A Problem Squared - 017 = All The Hills, Fauna Fills and Sauna Chills

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

How many Bec Hills could fit in Bexhill? What species would make the longest queue if you put every individual in a single line? Plus an update on Bec's coat conundrum! If you've got a problem or a solution, hit us up on our website www.aproblemsquared.com, or on social media. Thanks to www.higherdose.com for providing the sauna blanket for the fluffy jacket problem. To find out more about Mileva Marić and the campaign to have her contributions recognised, visit www.inspiring-girls.com/ig-blog/marijamilevablog    

Welcome and all aboard a Problem Squared, the podcast that attempts to solve all of your problems, like some kind of train which starts at you've got a problem central and terminates at no longer got a problem junction although to be fair most people are just along for the ride and you're in safe hands with myself matt parker a mathematician and performer i guess and my fellow driver beck hill the uh soon to be internationally famous tv star of uhaway Makeaway. No, wait, Makeaway Takeaway. That's awkward if I get that the wrong way around.

Beck. Hi, can I be the controller? No, the conductor. You can be the controller. You know what? I wasn't 100% sure on what the current staffing requirements are on a train, but I think conductor is still a thing. Yeah.

Anyway, thank you all for joining us on this episode of A Problem Squared. How many Becks could fit in Becks Hill? I'll be looking at which animal would form the longest queue. And a potential solution to a problem we had in 012 about whether a fluffy jacket could keep you cooler in hot weather. See, we tackle all the most pressing pragmatic problems available. Let's get into it. Choo-choo!

So, Bec, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm very tired because we're filming Makeaway Takeaway at the moment, which is very long hours in the studio, but it is going to be a great show. very long hours in the studio but it is going to be a great show i know you've been busy because i suddenly no longer get any text messages or phone calls from beck hill during waking out like you're you've just disappeared off the face i'm like wow she's must be busy during regular hours that's amazing i did manage to send you a message at one point in the evening i think because at the moment for the listeners i'm getting up at 5 30 in the morning and walking to the studio because we want to keep covid safe and i want to limit the amount of contact i have with people

and so i've been listening to um music again which i haven't really uh needed to as much because i haven't been walking anywhere as much and i found a playlist that i'd made for you matt yes ages ago that i'd forgotten about and it's a it's a pretty good playlist it was one i put together for you to write your book to and then forgot yeah no but the thing is i tend to listen to music not when i'm walking but when i'm writing so being locked at home i mean i've done a dangerous little writing but I've still been listening to music whenever I do get down to write

and so I got a message from you late at night where you rediscovered this playlist and so I think which was a problem I was like Beck I'm writing a new book I need new music and so you've assembled that playlist for me and so I between then and now I don't want to stun you.

No book writing has occurred. But the moment I sit down to do some, I will fire up that playlist and I will report back. I am excited though, because I also, just between when our last episode came out and we're recording this one, it was announced that my three books, well, the first three books of a series that I'm writing will be coming out called Horror Heights. It's a horror series, sort of a little bit like Goosebumps in the sense that they're sort of more bite-sized novellas. And, yeah, I'm really, really excited.

Basically, the funny thing is a lot of people like oh yeah i'll buy this for my niece or nephew or my kids or something and um i'll be honest matt i wrote this very much as a story for myself and just made sure the language was appropriate so part of me is like don't buy it for them buy Buy it for you. It's really funny. I don't know how to break this to you, Bec, but I suspect it will be perfect for children. Ow. I'd like to say it's perfect for everyone. Thank you.

Oh, that too. That too, obviously. That's what I meant. That's what I meant. Yeah. And when would these books, when would they be on bookstores, shows? The Slime is the first one, and it comes out on the 30th of September, so a month before Halloween. Well-timed.

