat for someone that had one and I did use it and I was like, oh, this is easier. But in a 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. I mean, it is ferocious and there's no one between.

I have to like burn a thing and then quickly turn it off and hopefully it'll cool to the degrees. Is your oven actually just a toaster? It's basically a toaster, yeah. I just, 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. It's how 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.

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, that's true. Maybe if you're consistently doing it, you know you just cook less to start. If your version of cooking is putting frozen things into things that heat them, this guy. The old oven chubbers. You start to get pretty good at working out. Eyeball on 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? 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. 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. I think your satisfaction area to problem solving volume ratio is great. Thank you. And whether it's of any nutritional value. Nutritional value is to be.

Yeah. 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 them. I do everything in my power not to think about it.

And thought, what if we simply, in quotation marks, scraped a layer of the seabed, corresponding to the expected sea level rise. Why do we not think of this? The doy. Takes an outsider like Frederick. And they've said 2.2 meters by 2100. 100. How large a mountain could we make from those materials? Or probably more importantly, how many mole hills? It's a reference to a previous episode. Thanks, love the show. Thank you, Frederick. We'd 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 scraped? What do we do? Basically, yeah. Yeah. 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 we're 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're just getting a straw Everyone gets a straw It has 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're shooting 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 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 a deserved way to go. I don't want to, but we would have earned it. This is why I don't think about rising sea levels. It gets 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 kilometer, a square kilometer is a million square meters. Yeah. Because a kilometer is 1,000 meters, 1,000 times 1,000 for area. So it's 361 million million square meters. That is a lot.

That is 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 8 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. Yay! I mean, considering that they say that, what, the earth is two-thirds ocean? Yeah, 71%. 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. If you 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 technical noise and there's a big mountain on mars that's Olympus Mons which is bigger really big yep 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 a sort of fun experiment you can do did you stack some soil on each other on a lunar flight there were two different It's 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 and slumping stuff were very interested in the egg timer.

Because they're like, oh, that's... Love that. 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. If you get a big enough egg timer that is longer that it's been since the drop tower was built, 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 metres of the sea bed. 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. 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 hour. 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'll pick stuff up first. Yeah. Then you'll take the 2.2 meters out and you put everything back on top. Oh, okay, okay, yeah. So we're going to pick up all the coral reefs. Yeah. Sure.

I call them Reeves. Reaves. Yeah, Reeves. Yeah, all the reefs. You played Superman, didn't he? I think he did. So, I then started looking into different types of marine sediment because it varies a lot.

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 oceans covered in what's called carbonate ooze. And so I looked up, Carbonate ooze, thanks to the fine people at C-MAP Australia, oozes that are formed primarily from the calcerius, 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 end, 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 It's pretty slumped Like that's not a Yeah I could walk up a 19 degree angle It's giving it's real It's less of a mountain Yeah It's more of an incline

A lot Like a 19 degree road Would have a sign saying Steep Road ahead So it's not nothing But I feel like if you're climbing a mountain You'd notice 19 degrees Yeah but is that a mountain or a hill

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 got a big list of salt types. Sticier.

It gets stickier. So 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, There's a reason that you, when you're making a sandcastle, you don't do it with dry, super dry sand. But silts can be much finer and sludgier and oozier as we've seen. Oh, true, yeah. So there's going to be ooze, then there's going to be an optimal moisture where it's quite buildable.

Sticky, yeah, and then dust. And then, yeah. So I'm going to see you're at 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, um, pirate. that's going to be a cone. Yep.

To meet the volume of a cone, which is a third pi r squared times the height. A cone, here's a subfact. 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 an 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. It makes sense to me, because if I imagine a square base pyramid, if you've got six of them and touch 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.

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. Huh. 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... Live maths. Live 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 times. Oh, I've done dot for times. Is that acceptable? I mean, sure, it would confuse me, but why not?

Should 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 three out the front under pie like that? Sure.

Great. Please go. Be my guess. The radius of the pile square 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 10 of 19, the tangent value, 0.344, that's our 1 in 3 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, you go a metre forward, you will have gone up 0.344 of a meter. It's the ratio of how far across to how far up. Oh, like the old hypot... That guy. The old Sakatoa. Pythagoras. It's a bit Pythagoras.

It's the beginning of trigonometry is just the gradient of a slope. It's called the tangent because of the gradient at that point. So we now know that the height is, whatever the radius is, times 0.3. 334. All the way around, the radius is the height divided by 0.334. So I'm going to replace radius in this equation. And 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 work 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 make if to see if I can't 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 to get to the yeah yeah so right now I'm understanding as much as I can, knowing I'm going to have the answer sued. And then I'm going to go backwards. And then you can stop paying attention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's valid. So anyway, I'm just going to rearrange this. That's going to 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 C 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 be a meters times three times roughly a third squared. I think that's going to cancel that. 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 a count. 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 mass 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, 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 mass 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 nice. But I like to do the algebra. I mean, of course it's partially pointless for an audio medium, but it does give, Hey, we have an award-winning producer. Yeah. As of recently, this is what she wins awards for. This is what she lives for.

