A Problem Squared - 056 = LTRL Words and Half-Life Burns

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

In THIS episode... 🐹 A Peanut Squared!  📇 How many words neatly shorten to letter-name versions?  🔥 Was Michael Jackson's hair catching fire in a Pepsi ad the exact mid-point of his life? ���� And some Other Business.  Roll up! roll up! The limited edition Millionth Episode Commemorative Plates and / or Bowls have arrived. You can PRE-ORDER them here: Plate: https://achievefulfilment.onwarehouse.app/preorders/new?campaign_id=y696c5w Bowl: https://achievefulfilment.onwarehouse.app/preorders/new?campaign_id=wzv5cew If you want to see the full Two Ronnies 'Swedish Made Simple' sketch, you can find that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3M1nppd3c So you're 18+ and want to see Micheal Jackson's hair on fire in diorama form. Good news! You can do that on Bobby Fingers Youtube, right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHi479xN_po Matt's video 'Was Michael Jackson's hair catching fire in a Pepsi ad the exact mid-point of his life?' can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUuGy5agBfg And we welcome PEANUT to the APS family. The very first A Peanut Squared problem is - If peanut needs to eat 5 g of pellets every day, and hamsters live for two years, how many grams of pellets is Bec going to need over Peanut’s lifetime?  You can also get your DING' t-shirts here https://a-problem-squared.teemill.com. If you'd like to find out which Muppet YOU are, just speed ahead of Matt and Bec and find that out here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jenlewis/which-muppet-are-you. If YOU'VE got a problem or a solution, hit us up on our website aproblemsquared.com. And, finally, if you want want even more from A Problem Squared, find us on Twitter and Instagram.

Hello and welcome to a problem squared the problem solving podcast that is a lot like soup in that we bring a lot of things together and it ends up in a easily digestible form. My name is Matt Parker. I'm a lot like Minestrone Soup in that Minestrone is terrible at writing podcast introductions. They are a lot in common. And my co-host Beck Hale is a lot like Pea Soup in that Pea Soup is also underwhelmed by this podcast introduction. I feel like it's... Pea Soup could be a very big fan.

That's true. That's true. Both you and the Pea Soup. be a very big thing. That's true. That's true. Both you and the pea soup. Yeah. I mean, don't worry. Hopefully, I've got one joke that's going to just, like, tie it all together at the end here. Because you see, Beck, podcasts, like soup, can be consumed via cans. And that's the whole...

We call that the foundational joke of the whole, the whole introduction. Cans being the industry term for headphones. Yes. Yes. And you can consume podcasts via headphones. Or, you know, or via those tin can phones. You could consume it via that.

You could listen to a podcast. If you had a long enough string. Unobstructed. You know, I've always wanted to see, like, if I could send computer data of a tin can, like, telephone thing. By literally having a speaker reading out ones and zeros on one end. And, like, a mic that's then converting it back into binary at the other. Oh, I really want to do that now. Maybe if we ever do a live tour.

Isn't it amazing? Oh, I really want to do that now. Maybe if we ever do a live tour. Isn't it amazing? Oh, yeah. Anyway, on this episode. I see F-I-K-N-L-P-U. Looking forward to that. I worked out if Michael Jackson's hair catching fire during a Pepsi commercial was the exact midpoint of his life. And N-E-F-R-B-Z-N-S.

Oh my, it's going to... Why weren't you doing the intro? First up, some big news. We've now got our 1 million downloads, commemorative plates, and our 1 million download commemorative bowls available to order. It's so ridiculous. But we don't know what the relative popularity is going to be between the plates and the bowls. We don't know how many people are going to want them. So we're doing a limited run and it's limited to how many people want to buy one.

As in this is the only time they'll be available. You either order them now or you never get one. Yep. So we've got a link. It's in the show notes. You can basically, you give us your card details and you pay for them now. And then we'll order a bunch and you'll magically get them in the future. You've got to trust us.

Yes. You know where we live. Our wizard supporters will be getting one for free. Oh, yes. Wizards, we're going to sort you out. Don't worry. Yeah. At some point, you will receive.

Anyway, at some point. A plate slash one. We're not promising a timeline. Yeah. We may hit two million downloads. No, we won't. We'll do it before two million. We got to what, November?

We're fine. We're fine. Anyway, Beck, how have you been? I'm good. I'm good. Guess what? Good? We're fine. We're fine. Anyway, Beck, how have you been? I'm good. I'm good. Guess what? Good? What? We have a new addition to our family of two at the moment. No. A replacement pet. I mean, you can never replace a pet, can you?

