A Problem Squared - 031 = Differing Frames and Numbering Phones

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

In this episode...   * Why are aspect ratios so whack?    * How many phone numbers actually exist?    * Wheels or Doors: Revisited.    * And, closure on A Pudding Squared.   A big thank you to Tom Salinsky for helping with this week's problem. You can find more from him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomsalinsky?lang=en and his podcast, Best Pick Pod, here: https://twitter.com/bestpickpod?lang=en   If you want to see Matt, Bec AND Lucie at the belated and brilliant Nine Carols variety show on the 16th and 17th of April, you can book tickets here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/nine-lessons-and-carols-for-curious-people-3/    You can check on tickets for Matt's shows here: https://www.ents24.com/uk/tour-dates/matt-parker-2 (Disclaimer: The 21st of April may, definitely be sold out.)    Bec's NEW BOOK Horror Heights: Now LiveScreaming is available for pre-order here: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bec-hill-2/horror-heights-now-livescreaming/9781444962338/    This is Dexter and Ivy's incredible A Pudding Squared answer, here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/In1cdfg_J4A   Don't forget too send in your Blue Dot Festival problems to us on the site below - we might just do it live!   As always, if you've got a problem or a solution, hit us up on aproblemsquared.com.   And if you want want even more from A Problem Squared (and who doesn't) you can find us on Twitter and Instagram.

Welcome aboard a Problem Squared and get ready to take off on the problem solving podcast, which is a bit like a helium blimp in that it technically solves a lot of problems, but is yet to be universally taken up as a solution to any of those problems. I'm joined with my co-pilot, Beck Hill, comedian, TV presenter, and author, and whose initials are the same as Helium Blimp, but in the reverse order. Helium Blimp, but in the reverse order. And I am a mathematician, also author, I guess, YouTuber, Matt Parker.

And my initials are the end of the word blimp. It's factually accurate. You can't argue with that introduction It's all I can't I love it The only thing I'll argue with Is you said author I guess And I would argue that you are

You've authored more books than I have Have I? I've done two You've written two Oh we're even now Yeah we're even If If Bruce Lee was still alive

And starred in a film of my life, Bruce Lee is Matt Parker spells blimp. There you are. That's the whole. Oh, right. I was wondering where you were going. Me too. Me too. I was trying to work out the rest of the word blimp.

If it ends with Matt Parker, what's BLI, you know? Yeah. Bloomin' lovely imp. It's Matt Parker. Yeah, there you go. Meanwhile, in this episode, I'll be finding out why aspect ratios are so whack. I'll be running the numbers on how many phone numbers there are. And we'll get some closure on a pudding squared. Let's get to it. Bec, how have you been? Good. Well, now I'm good. I'm now COVID free. Less COVID-y than ever,

which is great. That's the tagline of the film of my life. And I'm very happy about that because we start the first block of filming on Makeaway Takeaway season two next week. That's exciting. Yeah. You've got a second season. Second season. For any new listeners, it is an arts and craft show that is on CITV or the ITV hub. If you're watching back, I think season one is still up.

Oh, really? So it's a show that's for, for young people, but enjoyed by humans of all ages. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I actually was, as people started to socialize again, I was surprised by the amount of friends of mine who were like, oh, I love my Kwe Tek. I've been watching it. And I was really touched by that. How many episodes were in the first season?

13. So 12. And then there was a Christmas special. So there'll be another 13 in this one. I miss a lot of filming, but you know, you'll enjoy it. It'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. What about you, Matt? Well, I, at the time of recording, as of tomorrow, I'm back on tour, which is a bit terrifying. Well, yes and no. So my show Humble Pie, which I did the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019. We were in the same venue. It was great fun. I then toured it later in 2019 and booked in another like third half of the tour in early 2020.

And I booked in what would be traditionally called the DVD recording, where I was going to do a show at the Bloomsbury Theatre and get it filmed, quote unquote, for DVD. Obviously, a pandemic had different ideas. The whole thing was cancelled. And it was rebooked a couple of times because originally everyone's like, eh, we'll be fine by the summer. Right. And so it kept getting rebooked, rebooked. And I was torn.

I remember we talked on the phone quite a bit about this. I was like, do I just, just let it go? Or do I try and film it now? Or do I wait till the pandemic's over? And part of me, I was so proud of that show. And I think a lot of people would enjoy it or be useful. It's a really good show. Because it's a show all about maths and how things go wrong.

And I think it's a good teaching aid as well. I was like, well, there's so many people who could enjoy this if it was filmed and made available online. And so I was like, oh, fine. So I've rebooked the Bloomsbury show to get it filmed. And then the minimum number of shows required to remember the show. How do you work that out? Uh, I decided three.

Cause I figure, you know, three feels about right. Like two is not enough and four feels like too many. Like you can't be one show. Cause you're going to get to the end of it and be like, oh, I forgot all that stuff. Yeah. And two just for, yeah. So I'm doing three shows, which I think when this episode goes out, I will have done. But the filming won't have happened yet.