And then the second book will be coming out early next year. I mean, you've been filming your soon-to-be award-winning TV sensation and you've been releasing your series of books. I discovered a hole in my house. That's been my recent adventure. There are worse things to find holes in i guess good point and there are worse things to find in your house but um i happen to find a hole in my house do you remember very early on in lockdown i forget what we were messaging for some reason and i said i'm putting down like a new flooring over my downstairs bathroom yes obviously i told you i was boxing in a pipe because when they installed the downstairs sink

they the laziest way to do it which is fair enough i wasn't paying them to spend forever doing this properly i want it done quickly and cheaply they knocked a hole through the wall into the understairs area ran the pipe along the wall in that understairs zone, and then out an external wall. And I was always nervous because I keep a lot of stuff under the stairs. It's like a general storage area. I was going to lean something against that pipe. And it's just like PVC piping. And I'm going to break it.

It's going to be a leak. It's going to be a nightmare. a leak it's going to be a nightmare and i decided i want to box it in which is where you just build a wooden frame and and sides around whatever is sticking out and so i i started doing that and i previously put down that same flooring under the stairs i discovered that where they put the pipe out through the wall the pipe is about 35 millimeters diameter um oh americans that's like um maybe a third of a cheeseburger across and um the hole the hole that it goes through is uh over five centimeters across and so right and nothing blocks that hole it's literally just a massive hole in the wall and the pipe goes it, but there's nothing else in it. I can see outside through that hole.

And so now I've realized I've got this hole just dumping cold air into my house. Have you put anything in it? Well, I've got a plan. I'm not going to put... Well, I've temporarily shoved some like pepper towel in there to block it off. Just to stop the cold air. But I'm sure i previously complained to you about this i'm always a little annoyed that in in the uk during winter it's so

cold outside and so we spend a lot of energy heating up our houses and so we live in a warm box inside a very cold environment yeah but then inside that we have a fridge and we're spending even more energy to have a cold box inside the warm box that's inside the cold environment yeah and so i've decided to not block up the hole i'm just going to pipe that cold air into a fridge so i'm just going to connect the cold box to the outside cold bit okay and not have two layers of wasted energy on temperature changing you don't want to just put your food outside that what the you you did pitch that to me previously when i was complaining about this and i have done that the novelty in the uk of when it snows making a snowman and storing

my beers in the snowman just outside the back door has not worn off i i've never considered that and that's very funny oh it's definitely worth it you're inventing a fridge that will only work yeah during certain seasons yes yes that is a problem i yeah no so i'm gonna use it for uh like overflow beer and drink storage is this hole in your house like the exact diameter of a stubby of a of a beer bottle you know i'd have to reroute the pipe but that would work i could just drill a series of holes. Through the wall. If I just had like a grid of holes in the wall, I could just put a can in each one.

Fill all the holes with cans. It gets kept cold from the outside, stops the cold from getting into your house. As soon as you take it out, you've got a cold beer. Plug it up with another one. Exactly. That's what I'm trying to achieve. But I've ordered some insulated conduit, and I need to, once the lockdown's over, purchase a secondhand fridge, cut a hole in the side of it, run that tube straight in. Problem solved.

What a podcast. We're solving problems in the intro. Well, we did cover fridges in, I think, either the first or second episode, didn't we? So that does sound like a better use for an old fridge than to try and keep it actually running. So true. Hugely inefficient. Now get an old fridge, cut a hole in the side, connect it to the outside. Done.

I'm impressed. Thank you. But enough about my problems. Let's hear some others. Let's hear some others. Let's do some others. Our first problem comes from when we were still accepting problems via Twitter and Twitter alone, which was last year. This is an oldie, Matt. We're working through them.

Yeah. It's from at Chris the Tide. And they asked how many Becks could fit in Becks Hill? And I thought I should answer that because I've got access to the dimensions. who is maybe outside of the UK or is unaware, it's not spelt the same as Beckhill. Bexhill is spelt B-E-X-H-I-L-L as one word. Bexhill on C. And it's in Sussex, which is sort of the South England. It's on the coast. Yeah, on the coast. That's the word I'm thinking of.

I've never been to Bexhill. You've never been to Bexhill? Bexhill. I know. been to Bexhill? Beckhill. I know. What? Do you know what? I was going to and then lockdowns happened for a year. And funnily enough.

