A Problem Squared - 006 = Squaring Shirts and Testing Toasters

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/aproblemsquared Submit your data for our toaster investigation. http://bit.ly/APS_toasterdata Mike Hill wrote up his calculations as an official report. https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0njel6x5xcg0z5/T-Shirt%20Quest.docx?dl=0 Energy Scavengers: Static Electricity Could Power the World https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/energy-scavengers-static-electricity-could-power-the-world International Electrotechnical Commission standards 60065 https://webstore.iec.ch/publication/494 Limmy's channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/LimmyDotComBlog/ Limmys Show: Whats heavier a kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

Hello and welcome to A Problem Squared, a podcast where we solve your problems. My name is Bec Hill and I'm here with my wonderful co-host... Matt Parker. I wasn't sure when you were going to stop in that sentence. I forgot how we opened the show. That was good. That's good. We're back. Yay. So just for everyone who's listening, we've got a few fun things we're going to cover in today's episode. I've got a problem about how to measure the surface area of t-shirts. Yes, I'm going to attempt to solve that for you. No promises.

Someone has written in asking about the amount of energy in their clothes after they've been dried. I like that. That's very interesting. And I'm also going to tackle a problem that wasn't officially posed to us, but I was curious and wanted to try and solve it myself, which is a variety of questions about toast that Limmy brings up in his latest series of Limmy's Homemade Show. But now that we're allowed once again to talk about coronavirus things, because we took a whole episode off to give everyone a break. How are you doing, Bec? How's the lock-in going?

Yeah, I'm coping quite well. Nothing much has really changed for me other than the fact that I have to keep reminding myself to exercise. I didn't realize how much I walk until my Fitbit started telling me off. Oh, so I haven't got a Fitbit or anything like that. Does it start nagging you if you're not walking sufficiently? Well, I get a weekly update, my emails, and it's happy to tell me how much less I'm moving per week. Well, that's the one thing that's changed for me because when we last spoke, I had, you know, I explained my fantastic strategy of Lucy and I walking to work every day and then walking home from work every day, different ways around the block.

But the government changed its advice within days of the episode going out to say you're only allowed to leave the house once to go for a walk. Yeah. So we have had to cut back substantially. So we now try to walk to work. We don't we don't always get that to work. I've started cycling as well. And sometimes I'll go for a cycle and Lucy will meet me most of the way back. And then we walk the last bit home together. So I get a cycle and a walk on technically my one government mandated exercise outing per

day. But then to replace the walk home, to punctuate the end of the workday, we've named the back of our garden, the Step and Conquer, and we treat it as going to the pub. Oh, nice. So at the end of the day, we're like, should we go to the pub? Yeah, let's pop down the Step and Conquer. And then we just grab some drinks and we walk to the back of our own yard, which we're very fortunate to have a yard that we can walk out into. So that's what we've been doing.

Good stuff. Our first problem is one from Beck. And you came to me saying you need to find a way to fit 500 regions onto a t-shirt. And to be fair, you started by saying, have you heard about the million dollar homepage? Yeah. And I'm pretty sure I replied with, I was there. Yeah, I didn't't say have you heard about it i said do you remember it like it wasn't like i just received the news on a telegram

this just did no i was like i remember that happening and everyone was like why like everyone's like anyone could have done that but anybody didn't do that and yeah so for those of you who missed it a guy basically sold off a 1000 by 1000 pixel homepage, one pixel at a time. And people could buy pixels for a dollar each. And people did. Companies, individuals, the works, they spent a dollar per pixel. I think the trick was they were all like linked. So if you bought a pixel, it'd be linked somewhere. You buy a bunch, you can make a very small image. And you've decided to do the t-shirt equivalent. You can make a very small image.

And you've decided to do the t-shirt equivalent. Yeah, yeah. So I was clearing out my cupboards and I found a plain white t-shirt that I'd never done anything with. And I thought, okay, so I'm filming a lot more stuff during lockdown. I'm doing a lot more online stuff. I'm interacting a lot with my fans. And my followers have been incredible. They've been really nice.