So if people want to come to the filming, it's on the 21st of April at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. And I'm running a Kickstarter for the filming to pay for the cameras. So hopefully once, you know, uh, by the time this is out, the Kickstarter will have been running for a little while because the more money I get, the more cameras and better cameras and more lasers. So the risk assessment we've put in the local council have to sign off on laser use. So I've had to do a lot of paperwork pertaining to lasers. We've put in the paperwork to get the permit for more powerful lasers and more of them than I currently have access to.

But depending on the level of funding, I will get in these extra lasers. Thanks to our dear friend, Seb Lee DeLisle. Seb Lee DeLisle. And the lasers were impressive enough when I saw it in Edinburgh. That's exciting. That was one laser. What date is that again? In April?

That was the 21st of April. 21st of April. I will, I'll be there. I'll come. Are you free? I am free. Yeah, come on. Yeah.

You can come. Maybe meet Beck in the audience. See the show. Be immortalized in a crowd shot. I mean, there's a lot, you know. Yeah. What's going on? Oh, that'd be so fun.

I'm looking forward to that. Are you doing nine lessons? Yes. Yeah. That's like the. Which one are you doing? I think I'm doing. I can't remember. I said it. Lucy's like the. Which one are you doing? I think I'm doing. I can't remember.

Lucy's doing the other one. So I think. I think for me, Lucy's doing Saturday and I'm doing Sunday. Are you doing nine lessons? Ah, I'm doing Saturday. So I'll be with Lucy. I'll probably be around. And I'm going to do a reading from the second Horror Heights book, which won't be officially released yet,

but I believe they're talking to my publisher about selling special pre-release date copies there and there only, if anyone wants to get a Horror Heights book. So these shows are nine lessons and carols for curious people, which Robin Inch runs, which are meant to be at Christmas, but a bunch of them were cancelled.

And so they've been moved to Easter. And it's a variety night of nerdy and comedy people. And so you can come along and be the first people in the world to get the second book in the Horror Heights series. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So you and I, 16th and 17th of April at King's Place.

We'll put a link in the show notes or something. Name lessons. Google it. What a party. Wow. I'm just so terrified. I've got to remember the show. Hey, let's take your mind off it with some problems. You're on. Alright, Beck. Our first problem is sent in by Matthew Valaris.

Great name there. The Matthew bit I'm talking about. And their problem is why are aspect ratios all whack? W-A-C-K, whack. And then they, obviously this is bothering them because they point out there's a different one for their phone, their TV, their computer, their cinema. And I want to say it's a rant, but at one point they put four question marks in a row where they're saying, why are movies made for widescreen cinema?

But when you play it at home, it's got big black bars on the top and bottom because it wasn't made for the size of our TVs. They seem angry. So can you solve their aspect ratio woes? Short answer, yes and no. I mean, yes. Now I will expand. Good, good.

If you could just widen that out. In a nutshell, they're all whack because it's almost like not everything is made by one company. And because different people make different things, they make different decisions about why something should be a different aspect ratio. Right. Instagram uses square aspect ratios. The app Hipstamatic was quite popular at the time, but it was mainly only a photo editing app to make your photos look like retro square pictures. Instagram were like, hey, that thing's pretty popular. Let's focus on the sharing aspect of it. And then they became a big social media thing.

And you used to be able to share pictures from hipstamatic on instagram and then obviously instagram were like hang on why don't we just put the filters in our app and then they ate it yeah and then they ate it yeah so is that polaroids that gave a square ratio is that what they were trying to emulate uh probably which i Uh, probably, which I will delve into further later. Gotcha. Or not, depending on how we're going for time, Lauren. The answer was yes and no. But I was really curious about the movies and TVs part of it, because you would think that eventually at some point everyone would agree we're going to use this aspect ratio, but that still hasn't happened. No.

agree we're going to use this aspect ratio but that still hasn't happened so i went to someone who would be able to answer that question far better than i this is not only a friend but co-author of best pick a journey through film history and the academy awards mr tom salinski and we've got him on the pod right now hello thank you for you for having me. Welcome, Tom. So Tom, can you explain to us why aspect ratios are so whack? I'll try. So like so many things in our modern digital world, this all arises because things used to be made of stuff. And so a movie is a series of still images that gets projected one after the other but its physical form is a continuous strip of celluloid yeah so it just has sprocket holes punched in it so that mechanisms inside cameras or projectors can move it stop it and then open a shutter to either project or expose a single frame of film but there's no

frames on the film when you buy it and put it into the camera oh it's as the filmmaker yeah you get to decide how much film you're going to advance and what shape is the image that you're going to expose oh so the film when you buy it is not just like a bunch of little rectangles one after the other. It's just a continuous strip of negative. That's right. Oh, like in a cassette tape. Yeah. So the same kind of film can be used for different things. Very early films were roughly square,

but there was no particular need to standardise, and they sometimes ended up being a little bit wider than they were tall. I think they did that because they were copying Hipstagram, wasn't it? I can only assume, yes. Yeah. But everything changed with the coming of sound. Several things had to be standardised when synchronised sound came along in the late 1920s.