That's true. That's very true. But we do have a new pet. Oh my goodness. Now, originally we said that if we had another hamster, we would call it Sausage. I was looking forward to us having a problem sausage. Yeah. You started with the title, work back to the hamster. Yeah.

But we, and by we, I mean my husband, Gavin, I got this little hamster. And by we, I mean my husband, Gavin, I got this little hamster. And after spending some time with him, we were like, I don't think he's a sausage. He just didn't seem like a sausage. But we realized he's a peanut. His name is Peanut. Oh, Peanut. So we can have a peanut squared.

We have a peanut squared. That still works. That still works. So I thought I might start by doing a very, very quick A Peanut Squared problem for any young listeners. Oh my goodness. We'll start sort of relatively simple, I thought, because it's been a while. So for anyone with children or access to children who want to give this one a go and send in the answer to aproblemsquared.com. dot com. The peanut squared, the first one is if peanut needs to eat

five grams of pellets every day and... Is that a realistic amount of hamster food? Yes, that is the... Okay. I think that's right. I'm so used to mass problems being, you know, peanut has to buy 17 watermelons or something oh yeah no with no no relation to reality but i don't know how much a hamster would eat but five grams feels about right so peanut needs to have five grams of pellets a day and on average hamsters can live two years roughly about two, how many pellets are we going to need over

a peanut's lifetime? Wow. In grams. That's grams of pellets. Yes. And if you were to convert those into watermelons, how many watermelons? Are you asking that? So are you just going to bulk purchase one lifetime supply of hamster food?

I think we only really got through one bag with puddings. I think we might already have that. Exactly. There you go. That's the peanut squared. That's great. Great peanut squared. And I suspect you're going to have pictures of peanut all over social media.

So if people want to see the hamster in question, they can check out your socials. He's not quite tame yet, but I did get a video of him sleeping the other day and doing the little with his mouth as he was sleeping. It was very cute. How about you, Matt? How have you been? I'm good. I'm good. Okay, so I woke up this morning. Uncertain what I would discuss in the catch-up here, but I figured I'd just chat about whatever had come to mind at the time but between me awaking and now a new tiling pattern has dropped so there's

now a whole new a whole new tile out there which i'm very excited about okay i find this confusing because surely a tiling pattern can just be whatever anyone wants it to be correct and that's what i've explained to people doing tiling for me many times now when they insist on using rectangles. But, and you've seen some of the tiling patterns in my house. So, you know, I've pushed the boundaries of what builders will do for you. Tilers and bricks, yes. Exactly, yes.

Anyway, so no, this is within a certain constraint. So you're right. You could have whatever kind of crazy tiling patterns you want. This is a type of tiling pattern which is called an aperiodic tile. And an aperiodic tile means it'll never repeat. The pattern will never repeat. So aperiodic, no period. So you can never slide it over and it will match.

So you keep tiling forever and ever and ever and it'll never repeat. And there's another thing which is called nonperiodic tiling forever and ever and ever, and it'll never repeat. And there's another thing which is called non-periodic tiling. And that just means the tiles could have been periodic and repeated nicely, but you've just put them down a weird way so they don't. A-periodic tiles, it's impossible to tile with this shape or shapes such that you get a nice repeating pattern that sounds awful um i know it's so good it's great and the original examples of this used lots of different shapes and instead of just tiling all with the same shape you had to combine originally thousands and then eventually someone got roger penrose was the first person that found others since got it down to a tiling pattern where you only need two different shapes right

because i was gonna say at first it didn't sound that impressive because like a mosaic you know that's when you're using broken bits of tile and stuff to make a picture or something but you could argue that there's no repeat yeah whereas a product tiling it's a weird balance because it's got to be systematic enough that you've only got a few shapes and they kind of always go together the same way it's not like you're just freestyling they fit together in a particular way but that particular way will never repeat so so the big breakthrough today someone found an a periodic tiling that only involves one shape a single tile that repeats over and over and over again. And other people have gotten close in the past, but the tiles had to overlap, which is kind of not good for tiling, or they were non-contiguous.

contiguous so each tile would be made of two separate bits that weren't joined together but had to always be arranged relative to each other the same way every single time it's like there's like a handle coming out to join the two bits together and up until now people had only found ways to do it with two different shapes so two different colors in that case and people have cracked it with just one shape, one color, and that will give you a pattern that never repeats. That's very impressive. The other thing that's interesting is they didn't just find one of these. They actually found an infinite family.

So there's infinitely many patterns that have this same property, and they've released a video where it fades between them all. So we can share that as well it's got a slowly evolving pattern if you look very closely the shapes are gradually changing oh yeah yeah and every single one of these steps apart from the exact beginning middle and end are an apiatic tiling involving only one tile. So actually they could have picked any of these to represent the tiling because they all work. They just picked the one that looked the neatest. But all of those work, all the in-between ones.