And each time I've put something up, people have usually shouted me a drink or something. And I'm getting a small taste of what it's like to be YouTube sensation Matt Parker. It's a wall-to-wall treat. And I thought what I could do to try and repay the favor. I don't have the money myself, but I do have the time and the creativity. So I thought what I'll do is if I can divide the t-shirt up into 500 equal spaces, I can then sell each space for £10 each and people can tell me what name or company or whatever they want me to write in that space. And they can just request something that they want you to sketch. Like they could describe a scenario

and you'll draw it. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, it's 500 spaces, so they want you to sketch like they could describe a scenario and you'll draw it yeah i mean to be fair it's 500 spaces so they're gonna have a huge amount of space but if they were like can you just draw a picture of a cat because this is actually for my friend who really likes cats and put their name there then i would do my best to draw a little cat and put their name in that space so i've dubbed it the the 5KTS, which is the 5,000 pound t-shirt. Nice. Also, one of my problems for the next episode will hopefully be, which charity should I give 5,000 pounds to? Yep. That's a good problem to have. So you came to me and so you were like,

well, how am I going to arrange 500 regions on a t-shirt? Yeah. Cause I can take care of the actual putting stuff onto the t-shirt part, but I'm less confident with the working out how to put them on the T-shirt part. Now, I have a solution. So, well, I've got a variety of potential solutions for you. However, when you first sent this problem to me, I was frantically working on some other projects and I didn't get the answer back to you quick enough. Well, this is the thing. I genuinely thought it would be a really quick answer

because I don't quite understand how it works. And to me, all maths is magic. And so if I give you the ingredients for the magic spell, I assume all you have to do is put them in a cauldron and then the potions brood. I think I'm doing something with this analogy. And so I sent them to you and then you said, I'm having dinner, but I'll get something back to you tonight. And then you didn't, which

was fine. And then I was like, oh, he's probably very busy. And then I think a few days later, you said, this is going to take longer than I thought. And I thought, interesting, this must be a harder problem than I first thought it was. I will pit another mathematician that I know against you and see if you come up with the same answer. Which was fine because I suddenly realized I was going to have to build a new cauldron was the problem. Because I was like, oh, I can solve this problem. I'm sure there's an off-the-shelf cauldron available, as in there's some maths I already know that will solve this. And then I realized, oh no, I really want a custom cauldron to do this properly. And that took a while to compile.

So while I was doing that, you've actually got an answer from your brother. Yeah, I'm not sure if your cauldron is right for this answer. We'll find out. What happens is I went to my brother and, well, why not? I'll get him to explain himself. Here's an interview of us. Hey, Mike. What's up, Meg? So I've got a problem for you, which I've taken to Matt Parker. But as you are the other mathematician in my life, as my little brother, but also as a fully qualified maths teacher and tutor, I wanted to see how you also tried to solve this problem and I thought

it would be really simple and then Matt took a lot longer to get into the problem than either of us expected I think and that's when I came to you and you had a very similar situation didn't you? Yeah I started off with a panic because I think it's probably because I read that Matt was struggling with it. And I rate Matt quite highly in the mathematicians of my vocabulary and then just assumed it was the hardest thing in the world. Yeah, and so you came up with an easier solution for me. Yeah, so you and I agreed that if we can get a T-shirt lied flat, we can assume a certain amount of things. One, that there's no overlaps and there's no extra areas, which you can generally get with men's t-shirts.

And two, that there's generally straight lines. So we went with two-dimensional model and then it just turned into a year 10 area-based project. It's actually a lot easier to follow along a lot of the shapes can be turned into quadrilaterals which are quite easy to measure especially when there's parallel lines because a lot of things are symmetrical like your armpits should be at the same height in theory and the t-shirt should be made accordingly same with shoulder height and color the sleeves got a little bit interesting and there's probably a method that I would use differently if I wasn't looking at a two-dimensional plane only, but that's a problem for another time.