One was frame rates. Old movie cameras were hand-cranked, and so the film rate would change according to how fast or how slow the operator was turning the handle. But because there was no sound, a little bit of speed up or slow down here and there doesn't really make very much difference, but it makes a huge difference if you're recording audio at the same time. So then also, very, very early sound films had the sound supplied separately

on records, on discs, and since they could only play about seven or eight minutes of audio per disc this meant the projectionist was kept very busy as the film was being shown to the public and also they just had to keep changing over the records yeah keeping them in sync was also a nightmare so very quickly finding a way of recording sound onto the film became necessary and this was done either with a magnetic stripe down one side or an optical stripe. And so in the 1930s, the Academy, as in the Academy Awards or the Oscars, decreed that all movies on 35mm film should be made in the so-called Academy ratio, which if you want to be very pedantic is 1.375 to 1, but that's as near as damn it,

4.3. And for the sake of brevity, I am going to do some rounding here. I'm not going to distinguish between 2.35 to 1 and 2.33 to 1 and 2.39 to 1. I'm going to try and limit the total number of aspect ratios I talk about. We're going to allow that we will accept two significant figures per aspect ratio that's fine uh so uh 1.33 to 1.36 ish sort of four three uh was the shape of basically every film made in hollywood between about 1932 and 1952 with only a tiny handful of exceptions uh is there a reason that that the academy declared four three instead of square because like i mean a lens i mean the perfect aspect ratio is circle because a lens is a circular it's a circular lens it's projecting a circular image so if you're starting with a circle is there there a reason why they went, eh, how about a little bit of a rectangle?

I think photos were already rectangular and photos kind of imitate paintings. And because we have two eyes ranged horizontally, our field of view is wider than it is tall. Gotcha. So I think they started with a square and then it just became a little bit, a little bit wider than square. So potentially it's paintings who set the standard for photos very well be yeah the standard for film i can actually uh pop in with that because i was looking into the history of vertical films apparently the first moving picture of a cat which i think was called falling cat in the late 1800s, like 1893, I want to say, was filmed vertically, but then had to be

cut down to 4.3 to be shown in the cinema. But it was initially filmed to be a vertical film. That was because they were looking at the way that portraits are done. Yeah, because when you're painting a picture, you can pick whatever frame size and shape is appropriate for the subject matter. But it's harder to keep chopping and changing when you're making a film. And in particular, as Hollywood and the film industry all over the world became a business, standardization keeps costs down. When you have standard film gauges, standard cameras, standard projectors, everything's standardized, then that's one less thing to worry about. So they standardized on 4.3, job done.

Near as damn it, yeah. Excellent. Thanks for joining us. And then in the 1950s... Oh, the standard didn't hold. Oh my goodness. Television came along. And television began offering an alternative to going to the movies and the movie studios

started to panic. What could they offer that television didn't? Now, television was also for free or very nearly, and there are all sorts of technical reasons for that. But one of the things that the movies thought they could offer was a bigger, wider image and all sorts of widescreen formats came along. Now, a strip of 35mm film, you can get a wider image on that just by exposing less. You can expose a narrow strip across the middle, and then you'll have a wider image. But it won't be a bigger image, it'll be a smaller image. And so projecting that on a big screen may create problems because there's less detail there. So the most extreme solution to this was a process called Cinerama, which used three synchronised cameras and three synchronised

projectors to create an image, which is three times as wide as it is tall. There are, I think, only three feature films made in this process, of which only two are fiction. The other one is a documentary. It's just sort of a load of shots of scenery. I think it's a documentary about Cinerama. Yeah, but Cinerama clearly wasn't the way forward. So some places did just crop the image, but some processes used an anamorphic lens.

Oh, I read those books as a kid. It's about the aliens. They come to Earth. The kids can turn into whatever animal they touch. I know about this. Not quite. So this is a process which optically squeezes the image. So now you have a 4-3 image which you've captured on your celluloid film,

but it's been stretched vertically. And when you project it, you project it through a lens that stretches it the opposite way and then that expands it back out again and that gives you your cinema scope your 2.35 to 1 ratio the other you can do is vista vision which takes 35 millimeter film and passes it through the camera sideways oh so now the width of the film instead of being the width of the image is the height of the image right oh i have a i have a camera a still camera that uses 35 mil to either make square or vertical images right yeah they say for the sake of the developers, please only choose one type of ratio per roll. So VistaVision was used primarily for special effects work,

where the same piece of film would have to be re-photographed multiple times in order to build up layers of images, because it was such a big image that there was lots of details that even after it was re-photographed several times and it was then printed onto ordinary 35mm film, it still looked okay. The cameras were very big and bulky. They were very difficult to use to shoot ordinary footage. And then there was 70mm, which is taking film which is twice as wide. And again, you have problems with the cameras are very bulky, but that was used more. So there were two aspect ratios that ended up dominating, 1.85 to 1 and 2.35 to 1-ish, which is the 70mm or the anamorphic standard. And that was fine until television again screwed things up. Because television, not content with

offering programmes that competed with cinema, started buying films that were intended for cinema exhibition and putting those on television instead. So when I was growing up, widescreen films on television were very often shown panned and scanned. It's the worst. Matt, you might be old enough to remember that. Beck, I don't know if you are. It's just the worst.

So people complained, as your listener has, that films were being shown with black borders at the top and bottom. They couldn't understand why Ben-Hur wasn't filling the whole of their television screen. So in order to pacify these people, what they would do is basically zoom into the middle of the image and then just try and pick the vertical slice that contained the most interesting bit of the action.