You were not. I'm not buying that. It was always on my list of one day I'll do this. Do you know how many times I've been to Matthew Parker Street? A lot. I frequent Matthew Parker Street. Where is it? It's in Westminster.

It's pretty cool. Though Bexhill, I mean, I've been there once because we did a show there when we were on tour with Festival of the Spoken Nerd back in 2015. Ah. It was lovely. Well, when you were there in 2015, do you remember what month it was? It was October 2015. 2015. Do you remember what month it was?

It was October 2015. Oh, you would have gotten there almost immediately after their festival they had in September, where they broke the world record for the most amount of mermaids in a single area, which was what? 325 mermaids lay on the shore of Bexhill and got a Guinness World Record by mermaids. I mean, people dressed as mermaids. OK, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It would just be a record number of mermaids. Yeah, because it was wasn't zero.

That feels deeply achievable. Like between us, we must know over three hundred and twenty five people who would dress as a mermaid at medium to short notice. And I know we're not meant to gather in groups at the moment, but that does not feel, you know, it was 2015. It was, you know, maybe that was impressive. I wonder if we could break a virtual record for the most amount of people dressed as mermaids on a Zoom call. On the same zoom hey i mean we would either break that record or set that record and i very much suspect it would be the latter so yeah that was that was one of my facts i've got a second fact about bex hill

oh so do i oh we'll trade we'll trade trade second facts. Okay. I'll give you my, this is my second and final fact is that in 2012, it was found to have the most amount of centenarian, someone who was a hundred. Oh, like a centurion. Centurion.

No, that's not, no. That's the Roman army thing. I know, I know, I know. It has the most amount of 100-odd-plus people in the UK. Wow. You're welcome. Good facts. My second fact is in October 2021, this is the future,

the East Sussex Astronomical Society, who meet in Bexhill, will be hosting Professor Lucy Green as their speaker. Hey! Imagine if that had been my fact. I'd be like, you stole my fact! Professor Lucy Green being my wife. People are wondering why we're so amazed that an academic is doing a talk in Bexhill. Hey, excuse me, Matt. You could still be amazed that an incredible professor is going to be in Bexhill.

That's very true. I think, I don't, I assume October 21. I think that's probably still going to be an online event, but potentially it could be in person. Well, if we are allowed to travel, maybe I should use that as my excuse to finally get to Bexhill as well. Yeah, there you go so the only other thing you need to know about bex hill and that is getting us into solving this problem is that i looked it up and it is 32 point i don't know if you can see my hand matt i might have to take a photo for the socials look at my hand that's all my calculations for today's episode you've got numbers scrawled all over your hand.

Went to wash it earlier and stuff. That's why I can't read what the word is centenarian. Just to describe this for the listeners, if you were watching a 90s comedy film and one of the characters had to hilariously cheat in an exam, they would have this level of scrawling all over their hand. But then imagine they did a comedy like brow wipe because of the sweat. And now they look at their hand, they're like, oh, and it's all smudged.

And I end up with ink all over my forehead. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can thankfully read that Bexhill is 32.31 square kilometers. So in order to work out the answer to this problem, I first went to measure my diameter. And then I remembered how hard it is to pack circles. And I went, no, no, no, no, no. Classic, classic problem squared problem. Yep.

So instead I worked out that I am 29 centimeters by 45 centimeters. You know, so I've got like a little rectangle that I stand in and stamp that around like a grid. And that worked out to 1,305 square centimeters. to 1,305 square centimetres. So all I had to do was work out how many me's could fit in 32.31 kilometres squared. So I worked out how many square centimetres should fit in a square kilometre and then I times it by 32.31.

So you've got the total area of Beck's Hill in square centimetres now. Yeah. And then I divided that by my dimensions. And the answer is 247,586,206 me's is how many Beck Hills we could fit in Beck's Hill. But Matt, why would I stop there? Because I was like, I don't have access to a machine that can multiply me. Maybe this person wanted to know how many people called Beck Hill can fit in Beck's Hill.