I think it's interesting there are still tiling patterns to be discovered out there. It is exciting. Yeah. Our first problem today came in anonymously, which we respect, on the problem posing page at a problemsquared.com. Anonymous says, tedious and odious are fun words because they neatly shorten to letter name versions. Oh, okay.

And then here they got TDS is in the letters T, D, and S, and ODS, O-D-S. That's quite cute. They then say, what would you call this abbreviation method, and what are other fun words that do this? All right, Bec. Yeah, I have. the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is something that is probably more common than I thought about really. Like quite often you will still see words being replaced by letters phonetically. One example is like an IOU. IOU. That's a good point. Yeah. Those of us who are real old from the internet know ICQ.

Yeah. That's what I remember. I-I-U, that's a good point, yeah. Those of us who are real old from the internet know I-C-Q. Yeah, uh-oh. That's what I remember. Uh-oh. But I realized, yeah, I don't actually know the term for it. So I looked it up. It is a gramogram or a literal word, which I love. A literal word.

A literal word or a gramogram. Wow that was easy yeah that's one but i that was really zed but interestingly like depending on how you pronounce things it makes a difference not just in english but in other languages so in researching this i actually found out that the artist marcel Duchamp, I think I'm pronouncing that right, I hope. The one with the urinal? Yes. Yeah.

The urinal, which the piece was called Fountain. Oh, didn't know that. 1917. Wow. Yeah. We got surreal real early. That's it. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp did a piece, well, did a series of pieces called Ready Mades.

And that was sort of like found out, like they were grabbing bits of things and putting them together to create art. And so it was like a print of Mona Lisa with a moustache. And the piece was called L-H-O-O-Q. L-H-O-O-Q. L-H-O-O-Q. Yeah. And if you read those letters aloud in French, then it sounds very similar to L-H-O-O-Q.

I feel like you nailed it. If it's correct, translates as she is hot in the ass. Right. Art. Art. there you go there's some some really good art there i tried to find the earliest example of a gramma gram or literal words being used yeah it was actually really difficult the earliest one i could find myself was a poem which was oh it was a poem, which was a poem in 1886. Oh, that's quite recent. It was printed in the Indiana School Journal. And the poem goes on for quite a bit, but I'll read out the first part

and see if you can hear where the letters are being used in place of words. Yep, got one there. The farmer has no easy life. The seedy sows will rot. And when it evey rests from strife, his bones will ache a lot. His bones will what? Ache? Oh, ache a lot.

Right. It's quite a nice one because in eevee rests, the e at the end of v is being used as he in the next bit. So you're actually combining two words in that bit. It's lovely. That's very clever. The most famous example I could think of, though, and this was the first thing I thought of when I got the problem,

was the Too Ronnie sketch. Right. Which is a Swedish made simple. These are British comedians. The premise is that they're teaching, yeah, that's right, British comedians. The premise is that they're teaching people to speak Swedish. They're definitely not using letters. This is going to be real. I'll play a little clip from that. Let're definitely not. Using letters. Oh, this is going to be real.

I'll play a little clip from that. Let's do it. Yeah. L-O. L-O. R-U-B-C. S-V-R-B-C. F-U-N-E-X.

S-B-F-X. F-U-N-E-M. Nine. That was the least xenophobic of all 1970s British comedy. So, there you go. So, I did, as you've seen, there is a little bit in other languages, and that got me down a bit of a wormhole when it comes to using numbers in stuff as well. I couldn't actually find a specific term for when numbers are used instead

of words. So it just kept coming under grammar gram. So I guess it's in there. There is also a term for, I think it's numeronym. I'm definitely mispronouncing that, but essentially that's words that use letters in it, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're read aloud phonetically. So I mean, canine is a phonetic one. Oh, yeah. The letter K and the number nine. Canine, that's a literal word if we're including digits. Yeah, but they also included things like W3, which means World Wide Web because it's meant to be W but three times. There wasn't a specific word covering that.

But in other languages, it's interesting how many times numbers or numerals are used instead of words. So in Thai and a few other East Asian languages, the number five is used a lot because five is pronounced ha. Ha. Five, five, five, that's ha, ha, ha. So it's basically the same as writing lol. That's great.

But in terms of other words that we can make with just the letters, the longest one I could find is expediency, which is 10 letters long, and you can spell it with five letters. Expediency. That's great. I mean, that is expedient. It's very expedient. There's a paper by William E. Brant Jr., which was published in 2003, called A Dictionary of Letter Words. They've tried to come up with as many as they could. Some of them are using numbers, which I've actually discounted.

