After the bluedot festival, Matt and Lucie went to see a Björk performance. It didn't use enough lasers for Matt's taste.
The A Problem Squared merch to be used with the T-shirt trebuchet from problem 039-2 showed up. Matt sent half of it to Bec. One T-shirt design says "Name another podcast who launches their merchandise via trebuchet. I'll weight."
The packet also includes the official bluedot festival hoodie, which features both Björk and A Problem Squared (alongside many other acts).
After the bluedot festival, Bec was booked to read her book at Deer Shed festival. In the Q&A after the reading, a girl asked who took care of Pudding when Bec is away. Her dad apparently listened to A Problem Squared
Last weekend, Pudding has left us for the big week in the sky at age 2. There were no suspicious circumstances. Bec is unsure whether to continue with A Pudding Squared, but the segment will be suspended for a while. This episode is dedicated to Pudding, the unofficial mascot of the pudcast.
I, along with what I can only assume is everyone, dislike tables which wobble. Most of the time, you just shove a bit of anything under the leg, and you're all set. But what if you don't have a bit of anything? Given a four-legged table, can you always find a spot on a surface where the table will sit without wobbling? Or, put another way, does there exist a surface on which a table will always wobble?
There's the wobbly table problem in maths, which has been around for a while. The latest research says that given a rectangular table with same-height legs and a continuous surface with no angles greater than 35.26°, there will be a table configuration that is stable and does not wobble. A table with three legs never wobbles, bbut it might tip over more easily. In practice, Matt has never come across a wobbly table that he couldn't fix by rotating it. However, the theorem has not been fully proven, and the people behind the Mathologer YouTube channel are currently working on it.
The table problem proof uses the intermediate value theorem, which is intuitive to understand but hard to use rigorously. It states that if something moves continuously from one value to another, it must've moved through every value in-between at some point. Bec struggles to understand Matt's convoluted food-based examples.
A wobbling table on a discontinuous (e.g. tiled) floor may always wobble.
A "ding ding" by Bec, combined with a Beardyman ding
If you had to choose, which would be more effective for your dental hygiene: A toothbrush without toothpaste, or toothpaste without a toothbrush?
In the solution to problem 003-2, Bec learned that toothpaste exists mainly to assist our saliva. The effect only lasts for roughly 24 hours. The brush gets rid of the plaque and does the majority of the work. This means you should always choose the toothbrush over the toothpaste. Sophie, the podcast's resident dental expert, confirmed this answer.
Matt wants to know what you should do if you have no toothbrush. Bec guesses eating cheese is a good choice, due to calcium. The hosts pose this problem to the listeners.
A ding by Matt
@FrenchguyCh on Twitter suggests naming the wedding anniversaries after the periodic table of elements, and wishes Matt a happy oxygen anniversary. Matt suggests the -1st anniversary would be antimatter. Episode $040 came out on Bec's 6th wedding anniversary.
The original couple have confirmed that the answer absolutely 100% earned a ding, and thanked the hosts for the gift.
A negative ding from the soon-to-be married couple
People have given the podcast more reviews on Spotify. Episode $040 has only been released for a day, and APS has gone from 327 to 515 reviews, still at 5.0 stars. A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail have gone from 400 to 464 reviews, and is still at 4.9 stars. No Such Thing As A Fish has gone up to 7.3k reviews.
Bec opens a packet of Chee.Toz, which she and Matt then try out. They are stale but taste good.