Could be in Beck's Hill. All of them. So I thought, I need to find out how many people called Beck Hill are in the world. And I, yeah, spoiler alert, Matt, you're right. There is fewer than 247 million. There's fewer than 247 mega Beck Hills. So the way that I worked that out, because it was actually really difficult. I found one website that can tell you roughly how many people have your name in America, but not necessarily worldwide.

And then I managed to find a website called 4bears.io. And it looks like they just pull in statistics and data from as much stuff as possible. And they sort of approximate stuff however i can't search based on first and last name i can search based on first name and i can search based on last name so i found that on record i suspect that well in terms of hill there are 810,045 people with the surname Hill. And then I looked up Beck and there's only 6,680, which I thought was quite small. Funnily enough, most of them in Australia, it was the only place where it seemed to be quite common. And then to work out the odds of the amount of people in the world having both of those names, I worked out that that means that there's 810,045 out of 7.674 billion people in the world. then I took those results as percentages and then I

multiplied the numbers of those percentages together and I ended up with a result of 81 Beck Hills but then I was like that seems very small I actually already know a Beck Hill from Adelaide like you know that's just me there's got to be loads more and then I remembered of course yep yep I wasn't born with the name Beck Hill if we did a census it would be Rebecca it wouldn't be Beck that's only the amount of people born with the name Beck who go by that name you know officially so really what I should do is work out how many Rebecca's there are who might choose to go by the nickname Beck for this problem I think if there was a big Beck Hill fest gathering a lot of Rebecca's would switch to Beck for the purposes of attending Beck Hill Palooza at Beck's Hill.

I would argue the majority of the Becks will be born Rebeccas, will be Rebeccas. So then I found out that there are 7,234,407 Rebeccas in the world. That's more like it. Which obviously is a much, much higher number. So then I did the same calculations I did for the Beck and the world. That's more like it. Which obviously is a much, much higher number. So then I did the same calculations I did for the Beck and the Hill and worked out that it would be 23,676 Rebecca Hills. So if we add those two numbers together, all the Rebecca Hills, all the Beck Hills, we get 23,757. I looked it up, Matt. There's like twice as many people as that in Bexhill. So we could fit all the Beck Hills in the world

in Bexhill comfortably, not even squish. Like we could live there. We could have, you know, double the space that the current residents have. So I feel like if that hasn't solved that problem, I don't know what has. I feel like you might have, and I think this is good news, slightly more Beck Hills. I think you have calculated the lower limit, the minimum number of Beck Hills, because your calculation assumes that the probability of someone's first name being Rebecca is unrelated to the probability of their surname being Hill. And I suspect they're not totally independent for cultural reasons.

I suspect they're linked. I mean, what you've done is a perfect first approximation and I suspect if you factored this in, you would get slightly fewer Beck Hills. I mean, that'd still fit in Beck's Hill, but I have no idea how you'd actually work that number out. You'd probably have to work it out country by country. That's a really good point.

But I think your conclusion is 100% correct. Well, I would also argue that the majority of Rebecca's probably don't go by Beck. I mean, certainly not in the UK. So maybe it would even out. I suspect you're right. Yeah. So there you are. Every Beck Hill could live in Beck's Hill.

Yeah. That's great. Well, I look forward to our trip to Bexhill. Yes. Do we know if there's currently a Beckhill living? There's probably not. You're probably the only Beckhill in Bexhill. We'll find out.

If you're a Beckhill living in Bexhill, give us a shout out at A Problem Squared. Are you going to ding that or what? I think that's a ding. Yeah. That's 100% a ding. Well done. Well done. Our next problem comes from Chris in Ghana,

who has said they only recently discovered the podcast because they watched 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. So, Beck, we were wondering last episode if people would make their way this far in the Beckiverse, and they have so welcome chris and other listeners who saw back on tv and or downloaded the episode online and now uh joining us yeah in the far-flung corners of beck's um creative output so chris has a problem for us so they're apparently they've been thinking about some kind of noah's ark scenario but and they give scant details on why or how but they're more focused on if you got every animal which species would form the longest queue when all