Like a lot of the time in my life, I'm going to allow that. William E. Brant Jr. actually produced a paper in 2003, which included a dictionary of letter words. So there's some in here which are quite fun. Arty. Arty. are quite fun. Arty. Arty. Meaning arty. Arty.

Essay. Essay. An essay. NRG. So they've also listed inexpediency. Oh. Which is. Please.

Expediency. With an N on the front. With an N at the beginning. Is there a name for like half literal words, like express or something, where half the words replaced with a letter. I couldn't find any. No, yeah, I couldn't find, but maybe that's what we'll call it.

A semi-literal word. There were also some picture books. There was one that was published in the 60s, I think it was, by William Stieg. He wrote a book called CDB, and it was a picture book for, I think it was, by William Stieg, wrote a book called CDB. It was a picture book for kids where it was CDB and they're pointing at a B. They actually had a follow-up book, I think it was either in the 70s or 80s, called CDC.

It's very cute. Normally, children's reading books are to help children better understand how to read letters Very rarely do you get a book like that that's deliberately counterproductive In terms of teaching children how to process language Good on them, that's art What I thought was quite interesting is looking for examples of it I started to realise that we probably see less of it nowadays than we did maybe a couple of decades ago. And I think that literal words were at their peak. And look, this is just me throwing

a theory out there, but I think literal words were at their peak when texting was more expensive and you were limited by characters because then you did whatever you could to shorten a word. Whereas now we don't necessarily pay by character. Back when you paid by character. Yeah. And with predictive texting and stuff as well, we're seeing a lot less of that sort of shortened or anything like leet speak or anything like that.

You're not getting it as much because your phone or computer or whatever is correcting it for you as you write. There you go. That's synonymous as question answered. I hope I gave enough examples there. I'm going to say that is great with an eight and I'm going to give you a dung. Just a D. Just give me a D.

Oh no, wait, I take that back. You've DN a great job with an eight. Thank you. Thank you. This next problem comes from the internet via Bobby Fingers. Yes, that works. Via you, I think, strictly speaking. Via me.

Yeah, that's right. So this all started because my friend has a YouTube channel where he makes dioramas. He makes overly accurate, unnecessarily accurate, let's say, and detailed dioramas of recent moments in pop. Unusual recent moments in pop culture history. Yeah. Controversial, I would say. Controversial. Yes. We'll do that.

And I will say, I love the channel, but we'll give it a mild content warning. Yes. Because I know people listen to this podcast with their kids. Yeah. And kids listen to it by themselves. It's an mild content warning. Yes. Because I know people listen to this podcast with their kids. Yeah. And kids listen to it by themselves. It's an adult's channel. Yes. I mean, amazing.

If you do a peanut squared, don't watch Bobby Fingers yet. Yes. You can do one or the other. No one should be doing both a peanut squared and Bobby Fingers. You've got to pick a lane. Yeah, that's right. And the lane is about age 18. Yeah. There's you yeah that's right and the lane is about age 18 yeah

there's you that's right and he decided to make a diorama of michael jackson's hair catching on fire during the making of a pepsi commercial yes but one thing that bobby mentioned was the fact that that moment where michael jackson's hair caught. It was sort of internet lore that it had happened at the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. And he came to me and said, you know someone who knows math people. Can you recommend anyone who I can go to about this? So I forwarded him to you and then you did some maths. Well, the first instance, if people have seen the video,

is Bobby wanted a hilariously overqualified mathematician to be dismissive. Yes. And so I hooked him up with my friend, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who fully embraced the joke. Yeah, it's very funny. I think that's very funny. It's very funny. And then what I love is I texted you about this saying he's looking for this and you sent me some names, uh, that might be up for it.

But then as you were doing that, you also then sent, started to send me your calculations for working out. Like you started to get into it and I don't know what, at no point had I or Bobby or anyone asked you to do that. Yeah. So basically I, first of all, I was like, I was like, Oh, you know, fulfill the remit of this request and find mathematicians I think would be up for this. But then I started, I was like, wait a minute. Was it the exact, like how close is it? I thought. And, and I thought, well,

first of all, it'd be an easy, easy check because you can work out the number of days between things pretty quickly. You can, there's a bunch of websites that do this. You can do it in Excel. If you put two dates into excel and then do one subtract the other one it'll give you the number of days between them well actually it'll give you the number of days between them plus one because it gives you the number of days that pass and this is where you're gonna be a little bit careful in excel it'll be the number of days that pass to get from one date to another date. Whereas I want to know the exact number of days in between. And I made a video about this.

It's on YouTube. And some people in the comments were trying to say I got it wrong because they did it in Excel and they forgot about compensating for that extra day that you get. So you've got to be a little careful. And so what I did was I looked up that Michael Jackson was born on the 29th of August, 1958. He died on the 25th of June, 2009.