But with a 2.35 to one image, that means you're losing almost half of it by doing that. That's the irony. People complain, oh, I'm not using my whole TV screen. I'm not getting the whole movie on my screen. But by punching in, you're getting less, less of the picture. That's right. And I don't want to skip ahead to what you're doing next.

I had the reverse problem recently when the pandemic kicked in, I thought, you know what? I'm going to rewatch every Seinfeld episode, which was filmed in four, three, all the streaming services that offer Seinfeld have this awful punched in version to try and widescreen the 4.3 episodes and you totally break the composition and details in the shots

and jokes are broken. Yeah. Stuff's cropped out. Same happened with The Simpsons on Disney Plus I believe. I think they fixed that now but the early seasons, yeah people were showing screen grabs where you can see the joke in the original 4.3 version, but not in the punched-in 16.9 version. All Matthews get angry about these things.

The stupidest solution I can remember was when I was a kid, BBC Two showed 2001 A Space Odyssey, and they showed it in widescreen, but in order to try and forestall some of these complaints, during the space scenes, they put stars in the black borders in the hope that no one would notice, which worked a bit until, of course, any object enters or leaves the top of the frame,

whereupon it just seems to become invisible. And what you need to do really is just buy three TVs and run them side by side. Side by side, exactly, yes. I mean, and that's what all sensible people did. There was the opposite of your Seinfeld problem as well, Matt. And I remember during the pandemic when everyone started watching friends on because friends is on netflix and everyone started watching it again and i'm guessing it was originally filmed

with a wider film on the netflix one it is like quite wide but obviously when it was originally aired it was four three and suddenly there's all these bits in the show where there's a camera operator or someone in the side of the screen like all these things just just standing at this edge um in fact i'll there's a couple of screenshots i'll put them on uh socials we'll stick them on their problem squared twitter and instagram same thing happened with the the hd release of buffuffy, I believe. Because sometimes what's called the intended aspect ratio is not the same as the negative aspect ratio. And you're using negative in terms of film. Film negative, exactly.

Sometimes films were shot, what's called open matte. In other words, the whole of the 4-3 frame was exposed, but the intention was to matte off the top and bottom of the image when it was projected. And so some television stations who bought films bought them open mat, and sometimes that meant, again,

that there was stuff in the top and bottom of the frame that was never supposed to be there. Some very embarrassing stuff in some sex scenes, as well as boom mics at the top of the frame. Wait, when you say embarrassing stuff in sex scenes, that makes me wonder, like, what is more like... That's what happens when you forget to matter. That's to sound prudish.

Yes, exactly. And the fact there are some films which we don't know what the right aspect ratio is. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, which was recut by the studio, when it was restored, it was not clear whether it was intended to be matted down to 1.85 to 1 or whether it was intended to be shown 4.3. Orson Welles' notes are not definitive and there's no one shot which clearly looks better in one aspect ratio or the other. And so that's what also some directors were doing in the kind of

80s and 90s. They were deliberately composing shots that would work just as well in a matted 1.85 to 1 wide ratio or a television 4.3 ratio because they knew that their stuff was going to be on home video and shown on televisions. That's what I do when I'm taking photos now for online stuff.

I take it really far away. So I'm like, regardless of where I post this, it could be landscape, portrait, or a square. But televisions are not 4-3 anymore. Televisions now are 16 by 9. And for that, we have to thank somebody called Dr. Kearns H. Powers. Great name. And he started looking at all of the different common aspect ratios

that were around and considering what would be an ideal shape that would sort of suit everybody and 16 by 9 is the mathematical mean between that super widescreen 2.35 to 1 and that old academy ratio 4.3 it's also it's quite near 1.85 to 1 so a lot of widescreen films sort of pretty much almost fill a 16 by 9 screen. They just have a little black bar at the top and bottom, but not very much of a one. But that's where that came from. And then, of course, we come to the digital switchover and television stations start broadcasting in digital 16 by 9. And there the story should have ended. But there are a couple of other little things I thought might be worth mentioning. As that saw to where we are today, 16 by 9 televisions, 1.851 is the most common

widescreen format. Everything for television is being shot in 16 by 9 pretty much. And then you still have old fashioned 4.3 films with pillar boxing borders at the sides. But then there's a guy called Vittorio Storaro, cinematographer, and he was looking, still in the celluloid days, at how to get more out of a piece of 35mm film, and he recommended an aspect ratio of 2 to 1. which the aspect ratio is controversial, which is The Last Emperor, which is one that was shot wider than it was intended. Shot in 2.35 to 1 anamorphic, but he intended it to be shown in 2 to 1,

and he began pushing 2 to 1 as the aspect ratio everyone should be using. He called it univisium. And it took a while to catch on. He pushed this in 1998, but in the last sort of half a dozen years, suddenly loads of people are using this two-to-one aspect ratio. I mean, it's easy to remember. It is.