individuals of that species would be queuing up. And then they've clarified post-COVID, no need to worry about social distancing. So this is the problem from Chris, who very kindly put that in our problem posing page at aproblemsquared.com, if anyone has a problem that they want to give us. I mean, people tweet them at us, but the problem posing page is the most reliable way because they get injected straight into our database which chris did and so the question is if each species like all the animals that are that species got together and every single species formed a queue which line would be the longest and i'll get into my attempts at research in a moment but i'm curious to know

just off the top of your head and i've asked a lot of people this which animal do you think would form the longest line if they all got together so uh beck what would be what's your instinct on this well i mean it depends if you're saying what type of type of animal or species because obviously types of animals are then are then divided up into species. Correct. Chris has specified species. A specific species. And species is more general than animal too, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah, because obviously if you were going with just the different species of an animal, then insects. Because there's like a million different species of an animal than insects because there's like a million different species of insects yeah but you know if you were to take there might you know some of them there might only be like 10 of those insects left in the world i don't know so it wouldn't be that much so yeah i guess species does i don't think this person entirely understands how Noah's Ark works. Noah didn't take all of the animals. No. Noah took two of each.

And presumably just the ones that couldn't swim, you know? Yeah, yeah. So the question really is, what do you think potentially has the most individuals in a species that is also long? That's what we're going for isn't it yeah that's the question yeah yeah yeah i feel like i feel like it's gonna be weird like you know the common rat or something because there's loads of them okay yep loads of rats maybe

cockroaches a lot of cockroaches i'm just trying to i'm thinking more about numbers of a species as opposed to the length. Producer John, have you got a guess? I do. Thank you for asking me, Matt. Well, I'm curious. If you're looking for something of which there are a lot of and is also quite big, I'm going to go with a cow. A cow.

There are a lot of cows. Cows are big. That's good. There are a lot of cows. Cows are big. That's good. Oh, there's a lot of chickens too. Oh, chickens. Yep. Yeah. I asked Professor Lucy Green, despite being a space scientist, she was prepared to think

about biology. She pitched worms as the longest one. If you look at a lot of worms and they're long, you queue them up. So the reason I'm asking for guesses is when I took this problem on, I originally thought, well, first of all, I thought the question is just which species, if you multiply the population size by the average length of that species, gives you the biggest number. And I thought I'll just get a database of all the animals and then i'll multiply those terms together and then rank it by the result and i could not find any nice authoritative database that would give me the answer i did find there's a thing called the catalog of life which is like a big omni database of a lot of different biological research put together and my database mate oliver gave me a

hand to download this entire thing and go through it and it just hasn't got consistent population sizes hasn't got lengths so I had to kind of do it by hand I had to just try and find data where I could and make sure I hadn't missed any which is why I asked people suggestions to make sure I included those in my calculations. So the first thing I did was I went to Wikipedia and copied and tidied up the data on every single land dwelling mammal. To see if I could then rank those by population size and then see if there are any that then I should look at their length. And it turns out the top ones, it's absolutely humans right at the top of the list. Oh, yeah. And things that are domesticated are right at the top of the list. So if you're talking just humans, there are just over seven and a half

billion of us. And now we know how many are Beck Hill. We know how many are Beck Hill. Now, you worked out back hill standing up. Oh, yeah. But if you're getting all the humans to queue, we would form a much longer queue if we were all lying down. Yeah. So if every single human was lying down as a queue, that queue would be 13 million kilometers long. But if we all stood up, then it's going to be a much much smaller queue and i um i'd kind of estimated the um distance between people when they're queuing but back

you've now given us a new measurement of 29 centimeters per person in the queue so i'm just going to pop that into my spreadsheet here and so so all humans, if they were all backs and they were in a queue, very snug, just over 2.2 million kilometers long, that line. So I think humans might win if we're allowed to lie down. If we're forced to stand up, we are not going to win. I think we are overtaken by cows. I think producer John has got it. All cows I worked out are just over, they're about 3.6 million kilometers, if you're cows, long. Wow.