The moment I start writing some maths down, she's like, ah, this is going to 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 mindness. The answer is 44 kilometres.

High. High. That's quite high. It's wider than that. It's high. That's five Everest. Yeah, that's pretty high. 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.

Things would fly, correct, yes, yes. And it would be roughly, give or take, six times as wide as high. Is 44 kilometers, how tall is the Earth's atmosphere? What height is the Earth's tall? How high is the... Like we mark it up against a doorframe. Oh, haven't you grown? Yeah.

Atmospheric of Earth. Now, obviously, people argue about this. The, oh, how's this pronounced? The come-in line is one definition of the edge of space. Yep. That's 100K. Okay. So we're not in space yet.

No. So it's not that high. It's not that high. Do you mean Felix Baumgartner, who... Jump from Spooze? Yes, had the record for the highest skydive. That was about 36 and a half kilometers. Oh, higher than that.

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, 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 admittedly a tourist website about Everest,

they say it's about 20 kilometres 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. It's got, it sounds more plausible all of a sudden.

I mean, it's not. No. I think it's more. All it does is make me realize how small the atmosphere is compared to everything else. 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 up for the... Oh, 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 would rise back up to where they were when 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 back, I believe you have some dings for us. Yes, more importantly, Morgan of the card game slash problem in episode one to zero. It says, ding, ding, ding. Thank you both so much for answering my card game probability problem in episode one to zero. I have been listening to the episodes in reverse order.

Oh. So I'm not sure how you're going to hear this. Oh, no. Well. So I just got around to the newest episodes yesterday. What a trip. Wait, what? What? How does that work, Morgan?

It's the Superman paradox again. Do, yeah. Reverse order. Got to zero. Roll over back to the top. 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 is convinced the probability is somehow not applicable to her that is so true yep

to answer your question my father is not a match nor a Beck just lucky the first time he played was while my mom was I'm sorry I just the opposite of rolls off your tongue froze me every time it was teaching him so he would not have had the knowledge slash opportunity to stack the deck.

I've thought about giving my mum. Do you say mom like it's too big to failure your mouth? I don't. It just... Mom. Yeah, it's so close to nom. It's the opposite of a nom. I have thought about giving my momination 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 mad?

Okay. Alyssa, who posed the gullibility problem in the same episode. Oh, yeah. We are slamming episode 120. Yeah. If it was a physical thing, I'd throw it out the window. Yeah, we're done with it. Dinged.

Donned. Take it off Spotify. Get it down. Ellison says they tried out, Beck's responses for trying to reduce the amount of gullibility in the world, and they took them out for a three-week road test, my words. And they're reporting back with their findings to their favorite Twockley 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, this was really gone to town on taking your advice on board back.

And so there gives 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, as I literally asked you earlier about a browser I'm thinking of using. Because I don't trust it.

I'm like, where do they make their money from? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, but also if you think why would someone make that up, you're less likely to think they would. What do they have to gain from it? Yeah, exactly. Why would they do it? Turns out some people who just jokes.

Until recently, Alice 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 it 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 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 your yeah exactly yeah 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, 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 I 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.

Twockley and your solution has been really quite helpful. Thank you, Alyssa, for how... You've summarised that in a way that I would have taken much longer and indeed have to explain. Oh, wow done. Alyssa seems very happy with our solution, so we fooled them. Great. I trust Alyssa in that we solved that problem.

Unless her 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! Hey, guys, I pose the measurement problem from episode 119. Oh, bananas. Bananas for scale. Love the episode and the introduction of the Bechtric system.

Yes. I work as a land agent. Ah, Chris, we could have used your help. My goodness. We got a slump to put somewhere. Yeah. So I spend a lot of time measuring land and acres. From now on, I'll be referring to an acre as 30,000, 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. Correct.

Here in the new deal. I think you'd have to do it in various body parts of we assemble. For a one-to-one scale? Well, what I would need is a small... A decibeck. Yes, and then you would have to scale it up. If we have a way to scan you, I'll make you a desi-back. 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 1, 2, 3. As easy as 1, 2, 3. 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, etc., etc., or just, you know what? Listen, enjoy, and keep it to yourself. That's all so 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 We'll include. He, near, Ike. Ear, thwarm, ire.

Benb, rain-don. So, I guess in the ongoing, are we the Jackson Five 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 A, B. You'll B.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Laura. Oh, nice. Cremshaw, producer, Dave 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 what the most offensive thing is? I have to take the first shot. All right, Beck, hit me with a shot. So I believe you have another three that I'm looking for.

I'm going to go for H7. H. seven would you believe miss yeah i do i do believe that 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.

Wait until you find the three and then bam. That's so mean. I'm not going to do that. How about a B-10? 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. next episode. Oh, no. I have brought a game for the next episode. No. Well, that's exciting. But hey, if you've got analysis by all means, break it down. If there's one thing I've learnt from this, it's don't play battleship with this.