Bec flew home two days after the NY episode 045 was recorded. Bec gives a shoutout to the A Problem Squared fans at An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail.
While Matt was filming a video on pool, Bec was playing a lot of darts and was getting better and better. Afterwards, she played darts against Matt, Grant Sanderson, Rollie, and Genn, and didn't win.
Bec has started a podcast called Elon Musk vs Twitter, a few episodes of which are already out.
After New York, Matt and Alex stayed in the US and filmed two videos. On the last night they found a bar in Tallahassee that had a dart board. They first played some pool and then some darts. The dart board was a modern electronic one that does the maths for you, which eventually won Matt over.
Bec tells a cool Grant Sanderson darts anecdote.
Bec, bookshelves are kind of boring. What creative and different ways can I store my books? [Editor's note: More details follow.]
Matt's books are unsorted, except for the bookshelf in the background of his videos. Gavin (Bec's husband) sorts his books by height. Some people sort them by color. Bec has some large books, which go where they fit. She decorates her bookshelves with action figures and other knick knacks. She's always wanted a secret bookshelf door.
If you don't need immediate access to your books, you could stack them in arbitrary shapes, for example chairs or a bed. Matt wants to build a bookshelf out of books. Bec suggests book columns to frame doors. In a video, Matt used (and destroyed) copies of his own books as weights, and some people got mad. Bec talks about a business idea she had for book shelves that double as boxes for moving the books.
Awaiting ding from Sarah. Listeners are encouraged to send in pictures of their own ideas.
Usually, lottery maths videos are hung up on the likelihood to win the jackpot and don't go into detail about the chances of smaller consecutive winnings. If you were to buy a lottery ticket once a week for 30 years, what are the overall odds of coming out with a net positive, and how often would you need to win any of the smaller winnings?
Matt wrote a German lottery simulator. By the way, the optimized version of Matt's code from problem 038-1 is under half a millisecond now. After running the simulation, the average earning was 37.7% of the money spent by each person. 2.5% of people made a profit. In the UK, the average earning is fixed to 53%, while Germany's is set at 50%.
Matt wrote another simulator that follows a single person until they win the jackpot. They won the jackpot (12.5 million €) after about 5 million years. Along the way, they won 77.5 million € in smaller prizes. The tickets cost 305 million €.
In conclusion, if your plan is making money via the lottery, you won't.
Many people responded. One person was angry because they got the song stuck in their head. Bec requests a mashup of Semi-Charmed Life and Year 3000. One unnamed person wrote a very detailed answer that Bec and Matt will put up on socials. They looked into how long you can keep sperm frozen (55 years) and mentioned that no known submarine can go 88 miles per hour.
People have sent in made up word pairs, one of which Bec took and tweaked slightly. It consists of "vedpharkwing" (a bird that gets way too close for comfort) and "bumolscquytz" ("I've got a particularly bad case of bumolscquytz").
Ricard Broughton [Editor's note: May be misspelled] recommended to turn "veldcraft" into "veldcrafty" for one more letter. It's no bumolscquytz though.
Nosair [Editor's note: Spelling very likely incorrect] wanted to generate the longest English-sounding word with no repeating letters. They got "macrosuadingly", which is 15 letters long. However, actual English words matching those criteria exist: "dermatoglyphics" and "uncopyrightable".
Matt brought Cheetos Crunchy from America, which are supposedly made with real cheese. They're good, but not as salty as proper twisties. If you want to send snacks, email Bec.