And so I put those into Excel, subtracted one from the other, made sure I compensated for the extra day on the end. And it meant if you exclude the day Michael Jackson was born and the day he died, there were 18,562 days in between, which is an even number, which means there's no like central day.

Like there's an even number of days. the midnight the crossover between those because i just divided that by two and added it onto his birth date and sure enough the exact halfway point is the midnight between the 26th and the 27th of january 1984 and michael jackson's hair caught on fire on that 27th of January, 1984, and Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire on that 27th of January, 1984. And that didn't take me long to do. That was just like open Excel, do a quick bit of crunching. I was like, because I thought I could reply and say, no, it's not true quite quickly, as well as sending you recommendations to pass on to people.

And I was like, oh, nuts. That's close. That could go either way. people and i was like oh nuts that's close that could go either way well it's gonna go either way depending on what time michael jackson was born and died yeah because those the little bits how long he lived on the day he was born and how long he lived on the day he died is gonna drag the the halfway point in his life one way or the other then i was in too deep so no one asked me to do this but i was like oh my goodness i'm gonna look up. So I looked it up and Michael Jackson died at 2.26 in the afternoon. I'm like, okay, great. Got that. Piece of cake. Can't go wrong. When was he born? Well,

we don't know. There's some astrology sites that claim to have his time of birth, but I gave that about as much credit as I give any facts on an astrology website. So let's just say that bar for verifying facts is low. So I decided, you know what? I'll just assume it could be at any point in time that was deemed to be 29th of August, 1958 in Gary, Indiana. So I was like, oh, fine. Okay. So I'll just have air about, I'll have a upper and lower bounds.

He was born somewhere between midnight to midnight, 29th of August. So I was like, oh, fine. Okay. So I'll just have Arab out. I'll have an upper and lower bounds. He was born somewhere between midnight to midnight, 29th of August. But then I was like, oh, wait, time zones. Because there's different time zones. So annoyingly, Gary, Indiana, in 1958, when Michael Jackson was born, was in a weird transitional period. was in a weird transitional period. So I looked up the regulations, like the historical legislation around daylight saving time in Gary, Indiana, or in Indiana in general, in the 1950s. And there was a big vote in 1956

about whether or not they should have daylight saving. If they don't, which time zone they stay on. And the General Assembly made central time the official time of the state, but permitted any community to switch to daylight saving time during the summer. The law forbid them during the winter, had to be central time in the winter, but they could opt in to be daylight saving time during the summer. And Michael Jackson was born in the summer and I cannot for the life of me find anywhere that confirms if Gary and Deanna did or did not switch to daylight savings during the summer of Michael Jackson's birth so I must apologize to everyone that that's still up in the

air we don't know but we can do is we can kind of factor that in so we can say Michael Jackson was born between like the latest is not on daylight saving and the earliest is on daylight saving actually gives us a 25 hour window over which he could have been born. You've also got to compensate for time zones for when he died because he died in LA during daylight saving. So actually it wasn't 2.26 in the afternoon. It was 1.26 in the afternoon, normal normal pacific time and then you got to work out what time and what time zone his hair caught on fire yeah i looked up contemporary publications at the time and uh oh by the way at this point this point i've moved on from when when i'd

messaged you and said i think i think it might have been on the day. Because at the time, I just kind of looked up. I was like, oh, when did he die? When could he have been born? Et cetera. But then I was like, you know what? I'm into deep now. I've got to do this properly. I need to actually do some proper research.

You had to do a Dexter. And convince myself once and for all. I had to do a Dexter. I got fully Dexter on this. Dexter, not old enough to watch Bobby Fingers. Don't watch Bobby Fingers. And so I then was like I'm going to have to look up some historical papers

So first of all Actually I found what I think Is the original stating of this fact From April 2019 So quite a recent fact Someone on the Michael Jackson community forums In the Michael Jackson

News and Discussion I mean, I guess they're running out of Michael Jackson community forums. In the Michael Jackson news and discussion. I mean. I guess they're running out of Michael Jackson news. So this counts. They said. Okay. So I was fiddling around. I mean terrible choice of words.

To see when the middle of Michael Jackson's life. I'm just reading it as written. Yeah. By doing this, I calculated the days and hours of when he was born and died. Therefore, Michael Jackson was alive for 18,563 days. Okay, they've made the fence

post mistake by including the end day, but not the start day. Classic. I divided this by two to make 9,281 and a half days. I factored in the hours. Oh, then they subtracted that from his date of death. And they got Friday the 27th, 1984, which was when his hair caught on fire.

