Bec has been announced as the ambassador for the UK Crafts Council. She does this only so she can go to those parties with Ferrero Rocher pyramids. Matt is distracted by pyramid stacking maths.
Matt won the Christopher Zeeman medal for maths communication. With Bec's Best Kid's Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2019 award, this makes A Problem Squared an award-winning podcast.
Andrew retweeted a tweet by @dumbbass: "We need to melt down all the pennies and make the Statue of Liberty a girlfriend." Andrew then asked: Would the resulting girlfriend be far too big, far too small, or sort of about right?
Matt agrees that the penny should be abolished, and would strategically pay with cash or card so the rounding would be in his favour.
There's currently 130 billion pennies in circulation in the US. Using only their copper, you could make 81.25 statue of liberty sized girlfriends, or one girlfriend that's 9 times as big. The zinc from the coins is not a structural material.
Matt recommends that, after pennies are abolished, the next year's worth of materials should be turned into a statue. This statue would be within 10% of the Statue of Liberty.
A "ding" by Bec
Yo, I love burgers, but people keep making 'em too tall and I can't fit them in my mouth. Question: For a standard human jaw, what is the upper limit of burger height such that you can bite through top to bottom in one chomp?
The average human jaw can open roughly three human fingers wide. If you can't fit more than two and you go for surgery, you need to let your surgeon know. So your burger should be at most three fingers high, or two if you want to be careful.
To experimentally verify her results, Bec spent all of Saturday ordering five of the tallest burgers she could find. A video is available on her YouTube channel. The biggest burger was 10 cm high compared to Bec's 5 cm high mouth, and even with her special burger hooking technique, she did not manage to get a bite. Meat burgers can be compressed to approximately 80% their original size.
Matt dislikes tall burgers: Your burger should not need a load-bearing skewer to stay in place. Also, making your burger wider is a more efficient way to gain volume. Matt also accepts cutting a burger in half like a sandwich, but Bec vehemently disagrees.
The twitter account seems to have only ever asked this one question, and was later suspended for violation of twitter's rules.
Matt did not get the video done in time for the last episode's release, but it's coming along. Matt kept learning more and more stuff, and the scale of the video kept growing. Matt promises that the video will be released in time with this podcast for real.
Matt can confirm that the UK does not include terrain when computing the area, thanks to Dr. Laura Graham of the University of Birmingham. Matt can confirm that Switzerland will overtake the Netherlands in the ranking of area when you include its terrain. For small countries like the UK, the curvature of the earth is negligible. For large countries like Australia, they use an area-preserving projection.
The production quality of the video kept increasing. Matt bought a drone, got Paul and Dr. Graham to record their questions and answers, and Bec played the voice of Geoscience Australia. They do an impromptu recording of Geoscience Australia's response for the video.
Bec still gives the problem only a "di".
The goal after one year of podcasting was 100 patreon supporters. After 9 months, there are 56 patreon supporters. Thus, more patreon advertisement. Though of course nobody should feel pressured to pay on patreon.