Chickens, depends what size you assume a chicken is. I couldn't find any good reliable data on the average size of a chicken so then i remembered my brother has four chickens and so i just asked him i was like hey how big are your chickens and um he's compared his four chickens whose names are fluffy candy cane luna and ron what they're what they're that's like the name of the ghosts in Pac-Man, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Yeah, exactly. Ron is the Clyde of those chickens. But with this very small sample of four chickens, my brother very kindly measured their chickens and he reckons that 45 centimeters per chicken if the chickens were in a queue so

maybe slightly less for actual chicken length but queuing chickens would be 45 centimeters which means all chickens in the world just over 11.6 million kilometers out in front of cows just behind lying down humans. So if we get to lie down, humans would still win. But if humans have to stand up, chickens will take the lead. But then I was like, what about worms? I couldn't get numbers on worms. There are no good numbers on worms out there.

I found a children's fun fact worm page from the University of Illinois. It's got like a cartoon worm saying, did you know all this about worms? I don't know how well researched this is. But they say there's about a million earthworms per acre of land. But also, they say there are 2,700 different types of earthworms. And so, I don't know. Each one's a species. I had the same problem with ants.

If you lump all ants together, because all ants together weigh about the same as all humans together. There are a lot of ants out there. And I took an average length for the 10 quadrillion ants that are apparently on earth. And they would be be oh my goodness they are 54.7 billion kilometers long that's enough to go around the world 1.3 million times which is just insane and that's only in the center of the world isn't it that's not like that's just in the middle yeah

matt you couldn't do that because they would eventually get bigger and bigger and for outside they would add more and more so either you're winding them around the center of the world and that's getting more you want to go side by side or yeah or you're going yeah you're making a cylinder you are you're not covering a sphere making yeah yeah no i was going i was doing cylinder not a sphere you're right um not the biggest source of error in my calculations it turns out um but then they said there's 12 400 species of ants we think but i was but i don't know how many are in each one and if you just assume that they're randomly distributed then you're at about 4 million kilometers again. Right, right. So they're in the mix.

They're cows, humans standing up, ants on average. More problems have been caused by this problem than solutions. Yeah, yeah. And I worked out, I actually did a little bit of digging when this problem came in because I knew you were covering it. But I was intrigued and wanted to see what the definition of species is. And, oh, I mean, I didn't know that, you know, Darwin had a whole thing about how difficult it is to really specify what a species is because there's so many different factors you can get you can't necessarily say oh it's when they don't interbreed because sometimes

they do but likewise sometimes you'll get two species that interbreed but the offspring isn't necessarily its own species ah what's our motto here at A Problem Squared? Biology, sort your stuff out. Biology, what a mess. It's so messy. And then I got into the whole thing about what classifies as an animal, what classifies as a creature, what classifies as animate versus inanimate. Some people have theories that everything is either technically inanimate or animate, depending on what you classify as. Oh, it hurt my brain. And if anyone does want to waste an entire morning, do look it up. It's not wasteful.

It's very interesting. But, you know, wait till you've got a dinner party to discuss it over. Oh, it's a mess. And then I was like, what about bacteria? Not an animal. But Chris didn't say animal. Chris has species in the question. So I worked out, I read somewhere, if you got a single gram of plaque off your teeth

and you took all the bacteria out of that one gram of plaque off human teeth and put them end to end, you're looking at 63 kilometers of bacteria from one gram. And I'm like, but how many species? There's loads of different types of bacteria but we don't know so we have only categorized 30 000 types of bacteria but there's going to be many many more times that in existence out there we just haven't got the data on it but i don don't know if that, it depends what Chris is doing with them. If he has to get the bacteria to line up. So, it's what a nightmare. I liked

your answer, Matt. I think Chris needs to just put every human that exists on their boat. Yeah, that works. Apart from the Becks. All the Beck Hills. Yeah, we'll be happy in Becks Hill on sea, while the rest of everyone else is on sea. I'd say if we exclude ridiculous things like bacteria and we'll ignore worms, then the answer is if we're allowed to lie down humans, if we have to stand up chickens.