So then they say the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life was when his hair set on fire. So they've made a mistake in that. And they've then not been very accurate when they're looking at the number of days. Yeah. So, but to their credit, that was pretty good, pretty good, solid start. So then I looked up when his hair actually caught on fire, found a newspaper story from the following day. And it just says that his hair caught on fire when he was dancing down a stairway at the Shrine Auditorium

Friday night for a scene in a multi-million dollar Pepsi commercial. And that's the closest I can get to an official time was it was filmed at night. Well, you made a video about this and I was looking through the comments mainly because you didn't reference me in your video whatsoever. And I wanted to see if anyone... Bobby Figures thanked me in his description. That's, oh my goodness. I'll put it in the description. Hey, I said friend of a friend.

Yeah, factually correct. Well, was. How many friends can I have? Apparently not a good enough friend to mention. Ohually correct. Well, was. How many friends? Apparently not a good enough friend to mention. Oh my God. Fine. I'll put it in. No, it's good.

It's good. I was able to show up quite enigmatically in some of the comments where people were trying to guess who the friend of the friend is. But I did like someone was saying, you sent, I think you sent this to me as well, but I'd seen it. Someone was like, there's someone out there who's friends with both Matt Parker and Bobby Fingers. They were like, imagine being the guy who's friends with both of them. And I was like, I prefer the pronoun dude.

What kind of a legend. You know what I'm doing right now, Beck? I've logged into my YouTube account. Content. This is some real BTS stuff. Okay. BTS stuff. Okay.

And a huge thanks to my good friend Caps Lock Beckhill. How's that? Anything you'd like to add, Geralt? No, no, that's more than enough. Thank you. She did not ask me to. And I'm not going to add that. I'm just going to leave it like that. No, please put that.

P.S. Hello to everyone reading this from a problem square. We need to hide some coordinates in there. Do some sort of treasure hunt. Oh, yeah, we do. Okay. Yeah. Well, I've still got my pinup.

But anyway, we'll get to that in a second. Save. There you go. Okay. Thank you. All done. Thanks. All fixed.

So while I was going through the comments on a narcissistic level i did find that i did find that someone had mentioned that they found a news article that stated that his hair caught on fire at 6 30 p.m or around 6 30 p.m yeah oh i missed30. You know, I'll make a note now to go and delete that comment. Excellent. Okay. So 6.30. That still works with my theory because I feel like that's night. Because I worked out if you take the time of his death and you take the latest point at which he could have been born, that point ends up being 5.43 in the morning. The midpoint of his life.

So the latest, the midpoint in Michael Jackson's life could have been was 5.43 in the morning, the midpoint of his life. So the latest the midpoint in Michael Jackson's life could have been was 5.43 in the morning of the 27th of January. So night or 6.30 p.m. could not have been the midpoint of his life. So do you think that still counts? Because you could say that the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life occurred maybe on the same day as the day when his hair caught on fire. Yeah. I mean, that's something. I think it counts. That's kind of interesting.

I think when you, like, okay, if someone said to you, Matt, at the midpoint of your life, your hand will fall off. Right, yep. And you knew what date that was. If it falls off at any point during that day, you're going to be like, oh, it was true. I don't know. I feel like a hand falling off is a slower process. Than a hair catching on fire. Than your hair catching on fire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I'd be like, oh, it's a process of falling off. Sure. You know what I reckon? I think there's a non-zero chance that the exact midpoint of my life was when I had to edit that video description to thank you. Oh, yeah. I think future historian, future on the Matt Parker Forum news section, a decade after

my death, people will be like, I just worked out the exact midpoint of Matt's life. It was the moment when he edited the video description to include Beck. People were like, well, yes. I mean, we all split Matt's career into before and after. Yeah. Until that happened. I hope you're not right, because I like to feel that you'll live longer than that. Statistically, probably not.

That would put me to shy of 84. Yeah. You could pull an Attenborough I could Now is viable Midpoint of my life territory It occurs to me making the video I'm like what if this video was the midpoint of my life Talking about the midpoint of someone else's life

Well you know what though the problem with that is that A very dedicated person With murderous intent Could make sure it was the exact midpoint of your life. They could. They could. And I got dangerously close to that because Bobby famously buries the dioramas once they're done and hides the coordinates for where they are in the video somewhere. Actually, do we know? Has anyone dug up Michael yet? Or is that

embargoed information? I did see a few people in the comments that said that they were on their way to check the coordinates. On their way to get it. Because the people who do watch Bobby's, people who are of the appropriate age that watch Bobby Fingers' videos. It's been found. There you go. Bobby releases the videos a day early on Patreon. And sometimes that extra day's head start is all people need to find it.