But yeah, if we attack it from a two-dimensional plane and we assume that and that the collar is circular, then it's actually a lot simpler than we originally thought. So can you tell our listeners and Matt roughly what was the shape and measurements that I should do for my 500 equal shapes? Yeah so we we ended up with about 8,000 square centimeters which sounds like a lot but considering that there's a front and a back and it's a it's a fair size, it's about right for a medium men's. And if we have an 8,000 square centimetres shape

and we're dividing by 500, should get us around that 16 square centimetre mark. And that's sort of like perfect for a 4x4. And there was a little bit of leeway. So it was about 8,500 square centimetres and it did lead itself to about 17 square centimetres in theory. But if I do 4x4s, that allows for room for me to move over on my grid. It gives you room for error.

It gives you much easier to measure. Like if you were measuring millimetres on a T-shirt that has part elastic in it, good luck with that. But yeah, that was our conclusion. Cool. Thanks, Mike. No worries. Okay. Okay.

That's good. And it's different to what I did, which is reassuring because your brother, Mike Mike took the approach of what's the maximum size these squares could be and he's kind of calculated what I would call an upper bound like this is the biggest these squares could be and you can fit them on the shirt somehow however I don't know if you noticed he's not told you how to fit them on the shirt no however i don't know if you noticed he's not told you how to fit them on the shirt no i didn't think of that because the shirt has angles so if i get to like

the neckline some of the squares might be half yeah and he's left tolerances so he's kind of assumed oh there's going to be some wasted space but he's done i mean this is a great thing in maths where you just prove it's possible in theory and you're like, yep, job done. And that's now someone else's problem to work out how to do it. I've just managed to prove it can be done. So excellent work, Mike. I, however, decided to start with how they're going to be arranged and then work out how big they could be. So you sent me the dimensions of the t-shirt.

I put in that on the front, you've got a width of 30 centimeters and a height of 49 centimeters before you hit where the neck is. And on the back, it's also 30 wide, but you've got 56 centimeters height. You've got a bit more because the neck is out of the way and I just assumed everything's going to be inside those two rectangles so what I did was just write some computer code to exhaustively check every single possible way you could arrange the squares in those two regions and I've got all the results in a spreadsheet. And if I scroll down my spreadsheet, I checked. Oh, goodness.

Still going. Still going. I should say this isn't dead air. There's nothing wrong with your podcast. Matt is still scrolling down his spreadsheet. It's a big spreadsheet. I checked 5,904 different ways you could arrange your 500 squares. And I was not deliberately efficient. I decided to be safe. I would just check everything. So I've probably got some duplicates where the

front and the back could be flipped. And I've counted that twice. So it's probably fewer than that. But I started by saying, okay, you've got 500 squares. Your first decision is how many are on the front, how many are on the back. And so you've got to split 500 into two sections. And I started with 500 on the front and then zero on the back, and then went through all the possibilities. 499 on the front, one on the back, 498 on the front, two on the back. And so I went through every single possible way you can divide it up. for each one I worked out the factors of that number and so that's all the numbers that divide into it which is a way of working out all the possible rectangles you could arrange that number of regions into so I assumed the front and the back are always going to be nice neat rectangular

grids so once it's all said and done, you'll have one grid on the front, you'll have one grid on the back. There's a total of 500 regions and they're as big as possible. So just to check, Matt, is this not including sleeves? Not including sleeves, no. So it's just that one rectangle on the front and one rectangle on the back. And are you ready for the best solution? Yes, yeah, please. The best solution that you could have is an area of 6.29 square centimeters. And that is if every region is 30 centimeters wide and two millimeters high. So on the front, you would have 233 incredibly long, skinny regions stacked one on top of the other. That's like the thickness of my marker. Yeah, yeah. You could do something in like Morse code, like dots and dashes or something.

And then on the back are the other 267 stacked one on top of the other. Now, that's only if you maximize the amount of area. I then realized that's terrible. And so I put in a separate measure to calculate how close to being square each region is. And then I flicked through those and I just basically, I found my favorites. I opted, I sorted it by area and I sorted it by the ratio. And so if you sort it by all of that, I found that your best option was to have blocks which are three centimeters wide 2.1 centimeters tall on the front you have them 10 wide by 23 tall and on the back you have it 10 wide by 27 tall and that's maximizing the space available and it's maximizing the amount of areas. You still get just over six

square centimeters of space for each block, and they're a three by two effectively block, and then you can sell those. I then also did work out the closest you can get to a square size and a few other options, but that's my solution for you. You're going to have them 10 by 23 on the front and 10 by 27 on the back. That's a really good solution. You're going to have them 10 by 23 on the front and 10 by 27 on the back. That's a really good solution. My final question then in that case, I've opted now for a men's medium t-shirt, partly because it means the space that someone can buy is larger and partly because it is less likely to stretch in various places.