So Midsommar was shot in two-to-one. The most recent series of Doctor Who was shot in two-to-one. Chernobyl was shot in two-to-one. Another Round, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature last year, was shot in two-to-one. I think actually a lot of Netflix's original content is now two to one stranger things according to your producer was shot in two to one uh so that's uh that's kind of joined the party more recently well the problem i

have making stuff for youtube which is largely viewed on tvs and. And people want 4K. Like, if you make a 4K video for YouTube, you're kind of future-proofing it, but you also get the little 4K icon, which I quite like. And the classic 16.9 TV, that was the old 1080 by 1920 ratio. Good old HD.

4K, they doubled that. So it's 3840 pixels across by 2160 up which is just those numbers doubled but that's not quite 4000 and there's a different 4k so there are two competing 4ks the standard one which is just double hd is kind of under underestating, rounding down, like you've got to round it up to get 4K. You've also got 4096 pixels by 2160, which is more image. It's a bit wider.

It's also a power of two, which is deeply, deeply pleasing due to the power of 14. But it means. You're getting black bars top and bottom. And so I'm always torn. Which 4K. I should be filming in.

We tend to do. 4096. Because it's a power of 2. Yeah pleasing. Exactly I haven't got any other better reason. It's more pixels. But it's less screen area on a standard TV. So, I mean, people, let me know what you want.

But until I hear, it's two to the power of 14 all the way. I mean, do you consider the subject matter? Because that's the other thing you're seeing nowadays. You see things like the Grand Budapest Hotel, which is shot in three different aspect ratios for the different parts of its story. Or you have the Snyder Cut, where he went back to 4.3 on the basis that this is a story about men standing around

and then leaping vertically into the air. So why is he telling this story in a wide aspect ratio? I, um, there's many things that my dear wife tolerates because she's wonderful and one of them is i get very excited when a film changes aspect ratio and i feel the need to point it out just to the room even if there's no one there i'll say it out loud every time and i get ah so so good night books which is there's a one there, I'll say it out loud every time. And I get, oh, it's so, so good. Night Books, which is a Halloween film for kids. It's on Netflix.

Every time it went into a character's, they were telling a story and it sort of went into a flashback mode. The letterboxing applies. The black bars come down and it goes really cinematic while they tell a story. And it is really good. It's actually very scary. I thoroughly recommend it. Well, another film where the aspect ratio jumps around is The Dark Knight. And that's because parts of The Dark Knight were shot on IMAX. So we talked

before about trying to squeeze the most out of 35mm film, using anamorphic lenses to squash the image or passing it through the camera sideways in order to get this bigger image area 70 millimeter cameras were generally seen as very bulky and so only very prestigious projects were shot on 70 millimeter imax creates an amazingly big image by taking 70 millimeter film and passing it through the camera sideways oh this is the best of everything colossal image and in fact i remember seeing a documentary about imax when it was first developed and the problem they had was as i said at the very beginning you begin with a continuous strip of celluloid and to expose this or to play it back what you have to do is move it one frames worth,

stop it dead, open the shutter and close it again. And they could not get any mechanism which could move 70mm film on its side fast enough because you have to do that 24 times a second. And no matter what they tried, it always ended up creating what they called the autumn leaves effect, which is when they got above about 12 frames a second suddenly the projection booth would be filled with little bits of shredded film fluttering to the ground because the mechanisms are very clever that that that have these cool little i guess it's all mechanized little mechanisms that that kind of move it and stop and move it and stop using clever cogs and cams and stuff. But in the case of the original IMAX projectors, it was creating a loop in the film, a kind of hump,

and letting that hump kind of move along the length of the film. And every time it moved along, that would be one frames worth. It was really, really clever. Now, it's all digital nowadays. But yeah, IMAX, partly because of that problem, had a squarer aspect ratio of about 1.4 to 1 uh so that the the full imax experience filling the whole height of the screen is is coming very close to that academy ratio again and so that's what happens when you're watching the dark knight you keep going from this widescreen format to this nearly square format

i have to watch that again. I don't remember it, but I think that's the thing with some film is when all the parts are working so well, both the acting, directing, the effects, everything like that, sometimes it's so good that you don't notice it because you're

so immersed in it. These days with digital cameras, it is purely an artistic choice you can have pretty much any aspect ratio you want most films are still 185 to 1 or 2.35 ish to 1 most tv is still 16 9 but you can you can shoot and then edit into pretty much any shape or size that you wish and as long as you deliver in a standard format, your material can be seen by anybody. YouTube used to, was 4.3. So it was based on TV ratio until 2009, they switched to widescreen, but did black bars. So there was this weird era where despite YouTube

being a new, totally digital way of watching video, they still had black bars because they switched to widescreen, but then they black barred the 4.3 footage. But obviously now they just show it in whatever the ratio is, and you can upload it, I believe, pretty much whatever you want. There probably are some limits, but it's just strange to see. That was like the final bit of black bars online, like embedded in the website for weird

archaic reasons yeah you do sometimes see material which is both letterboxed and pillar boxed which is very frustrating on a dvd you might get yes yeah a four three documentary about the film which includes clips of the film in widescreen yeah which has now become a little postage stamp in the middle of the screen with black borders top, bottom, left and right. But that is why aspect ratios are whack. Yay! Oh, Tom, thank you so much.