It's amazing. I also have to say that Bob, I've just realized that Bobby, as of us recording this, is only a few hundred people, subscribers shy of beating me in subscribers. Oh no. And he's only made three videos. We can edit out all our references to his channel. Yeah. Let's do that.

Yeah. Or, or, you know, if anyone goes to watch Bobby Fingers from this podcast, check out Beck Hill Comedian. That's youtube.com slash at Beck Hill Comedian. I mean, my career is going to be split to before and after I had more subscribers than Bobby Fingers. It's a matter of time. Criminally underappreciated channel but still new so you know give it time so anyway i i realized i couldn't i considered burying the

pinup board i used in the video i had like a conspiracy theory board with string and pins and stuff stuck to it and i was like i could bury the whole board somewhere i would have loved it so much if your video ended with cutting to you out in a field and a shovel. Yeah. Yeah. It crossed my mind. I was a bit low on time and effort. So instead I put all the contents of the pin board, except for the pins and the board into an envelope. And I've been carrying it around with me ever since. And the first person who asks for it can have it. I imagine by the time this podcast goes out, that will have happened. As of the time of recording, I've only been outside to walk my dog.

And I've dutifully carried it with me every time I walk the dog. On the tiny, tiny chance someone in rural Surrey would be like, Oi, look at that guy. Give me the Michael Jackson stuff. Well, I'm seeing you. You're getting your medal that you mentioned in a previous episode tomorrow. I am. At the time of recording.

I'm seeing you tomorrow. So if someone doesn't ask you before I see you, I'm going to ask. And then if anyone wants it, they have to find me. They're going to find you. That's so good. Come on. We'll be talking to each other and someone will come up because we you were all invited and i'm looking forward to seeing some of

you there someone will come up and say like oh beck did you get that stuff yet and then the look on your face they'll be like matt can i have it i'll be like they were first i'm afraid too late so the original problem sent to me by bobby just, can you recommend a friend to help out with the video? And in exchange, I ended up making a 15 minute video about the maths of if Michael Jackson's hair catching fire during a Pepsi commercial was the exact midpoint of his life. And I thoroughly enjoyed watching your video and hearing you talk about it in this episode. So I'm going to give you a double ding for that. Thank you. I like to double ding all my material, you know, get maximum value out of that. I'm going to give you a Bobby Dingers.

Hey, good work. Finally, it is time for A, N, E, O, B, Z, N, S. No. What? What is it? N, E. N, E. Oh, I did A, N, E. What? What is it? N-E. N-E. Oh, I did A-N-E.

Why did I do A? You're right. N-E. N-E-A. Hang on. N-E-O-B-Z-N-S. Yeah. Pretty good.

Sort of, yeah. B-Z-N-S. I've got N-E-F-F-R. N-E-F-R-B-Z-N-S. What's the F? F-R. Sounds likeE-F-R-B-Z-N-S. What's the F? F-R. Sounds like other. Oh, I see what you're doing.

Okay. N-E-F-R-B-Z-N-S. Okay. So the first bit of N-E-F-R-B-Z-N-S is a stump day. Got a stump day. We've had the stump handover. It has happened. The stump has been passed on to James,

who's passed it on to their parents, who, well, their parents are currently on vacation. As soon as they get back, they're going to get straight into the stump. Very exciting. So the stump is progressing. But James did ask if there was any direction I wanted the stump to go in,

and I said, nope, I'm going to hand it over to whatever artistic interpretation is decided by the woodworkers. So we will find out what the stump is turned into. I'm very excited. Our next bit of BZNS is in relation to episode 054 where Matt and I were arguing about what the best sort of unmarked ruler would be.

I feel like that needs no elaboration whatsoever. You gave an option of two differently sized rulers. Thank you. With two to three markings on them. Yeah, I was very proud. And sub-N-E-F-R-B-Z-N-S, I am now working on if I can get them manufactured as rulers. Wow. Doubling down on the double ruler.

Maybe before you do that, you should see what the results of our survey was. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure my ruler won in a landslide. An immeasurable amount. I argue that my idea would be better, which was to make a one centimeter ruler that is folded accordion style. A series of one centimeter rulers hinged like a Constantino. Yeah.