I mean, honestly, the rate I'm going with chocolate bars right now, I think that my stomach is going to be pretty good real estate soon. So I thought if I get like a men's t-shirt that's a bit more baggy, if I were to give you the measurements of that, can you put that into your special code that you've written and we'll see what it suggests? Yes. And that's the beauty of building your own cauldron. Yeah. Because I thought, you know what, Beck's going to change the shirt. And so I wrote it. I factored in Beck as one of the conditions. And so I wrote it such that you

can just change the dimension. So in fact, if you give them to me now, I'll type them in. Yeah. And we can set it going. Right. So the shortest width is 42 centimeters. 42 across the front. Wow. It is bigger. And lengthwise, we're looking at 60 centimeters. 60. That's the front?

That's the front. Yep. And on the back? And on the back, 67 centimeters. 60. That is substantially bigger. Okay. So I've got all that code now.

Dropping that into Python. And I'm running the program I've just called Shirt. And it's off. I will, against my better judgment, upload my code to GitHub afterwards. And we'll put a link in the show notes. If people want to go and have a look at it. Don't judge me. It wasn't written for public viewing. But I will put my code up on GitHub if people want to go and have a look at it. Don't judge me. It wasn't written for public viewing,

but I will put my code up on GitHub if people want to go and check it out. And if you think you can write a better version, you're probably right. In hindsight, I should have put a few extra lines of code in that gives an update on how much it's done. At the moment, I'm just looking at a cursor and it's working in the background. So how about let's go and deal with another problem and we'll come back to this and see if it's done afterwards. Okay. This problem comes to us via Twitter from HGoldstein95 who says, What portion of the energy that goes into a clothes dryer

ends up trapped as static electricity on the clothing? That's great. It's like they're worried about wasted energy going into the static energy in the clothing. Yeah, which makes sense. I was watching the show that I did in 2019, the I'll Be Back show last night. You weren't just at home watching it to remind yourself of the good times it was being live streamed as part of a big event yeah yeah yeah yeah but but one of the jokes i'd forgotten was um essentially talking about how dumb lampshades are and why did we invent lampshades instead of just making the light dimmer and i feel that h goldstein 95 has had the same thing here where they're like how much energy could I be

harnessing from these clothes? Well harnessing is not a bad way to look at it because I did a bit of research and some people have tried to come up with devices that will collect static energy or have some kind of movement that generates static electricity that can then be harvested so I was originally thinking it's going to be too small to matter, but then if people are trying to collect it, I'm like, okay, that's a non-zero amount of energy. But now the question is, how much is it compared to what it takes to run a clothes dryer? Now, before we go into any of that, just to recap, energy is the ability to do work. So a a normal clothes dryer and they range dramatically

they seem to be about 3 000 watts and that's power which is energy over time so a watt is one joule of energy every second and so 3 000 watts that means you're using using 3000 joules of energy per second. And I don't know how long it takes to dry clothes. So I went for an hour. So I'm making a bunch of assumptions here. But if you've got a 3000 watt dryer, you run it for an hour, which is 60 minutes of 60 seconds. That's 3600 seconds.

At the end of that, you've used about 10 million joules. That's the amount of energy going into your clothes dryer. Hopefully, the bulk of that is drying the clothes and a little bit like spinning it and the dials and the lights and everything else.

That's a lot of joules. It's a lot of joules. It's a lot of energy. If you spelled that differently, that would be treasure. A lot of joules. Yeah. There you are.

A homonym. That's so good. i thought just to put that into something we understand a lot of people talk about calories yeah how many calories a day do you do you know what you burn what's your calorific output i think it's roughly 2 000 does that sound right that's about right yeah yeah vary between two, two and a half thousand calories output a day. Give or take depends what kind of exercise you're doing. And that's about 10 megajoules. So the energy it takes to run your clothes dryer for an hour is about the energy it takes to run a human for a day. So that's your comparable amount of energy. That checks out because I reckon it would take me a day of going onto clothes.