As a listener of the show as well, you'll know how much this is worth, but I think, at least from where I'm standing, you've just given us a good old ding. A ding. Happy to help. I think if Matthew, who wrote in, isn't happy with that, then they can go and take their head

out their own aspect ratio. Unkind. I was trying to think of a pun on Aspect Radio that's all I could come up with I didn't mean it Matthew don't take away our ding if people would like more Tom where should they go

they could go to at Tom Selinsky on Twitter where they can get daily Star Trek reviews because I'm watching all of Star Trek one episode per day or they can listen to Best Pick the podcast in which we watched because that process is completed now of Star Trek one episode per day. Or they can listen to Best Pick, the podcast in which we watched,

because that process is completed now, every film that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in an order determined by pulling them out of a hat at random. Excellent. And that having been done, we're now just watching different films and researching them

and talking about them in different ways. Or they can buy the book, Best Pick, a journey through film history at the Academy Awards. Or think about the book. Best pick. A journey through film history and the Academy Awards. The book is vertical ratio. You didn't... The book is vertical, yes. We didn't go for a widescreen book.

Disappointed. Next time. We'll put some links in the show notes. This one is from Anthony, which, by the way, I wouldn't see this as a dinglet, but you say it is, which goes to show how different we are. Yeah.

For me, this would be a massive, this would be a big old problem. This is a big old problem. Oh, goodness. You're quite confident that this is a quick one. I've been wrong before. So this is Anthony, or Antony. I apologize. I know people pronounce them differently.

They say, hi, Matt and Beck. Massive fan of everything you all do thank you very much i got a missed call from a mobile number earlier today but when i rang it back i was informed the number had been disconnected this got me thinking about how many mobile phone numbers there are how do the australian numbers compared to the uk or US and would we ever run out? Which I think goes a little bit disappointingly. It sounded like the original problem was going to be like, am I a spy?

Right, yeah. Like, did I miss out on some intel? Someone had to destroy the phone before I was able to find out some fascinating facts. Well, this is why you think it's a bigger problem than I do. Because I'm like, oh, that's easy. I'll just run the numbers on the numbers. Like, that's pretty straightforward.

And actually, I've had the same thought before. Because at least in Australia, they do reuse phone numbers, which I think is ridiculous. I discovered this when I was a teacher. One day on the way into work, I couldn't find my normal water bottle. I went and grabbed an old water bottle that I'd used years ago when I was at university at like a sports event. And this is right when I, in the year 2000 2000 I got my first ever mobile phone right when you could text message and I'd written the number on the bottom I was just gonna say this story

this story has started for a while started to go down the route of like old man rambling and the year was maybe 2004 back then phones you could you could text but you had to scroll sideways to read it all on the little tiny lcd screens we used to call them yeah well anyway the point is i used a bottle at work that had my old phone number on it i didn't have any more the students saw it thought that was pretty funny thought they were going to message me but i'm like i haven't got that number anymore like one of them, I can apologize. Oh, sorry. A bunch of people were sending you messages.

I'm like, why? I didn't, I didn't get the new messages. So I had to message that number. And some poor person in Queensland was like, yeah, I had no idea where these messages were coming from. They'd been reassigned my old university mobile number that I'd left on a, on a sports bottle. Cause I didn't want to lose it at some, you know, sporting event I'd gone to. And, uh, they're getting a bunch of tech, you know, uh, hilarious text messages from year nine students.

So, and I was like, well, why did they give them like, are we that short on numbers that if someone stops using it, we hand it out again. So when I got this, this problem from Anthony, I'm like, that's a good point. I want to run the numbers. Let's find out. And so in Australia, your phone numbers, they start, well, they start at zero or plus six, one thing we want to do. Mobile phone numbers then have a four followed by eight digits. That can be any of the 10 digits. They can be any of the 10 digits. They can be zero through nine.

Yeah. And that means there's 10 options for the first digit, 10 options for the second one, all the way down. 10 to the power of eight is 100 million. And so there's your answer. There are 100 million possible mobile phone numbers in Australia, which is bigger than the population of Australia. In fact, that's roughly four each, a little under four each.

So that's, and that's, that's every human in Australia. So, I mean, I don't know, do you need more or fewer than? Well, I mean, it's not always going to be the same amount. Like people will, new people are born every day. They're going to need to write numbers. That's true. But you could add digits. So currently there's eight, eight digits you can change.

And there's nearly 26 million people in Australia. To compare that to other countries in the UK, plus four, four or zero, then you have to have a seven. And then you've to have a seven. And then you've got nine. Nine other digits. That's one more. So that means there's a billion possible mobile phone numbers in the UK. Population just over 67 million.

That's almost 15 numbers each. That's good. That's plenty. That's, you know, room for the future. Loads of extra numbers there. Yep. In the US, okay, this gets complicated. First of all, you got plus one. And it's the US and Canada. So they're combined for this. Then you've got a digit that can't be a zero or a one. It can be any of the eight other ones. Then any digit, then any digit, then a digit that can't be a zero

or a one, and then six more that can be anything. And so if you run that through, you've got eight digits that could be anything. You've got two that can't be a zero or a one. That's 6.4 billion possible numbers. For a population of just over 367 million, that's more than 17 cell phone numbers per person in North America. And so they've got the most. Well done, America. But I think, you know, I mean, I'll take your thought on this back. I think we should just have more digits.