So we took photos of our little cardboard prototypes. Your prototypes, yeah. Put them on Twitter. We had a result. 48.7% said they want yours 51.3% said that they go for the accordion ruler 49 to 51

I am I'm outraged as well because it should have been far more for the accordion I can't believe anyone voted for yours this is you know Brexit levels of close i know i don't think we can make any sweeping decisions based on that smaller margin

wow 310 people voted so that's that's that's a that's a lot like that's i think that's this i think the audience is split i think that's a significant split we've had we've had larger vote counts before but neither of us retweeted at this time no that's true because we were both very confident that we were going to win it yeah i don't know about you but if i retweet something i don't trust people who follow me to find it hilarious to do the opposite of what i would like so kept real quiet about that one final bit of any NEFRBZNS. Several people contacted me to say they could give me a hand with the data that I collected on my phone when I went around Silverstone on a MotoGP bike. And thank you to everyone. I'm going to email it out to everyone. So people who asked

nicely, I'll give it to you. Have a go at crunching it. Anyone who successfully crunches it and gets me back some nice plots, I will mention them in the video. You know me, I will mention people at the drop of a hat, you know, any reason whatsoever by name, I will name check them in a video. So anyone who can have a go with that data and get back to me will be thanked at length. And anyone associated with me finding them will be mentioned. So that'd be great. Wow. You're welcome. Thank you so much to everyone who listens to this podcast.

That's why we do it. I mean, other than it's an excuse for us to catch up. But primarily, we're glad that you enjoy it. I think it was sending in your problems. But you know what? We also got bills to pay. And this whole thing is funded not by ads, not by sponsored content, but solely by our fantastic Patreon supporters. Huge thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon.

And not only do they get an extra bonus ridiculous episode once a month, and everyone else, you're not missing out on much, but we pick three of their names at random to thank every single episode. And I've just generated our three random names, which this time includes... Christopher Harper. Justin Begley. Joe Lee. Thank you so much to everyone else. I think they're all new names, actually.

Joe Lee. On Patreon, who supports? If you go... Joe Lee. Joe Lee. Oh, you're singing the Joe Lee song song i wonder if they've heard that a lot of times already i'm thanking you for paying up patreon okay i cannot guarantee everyone gets a novel song written about their name by beck but there's now a non-zero chance if you support us

at patreon.com slash a problem squared i'm sure we'll link to that in the show notes as well this bubbling hot bowl of deliciousness known as a problem squared has been me matt parker beck hill and our producer the uh the the stirrer of this all together lauren armstrong carter thanks for listening like a witch yeah that's what i'm imagining the big cauldron of our podcast okay beck yep now this is gonna sound weird i need you to pick a jim henson character oh this is ridiculous so we've been doing a which muppety you buzzfeed quiz and question are we up to now four question four is just pick a jim henson character that's ridiculous you can't just it can't be like it's like a seven that's like what sandwich are you a question one is like pick a

sandwich that represents you this is ridiculous what do you like pickles and cheese ham exactly name your favorite uh so anyway they list a bunch of um muppet i mean they're all muppets or jim henson characters, I guess. I mean, one of them is David Bowie. That's not even a character. That's a man. Oh, no, it says Jareth. Oh, okay.

The character, yeah. Huh. Well, I'm going to big bird. Well, you have to read them out, Matt. Oh, sorry. You can't choose them if I don't know what they are, except for David Bowie. Here they are. Okay, there's nine of them.

They are, in the order presented by BuzzFeed, a doozer, which are the ones from the... Is that the phenomenon? Fraggle Rock. The small ones in Fraggle Rock. Oh, okay. Doozers. One that just says nanny and has the lower half of a person. I don't know what that's in reference to.

Someone with a better knowledge of Jim Henson law might know. A character called Red. I think that's a Fraggle Rock character as well. Jareth. Bowie. Ludo. Don't know what Ludo's from. Ludo's from Labyrinth.

Ludo smelled bad. Oh, there you go. So you've made your choice. You then got Bert, as in first name Bert, last name and Ernie. You've got Jen, another character I don't recognize. Snuffy, because I couldn't be bothered writing Snuffleupagus. Unbelievable. And Sir Didymus.

Where's Didymus? Sir Didymus is also from Labyrinth. He is. Oh, this is a real lazy quiz now. But Sir Didymus, yeah, Sir Didymus is like a little fox guy, and he rides a dog called Ambrosius. Huh. Wow.

I don't know why I'm the one running this quiz. So, uh, I think Bert would be equally annoyed by this quiz. Yeah. So I'm going Bert. I mean, if they had an Ernie,

I would go for Ernie and I'm pretty sure that would be both of us in a nutshell. I think we're done. Spoilers. That's the end of the quiz. You have a bottle top collection, don't you? You know what? I'm dangerously close to that being true.

Yeah. And whenever I come over and stay at your house, you and I actually stay in the same room in separate beds with little nightcaps on. Yeah, comedy single beds. Yeah. Lucy has to come and tuck us in. It's just her lower half Because she's nanny

Yeah Who would I choose? Jareth Sorry Okay, go on Bowie Love it I wonder how much I'm not looking ahead

Who knows how much more quiz there is