Yeah. A whole day to dry the clothes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. So there you are. So it's about a human's day's worth of work. But then I was like, how much energy is in the static electricity? And the people doing the research, I couldn't find any good numbers.

They're like, oh, a hundred of our devices could power a light bulb. And I'm like, yeah, but a light bulb is such an ambiguous unit of power. Come on. And so in the end, I decided to cheat and I looked up the International Electrotechnical Commission Standards. Oh, they've got some great bands signed. Oh, they do. The good old Elect electrotechnical commission so so their um regulation iec 60065 specifies the maximum amount of static electricity an electrical

appliance can discharge into a human whoa and i'm like well the clothes dryer must fit those regulations so i'm going to use that as my kind of amount of static electricity because if it was more than that, it could discharge. It wouldn't be allowed to be made. So if in doubt, just look up the regulations. And that is 350 millijoules. So 0.35 of a joule is the maximum amount. So I took that as that's the most amount of energy you're going to have in your clothes in static charge.

It's like less than a Tic Tac. It's less than a Tic Tac. Amazingly, Tic Tacs are listed as zero calories, even though they're all sugar, because they're a rounding error. Oh, wow. Yeah. I think now they're more honest. They're just like, it's less than a calorie. Like, it doesn't mean you can eat thousands of them.

So H. Goldstein, 95. The percentage of energy that goes into your clothes dryer that ends up static is at a maximum 0.000000324%. Less than a ten millionth. So, not much. I hope that solved your problem. Ding! Let me just check in on the code and it's still running. Wow.

I should have written more efficient code. Okay, shall we do another problem and we'll check back in again at the very end of the podcast. Good idea. And interestingly, our last problem was found by and solved by Beck. Yeah, I wasn't trying to cheat here, but this bothered me so much that I thought I'm going to have to solve it anyway. So it's technically work if you do it for the podcast, right? That's good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was watching Limmy, who's a Scottish comedian. He's got a new show out called Limmy's Homemade Show on BBC iPlayer. For our international

listeners, if you've not come across Lemmy's fantastic work on TV, he did a sketch in one of his previous shows, which was like, which is heavier, the kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers? And it's a fantastic skit.

I think it's hilarious. So I think a lot of people may have come across that. We'll link to it in the show notes somewhere. Yeah, if you haven't heard of him already, do yourself a favor and go and check him out and in the first episode essentially he

asks these five questions which are what do the numbers on a toaster mean is it minutes would setting your toaster to five burn your house down what happens if you set your toaster to one but a few seconds later you change it to three does it let you change it what happens if you set a toaster to five but you wait until it's around about the three level of cooked and then turn it down to one what would happen and finally he says what if you have a four slice toaster with two levers but one dial and you set the dial to three and push down the first lever and then halfway through you push down the second lever like a multi-lever toaster. Yeah. So you can lower in

different bits of bread separately but it's only got one dial. That's right and I couldn't sleep. I just kept thinking about these mysteries and I was like I'm not going to rest until they're done so I thought what I'll do is I'll have to solve these problems. So the first thing I did is I went out on Twitter and I said I'll need some people to help me and actually I told you Matt that I was thinking of working on this and you directed me to one of Tom Scott's videos on YouTube. Yeah, Tom Scott did a video years ago and it's had millions of views where he was testing the numbers on different toasters.

And I'm like, I think this is the only previous research in this new area that you've discovered that I'm aware of. So I believe you reviewed the literature and you went and checked that video. I did. And spoiler alert, he basically points out that every single toaster works differently compared to its dial. But one toaster did go for the exact amount of minutes. And it was one of those big four slice professional grade toasters. Like a catering toaster. Yes. So I thought those are the ones that are more likely to have a four slice one dial which i don't have so i went out on twitter and i said preferably what i'm after is people with a four slice professional grade toaster and two incredible

people got back to me at press underscore coffee and at regular lods they both got in touch and said yep i've got those. Now, unfortunately, neither of them had one, just had one dial. They both had two dials. But I thought we can at the very least work out whether those four slicer ones are the ones that measure minutes to the numbers on the dial. So I asked those two followers and I joined in myself to make a third, even though I don't have a four size toaster, but I just wanted to see if there are any discrepancies.