I mean, back in the day, you had to remember phone numbers. And so they were kept deliberately short so that they're human, human rememberable. One thing I realized when I was writing the Horror Heights books, there was a plot point that I wanted to do where a kid ended up quite far away from home without a phone. And so they went into a service station and called home. And then I realized realized would kids know what number to call because you wouldn't have a landline number to call you'd have to memorize your parents mobile numbers and I still remember my dad's mobile number from when he first got a

mobile but I I messaged a friend that I said does your do your kids know your phone number if anything happens to them and they didn't have a phone and they were saying, no, we don't. And I couldn't find anyone who's really, you know, have learned, learned their parents' phone numbers. Yeah. I don't know my husband's the other day. We were both trying to memorize them for each other. Yeah. And his is really easy. I, I have three phone numbers, three functioning phone numbers in my memory. There's my number, which is just convenient to know. I have learned Lucy's as like an emergency number.

So in this exact scenario, I can phone my wife. I also know the phone number of my best mate from high school's parents' house. Because like that's just, and they haven't moved, right? So I could still ring Simon's parents' house because like that's just, and they haven't moved. Right. So I could still ring. I could still ring Simon's parents anytime I need to, because I memorized that. I memorized that number in the nineties and it's still in there. Yeah.

I had a boyfriend in high school and we both got our phones at the same time, like through a contract or something. Our phone numbers were exactly the same, but one of us had a different last digit. They were handing them out sequentially. Yeah, I guess so. That was when three first started operating in Australia. But I think, I think they should be longer, partly for redundancy.

I think you should have a check digit. So then it's like, like bank cards. There's a pattern in the digits. So websites and places can automatically check if it's a valid bank card number or not. And so we could have check digits and phone numbers now because you need to memorize one, maybe two. So I think we should have longer, both for redundancy and for data checking reasons, we should have longer phone numbers, but for some reason we don't. And for some ridiculous reason,

we continue to recycle them. So we'd like to hear my favorite ever story of a recycled phone number. Yes. There's a thing called the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the UFC, which I'm unaware of other than they call the ring the octagon.

And so occasionally if I'm searching for octagon things. The nerdiest reason. That's pretty nerdy. I mean, and just so everyone knows, if you see something called the road to the octagon, it's disappointing. It's not a magical journey that ends with geometry. So anyway, one of the fighters, a welterweight called Rory McDonald, noticed one day that the music he was

requesting to be played when he walks into the arena on the way to the octagon, I guess, was being ignored and otherwise seemingly random songs were being played. So the fighters get to choose the kind of hype music when they walk out. And he was walking out to things like MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This, which he had not asked for. And other fighters were making fun of him. It turns out they had an old number of his on record,

and they were messaging that number to ask what music he wanted, and the number had been reassigned to a UFC fan who knew what was going on and was just sending in hilarious song options as a joke. And they only realized one day the organizers came up before the show and apologized that they couldn't find the Nickelback song that Rory had requested. And he was like, I have not. And that's when they got to the bottom of it. So they had recycled a phone number and it was only stopped by Nickelback. Oh, now I have to try and get your walk-on music at Bloomsbury Theatre to be Can't Touch This and Nickelback.

That would be hilarious for like just the Problem Squared listeners, of which there'd be many in the crowd. Back in episode 029, Beck, I had another installment of a pudding squared, which is a problem, just to flip the whole thing around, that Bec poses to the listeners, specifically offspring of listeners, to solve a problem that pertains to her pet hamster pudding. So Bec, what was the most recent pudding squared? pertains to her pet hamster pudding so beck what was what was the most recent pudding squared yes this was a problem that dave one of our listeners posed which was if pudding could run at nine kilometers a day which we'd already talked about in a previous episode how long would it take pudding to reach the edge of the solar system this is obviously assuming that pudding can breathe and run in space yeah yeah

and we have some answers from the way some of them are written i am fairly certain a lot of adults came in to answer but i you know i just like that people had a go i realized very quickly from all the answers that no one seems to be 100% sure where the edge of the solar system is. And so instead of doing the maths, I posed it back to you, Matt, because you do maths and have a wife who knows about these things. Well, I went straight to the local expert in the household, Professor Lucy Green, given I've married an astronomer, space scientist given i've married an uh astronomer solar space

scientist i've married a space scientist now i should actually flag up she studies the sun and that may have influenced her opinion on where the edge of the solar system is but it's got solar in the title it's going to be sun-based some people went for neptune the most distant planet. And Lucy disagrees with that. Some people went for the Kuiper Belt, which is where Pluto and other dwarf planets hang out. And Lucy disagreed with that. And then some people went for the Oort Cloud, which is a long old way away.

And that's where comets come from. It's like a whole bunch of debris a long ridiculously long way out and occasionally it gets perturbed and then a comet will come flying through the solar system lucy disagreed with that so she says you ought not to you ought not she said it's the heliopause oh so you got the sun the solar in solar system it's producing heliopause. So you've got the sun, the solar, in solar system, it's producing the solar wind, and this is this stream of plasma and magnetic field

that just comes out from the sun, washes over all the planets, washes over the dwarf planets and asteroids and everything else. At some point, though, it slams into the interstellar medium, which is like all the stuff between solar systems. And where it slams into the interstellar medium, it stops.