There you are. I think that is worthy of a ding. that is worthy of a ding. In any other business, I have finally got a solution to a problem we had in episode 012 from a Patreon supporter called Mike. The original problem for anyone who needs reminding was, I used to think of big fluffy jackets as being inherently warm, but of course, they're really just insulation from the cold. How hot does it have to be outside before wearing a jacket will help you stay cool? So we discussed this problem in 012 and decided in the end that obviously there are a lot of variables and different factors. in the end that obviously there are a lot of variables and different factors and it was sort of impossible to solve unless we knew what environment we were talking about and so I said that I would try and do it in a sauna and just yeah do that as an experiment and work out what

the result was and then of course lockdown occurred. And saunas became impossible. And it got shelved. And then I was contacted by a company called Higher Dose. And they sell sauna blankets. A sauna blanket. A sauna blanket. And for the uninitiated, as I was, what is a sauna blanket? The best way I can describe it is it's like a waterproof sleeping bag,

which heats up. It's infrared and it gets really warm. Hot, you might even say, but not to a bad level. I've been semi-dismissively referring to it as the electric sleeping bag, which I don't think is inaccurate. Yeah, it is a lot more technical and scientific than that. But if you're trying to imagine what it is, then that's probably the easiest way to go about it.

And essentially, it's been created so that you can have a sauna experience at home and not need a massive box to sit in or anything like that and I thought brilliant yes can I please wear a giant fluffy jacket in it and they said of course so they so they sent one out and I did actually film this for YouTube because uh trust me it is funnier to watch than it is to imagine. And basically it just looks like I'm sort of, you know, there's vegetables that you put in the bags and then put in the microwave. Right. Yep. It looks like I'm sort of doing that. It was really funny to watch back because honestly, I really, well, you know this and I've talked about this on the podcast before.

I miss, like, I love the heat and I really, really miss being hot. I like humidity. I've always enjoyed being in those sorts of environments. And neither of us have been back to Australia for a while now. Exactly. Yeah. I'm starting to feel the withdrawal from not getting my uh my dose of the warmth yeah so i really enjoyed doing it because i was finally in a situation where i got really hot and sweaty

without doing the workout and so i just lay there like just chilling out having a time of my life when you watch it back my face is completely blank like you can do you know why that is like because i am not thinking about anything it is the closest i've ever been to meditating just chilling in your electric sleeping bag oh just stewing in my juices i loved it wow but the the first one that i did i did without a big fluffy jacket and i keep saying big fluffy jacket because that is how the question was worded. I have different types of coats and jackets. I have

those, you know, big puffer ones, where they're sort of the ones you wear in the snow. But Mike specifically said big fluffy jacket, which I have, which is the one that I carried out the experiment with. It was big. It was fluffy.

Very fluffy. Yeah, it's exactly, exactly as Mike said. So the first time I did it, I did it without the jacket. The controlled stew, as we call that. The controlled stew, yep. And the temperature of the sauna blanket was 65 degrees Celsius. Whoa, that is a warm blanket. Yeah.

Wow. And my body temperature was 36.3 degrees Celsius. Whoa, that is a warm blanket. Yeah. Wow. And my body temperature was 36.3 degrees Celsius when I got in. Right. And I took my temperature every five minutes. I'm not going to take you all the way through it because I explain it on the video. If anyone is listening and wants to watch, it's on my YouTube, just Beck Hill Comedian. I'm sure if you look up Beckhill Fluffy Jacket or something, it'll show up as well. Yeah, just go onto YouTube, search for electric sleeping bag. You'll find it in no time. Right.

What was your final temperature? My final temperature after 30 minutes was 38.8 Celsius. Now, for people who are kind of worried about your well-being that's just like your surface temperature yeah oh yeah i should explain matt you sent me a thermometer that would allow me to yeah to have the temperature of my digital thermometer yes you sent me that and uh it was surface temperature you're right i should explain that this wasn't anything that was going inside me it wasn't anything taking my core temperature i know because i want that back so you know what on reflection you can keep the keep the thermometer back yeah so uh 30 38.8 degrees celsius was my temperature. With no fluffiness, no coat, nothing.