And we did three different experiments. Right. One of the experiments was to time how long the dial on one took and how long the dial on three took. It's like the base unit. And then you can see if three is three times as long. Yep. And even immediately, everyone had different results. Wow. So I got one minute 15 for one setting and on three, it was two minutes. What? At Press Coffee, got 43 seconds

for a one dial and one minute 51 for a three dial. Well, that's closer to three times. And at regular LODs, got one minute 30 for one and two minutes 30 for three. On these dials, is five the max or do people have a different range? Ah, now I'm glad you asked that because I didn't ask them that,

but one of them already pointed out to me that their dial goes to seven. I noticed that mine goes to six and i also know that including mine they all start at one they don't start at zero which i'm afraid i knew you wouldn't like matt no zero oh it makes a mockery i mean you should have the null toast option it's just bread yeah just bread that's right like what if you just want to have a slice of bread? You need zero. I mean, we'll have to take it to the top, Matt. This goes deeper.

This goes deep. Big toast. Wake up, Wheatle. Oh, very nice. So to summarise the answer to the first question posed, it's that the numbers on toasters do not mean minutes. Categorically, that is not what they mean. Maybe in rare occasions it might be, but through my testing and through the others, generally it does not equate to minutes. And not only does it not equate to minutes, it's not a linear scale. No, not necessarily. Well, not at all through my testing.

Not necessarily. Well, not at all through my testing. Wow. I checked my toaster and it goes from one, not zero. And I'm disappointed in myself. I never noticed that. And it goes up to eight. Eight?

Like what an arbitrary number. I've never pushed it past five. So who knows what happens at eight? Goodness. You know what that is? That's like when you get those newspapers that do six stars to try and look special when they're reviewing people. Oh, you think it's the inflation of toast values? Yeah, that's right. It's like grades at school. Like back in my day, a five used to mean a five. Not now.

The next question was, would setting your toaster to five burn your house down? I actually didn't ask my testes to try this because we don't have insurance at a problem squared correct and i didn't want to accidentally burn down people's house so i've given the answer of depends on your toaster which i think is a pretty safe solution yeah what happens if you set your toaster to one but a few seconds later you change it to three does it let you change it now these results are interesting i'll revert back to regular lods who had a lovely way of giving their results they said test two both sides of toaster set to level one bread locks engaged a few seconds into toasting

level change to level three result toaster popped in two minutes 30 seconds each time so that's actually the same that they got for a 3. Yeah, so for them... You can change it as you go. You can increase it. That's right. Whereas Press Underscore Coffee got 46 seconds. Given that their number 1 level was 43 seconds,

I'm going to go with no, not really. It doesn't let you change it. It essentially locked it in. Yeah, once you push it down, you can't change the timer. For them, nope. And for mine, remember that my level was two minutes.

Yep. When I did it and put in one and then set it to three a few seconds in, it ran for a minute 45. Huh. Is that what you normally get on a two? I should have tested that, but by that stage,

I was so full of toast, Matt. It's a lot of toast. I've eaten so much toast. But if your toaster then gives you the average of the numbers you dial in, that's a clever toaster. That is a clever toaster. The next question I had was, what happens if you set your toaster to five, but you wait until it's around about three? Yep. Then turn it to one? Got it. What would happen? So with that, what I did is I had everyone set it to five and then as soon as their timer got to whatever their level three takes, I got them to immediately turn the dial down to one. Yep.