And that's the heliopause. And that is where Professor Lucy Green draws the line, the spherish thing around the solar system. So she claims that is the edge of the solar system, which sits about 18 billion kilometers away. And we know this because the Voyager spacecraft have gone through it. And that was a very exciting moment when they went through because they had detectors on them. So there was the change in the plasma density around them, which meant that we knew they'd gone through the heliopause. And that's why we now know where it is.

As well as obviously being explored by pudding. I don't want to, you know, skip ahead, but I saw a lot of answers just gave all the milestones as you go further away from the sun. Which I like. We, you know, we like this. We like a specificity. We like a specificity. We like a comprehensive answer. That's right. So, Matt, what is the correct answer for the heliopause?

So given the heliopause is on the order of 18 billion kilometers away, quite conveniently, nine kilometers a day divides into 18 very neatly. Nine kilometers a day divides into 18 very neatly. So it's roughly 2 billion days or rounded five and a half million years. Ah, wow. This is interesting. I would putting some arrow bars on that. I would accept anything in definitely in the five to six million year range. I'd probably between, to be honest, between three and 10 million years is,

you know, not bad. So some people did the correct calculations, but they went for Oort Cloud. So that was, uh, Eseas, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. E-S-A-I-A-S and Lou, L-E-W. We had some answers from people who gave us loads of different options, including the heliopause. Alex, Morgan, and I quite enjoyed Morgan's because they also added a little fact. Pudding would be there now if he had left, this is at the heliopause, if he had left when brown bears and polar bears diverged.

Oh. They may have scared him. Imagine the joint bear that split into both those terrifying animals. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You may have noticed there's one name missing from all of those. A classic name. Classic name, and that is of Dexter, who tends to answer all of the pudding squares completely right.

And this time is no different, but Dexter decided to answer in a slightly different way, which I love because I think the first time Dexter got back to us, we had a photo with all the working out on a whiteboard. And then the second time there was some great drawings and illustrations. And this time we got sent a YouTube link. The production values are going way up. It's amazing.

Dexter and Ivy. Dexter is nine and Ivy is six. And they've done putting in a spaceship doing a tour of the solar system with all the points along the way. Not to scale. Not to scale. But I mean, adorable and 100 correct so uh we'll pop a link to that on socials so everyone can watch it because it genuinely made me cry i saw it when i had covid and i genuinely uh teared up it was so lovely but they've drawn all the planets with little faces

and they've drawn the oort cloud but for theiopause, they've just written heliopause. No face. Which is fair. How do you draw, you know, plasma coming to a halt? So we're going to allow that. So well done, Dexter. And well done to everyone who wrote in. And you know what?

Even if you didn't get it correct, we appreciate you giving it a shot. Now it's time for AOB business. And we have got, oh man, have we got any other of this AOB business? To start with Beck, a lot of people were very upset that our answer to are there more doors or wheels in the world was, I mean, glib, I think is the consensus. So, Bec, I believe we have both redone our calculations. Yes. And what did you get this time? Yeah, I got wheels this time. Oh, me too.

Oh. Oh, there you go. Glad we could set the record straight okay cool correct yeah i also had some any other business someone who did not provide their name so i'm assuming they try to be anonymous wrote in after episode 029 in regards to the food labeling because there is a moment in that podcast i'm talking about the definitions for spring water, mineral water and bottled water, and there can't be any harmful bacteria or anything like that in the water. And as an aside, Matt, you're saying that should be applicable to all food. Yeah, thank you. who works within the food testing industry in the United States, wanted to write in to say that it's not necessarily the case.

What? They've said the Food and Drug Administration wasn't given the ability to regulate food companies during an outbreak until 2011, and even then it took several years for them to get started with it. So if you've been to the US before 2016, it was basically illegal for companies to knowingly sell you contaminated food. Oh, my goodness. In parentheses put, sort of.

They would still have to pay fines, but the government couldn't stop them. That's a great technicality. Sometimes we make claims or say things offhandedly, thinking that they're givens or obvious. And it turns out not 100% true. I both accept that correction and I wish to reiterate that I think it should just be a blanket policy. There's not bacteria in your food.

Yeah. Thank you so much to everyone who listens to, shares, reviews, and just enjoys this fantastic podcast that we make freely available. reviews, and just enjoys this fantastic podcast that we make freely available. But particular thanks to those who support us on patreon.com slash a problem squared, who not only get the bonus, I am a wizard episode that we do once a month. We also pick three of their names at random to thank in every episode, which this time is Bibi Rosenberg. N F capital N.F.

Capital N, capital F. And Felix Leitz. Leitz. Thank you all very much. You have been listening to A Problem Squared, a us production that we made. I'm Matt Parker. My co-host is Beck Hill,

and this was produced by Lauren Armstrong Carter. And we'll go back now to our guest, Tom, for the final say of this episode. And before I go, is this your card? Oh, no. But it would have been amazing if it was.

I feel like we're getting close on that. Come on.