No fluffiness. And in that one as well, I was properly starting to bead. I think I got my first beading sweat around sort of just after the 10-minute mark or something. I was like, and then it was just constant. Yeah. With a fluffy jacket, same temperature for the blanket, 65 degrees Celsius. My body temperature, my surface temperature, sorry, that day was 36. So it was 0.3 lower. I'm sure some people will argue that makes a huge difference. Close enough. 0.1. I was 0.7 degrees lower. So even though I started out 0.3 degrees lower, I ended up 0.4 on top of that. I think that's significant. I think that is a noticeable

change. Yeah. Have you got, you've got the kind of the temperature, like I guess you were consistently just a bit lower than the control stew. Well, it's funny you say that because the gap actually fluctuated between the two. So at one point around the 20 minute mark, I was 37.3 in the jacket, 38.6 without the jacket. 38.3 in the jacket, 38.6 without the jacket. So it was like a full degree 0.3 difference. And I remember, in fact, at 20 minutes without the jacket, I was sweating so much. Because I was sweating like you would in a sauna.

I was sweating the amount you're supposed to sweat in that environment. With the fluffy jacket on, I literally just felt warm. I felt like I was snuggled up in a blanket in winter watching TV. I just felt real, you know, just comfy. A bit bored, actually, to be honest. Well, I suspect, because when you're wearing that blanket, you're going to delay, like it's insulation, so you'll delay you warming up, but you're not going to stop it permanently. Eventually, the heat will catch up with you. Exactly.

So I think you're just buying time at one point over a degree benefit, but then the gap is going to gradually close. I did actually, there's a graph on the video if anyone wants to see uh the plot points uh of the two uh following my temperature every five minutes and then how they look compared to each other i will also post that up on instagram and twitter when this episode goes out but yeah uh it's exactly as you say, Matt. I suspect, looking at the way it happened, it meant it delayed it, but it was starting to catch up. What I don't know is if after the 30-minute mark, at any point, it ends up becoming the same or worse. That's a good point. You have to spend a lot longer in the electric sleeping bag.

But I would say, I mean, that's amazing, Beck. You have both comprehensively managed to solve this problem experimentally, which is really good. And you've got yourself a free thermometer. So frankly, it's amazing all round. So I'm going to give you a ding, absolute ding. And it took us a little while, but we got there. From episode 012 to 017, problem solved.

Ding. Before we finish up, I want to give a shout out to the hashtag Nobel for Milliver, which is a campaign being run by the Inspiring Girls charity, who are working to inspire girls to move more into other industries where there is not an equal representation of women at the moment. They are working to get more recognition for Mileva Marik and her work as a mathematician. Until now, she has mainly been known as Albert Einstein's wife, but obviously contributed a huge amount to STEM and they would like to get that recognised. So if you would like to join in by spreading the word, use hashtag Nobel for Milliver. That's N-O-B-E-L-F-O-R-M-I-L-E-V-A. And we're asking all women to take photos of themselves poking their tongue out

to copy the same picture that Albert Einstein was famous for. The famous tongue poking out Einstein photo. Yes. Yep. Spread the word. Get it out there. We will put some links in the podcast description. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening to A Problem Squared episode 017

as we finally pull into the no problem junction. Thank you everyone who sends in problems. Of course you can go to problemsquared.com if you want to use our problem posing page. Now you can say if you're offering a solution. So if you do have worm data that's where you can let us know that you've got that. And thank you very much to our 182 patreon supporters who all get to listen to these episodes a few days early and if they're at the i'm a wizard level of support they get to listen to the uh incredibly polished i'm a wizard bonus episode and that's it i've been matt parker joined by beck hill our producer john harvey is behind the scenes who's somehow going to edit

what we've just recorded into an episode. And our curator of problems, Steph Keegan, who we would normally just thank. It turns out today, Steph, if you're listening, we're recording this

on your birthday. So at time of recording, it is your birthday. And so, I mean, as you are curator of problems, you should be listening to all the episodes. Happy birthday.

Bye. Bye.