And in every single case across the board, including mine, as soon as we turned the dial down, the toast popped up. As soon as you start turning it or when you get to one? It was as soon as the dial was turned. Actually, at regular LODs said, Both sides of Toaster set to level five, operated for two minutes, 30 seconds before Toaster levels quickly moved to level one. Result, Toaster popped immediately upon the dial, being dialed back to one. Toaster operative, in brackets, me, reported it,

I mean, it's a dangerous field of research, Toaster analysis. Me, reported it, shoot him up a bit because he had his face quite close to the latching handles and nearly got hit by one. I mean, it's a dangerous field of research, toast analysis. It is if you get that close. Yeah, stand back, people. As I said, we do not have insurance at a problem squared. And then the final fifth toast problem that Lemmy poses on that episode. Unfortunately, for that last one, we need someone who has a four-slice toaster with one dial. What happened was I tweeted saying I was going to do this

and Lemmy, actual Lemmy, replied. Of course he did. And said that they have one of those toasters, but they prefer the mystery and don't want to know, which I fully respect. I do not. No, I fully, fully respect that. But I also think that you would understand this as a fellow comedian, Matt, that nothing ruins a joke more than taking it absolutely seriously.

That's a good point. So what we're potentially doing here is ruining a lovely bit of comedy by him. So I think the only thing we can do out of respect of their wishes is to ask everyone if they work out the answer to this do not tell Lemmy. Don't tell them. Don't tell them you know. Don't tell them that they should listen to this episode. Don't annoy them. They've done their job. Just go and watch their show and enjoy it. In fact if you find out the answer and you want to announce it to the world, the code is I watched Lemmy's show thanks to a problem squared and really enjoyed it. And then we'll know that that's code for you knowing the answer. That's quite nice.

Finally, before we go, let me bring my code back up. It's done. It's finished. Okay. So I'm going to go get the results. And okay, that is a much neater solution. So if you're happy with squares, you can do three by three centimeter squares. That gives you nine square centimeters and doesn't make a difference. You can do it on the front or the back. In both case, you do one block, which is 11 by 20.

You do another block, which is 14 by 20. Put one on the front, put one on the back. There's all 500. And wow, this is pretty cool. Okay, so I might have a little bit more of a play with these new figures. I'll pick the best one and then you can lay out your t-shirt.

I'll tell you what, between you and Mike and your solutions, I'm going to go a step further and I reckon I could fit quite nicely three and a half centimeter squares into some of those gaps that I don't think are necessary. So you're going to average our suggestions. You're going to do three and a half by three and a half. And I'm going to see if that works. Well, Beck, you know, that's the wisdom of a very small crowd. I think you'd try it. Give it a go. That's a great idea. On average, that problem is solved. Yeah. We'll tune in next episode when I'll hopefully be sporting a 5k TS.

On to our Any Other Business, we've got two different updates to previous problems. Someone, MCK Gerald on Twitter, has said that they think I was right about the surround sound encoding, where one of our episodes was initially poorly encoded. They claimed they were listening on earbuds and had Beck Hill sounding like she was behind me. Yeah, but the truth is I was. I was standing right there the whole time. I should also update that my mate Ron from Northern Ireland, after listening, got in touch and reckons he can change the files

so that I won't have that issue with the warbling and Edith Piaf moving forward. Oh, really? Oh, amazing. So he's going to sort that out for me and I might have an update for the next episode after this. Obviously, no need to use it at the moment because I'm not out gigging. Not a lot of live gigs. And finally, we got a tweet from Bridget B, which just said, ding.

And that was the person who pitched the how do I fit a backpack on the tubes not annoy other people and that one solitary ding indicates that Beck they were indeed entirely satisfied with your solution and that is a problem solved yes so Matt to recap in today's episode where can people go if they want to help out with this toaster experiment? Okay, so the toaster experiment, I will make a Google form and it'll be some weird URL. I will link it in the show notes if you go and just check that out on however you're listening to our podcast. Thank you, obviously, for subscribing on some platform and obviously reviewing it if that's a possibility. And if you check the notes on this, there'll be a link to the form you can give us your toaster data and if anyone wants to

buy a square which will be somewhere between three and four centimeters squared on the five thousand pound t-shirt for charity i'll pop them up for sale on my website which is beckhillcomedian.com forward slash shop so that'll be beckhillcomedian.com forward slash shop and thank you so much to everyone who listens to this podcast and tells other people about it it's happily growing along we're having a great time making it it's one of the few bits of work we get to do at the moment and thank you to 47 people who are supporting us on patreon yay you know what let's do a readout next podcast of our new supporters okay and so people you've got between now and the next episode if you want to support us on patreon

we will do a full credit thanks next time bye