Ladies and gentlemen, Stand Up Mathematician, Matt Parker! Alright, we're now going to blow this whole "what is a nerd" debate clean out of the water! When I show you my all time favourite, we are talking absolute number one here, top favourite spreadsheet.
Some of you may have your own favourite spreadsheets! I don't know! But would you believe, there are some people out there who don't use spreadsheets recreationally and I'm astounded at this!
Apparently there are people who say spreadsheets are just for work. Right, people who say "yes, if you're in the office then spreadsheets are great. Because you know you can add numbers up, you can take averages, you can grab a table and just pivot that sh-" But those same people, when they go home after work they don't turn into a spreadsheet or two to help them to relax.
And I think that's outrageous. So I have a campaign to change people's minds about spreadsheets. Now while the vast majority of you are with me, I suspect there may be a few people here tonight who bought tickets because we have advertised this as a comedy show.
And those people may be concerned that me talking about spreadsheets is not going to be a world of column to column hilarity, and so to avoid that problem I have written, and I will perform for you tonight somewhere between zero and a whole joke. Okay that was not all of you, that's fine. A lot of you are now worried this joke is a waste of valuable spreadsheet time.
And it's okay. I've minimised the impact were you to imagine my talk about spreadsheets as a graph of the amount of joke over time. There will just be the one sudden spike in the otherwise background level of joke.
And so this spreadsheet in question, my number one spreadsheet, is this one here. And what I have done is I have gone through and I put lots of numbers between 0 and 255 into a spreadsheet and then so you get a sense of where the large and small values are I've used conditional formatting so the larger the number in each cell, the brighter the background colour gets, right. And so in fact if I change one of these you see the background colour changes with it.
So if I increase it to 100 the green gets a bit brighter. If we go up to 200, it gets much brighter. And then 255, the largest value in the cell, sorry the entire spreadsheet, is full green.
0 is completely black and here we have every other whole number shade in between. And I've not just done this for one colour. As you can see the rows go red, green, blue, red, green, blue, and that carries on for the approximately one thousand rows in this spreadsheet.
Oh and it's about 300 columns across. Yes. Now at this point, a few of you are thinking "why?
Why have you done this? Why are we hearing about it on a Saturday night? " Well, actually I did, I heard a few laughs when I said 255.
There's a few people in here who already know where I'm going with this spreadsheet. If you already know what I'm doing, my only advice, is for now, just remain calm. Alright, cause we have a long way to go with this spreadsheet.
If you get too excited now, you're not going to leave yourself the emotional room to move later on. In fact I would recommend, initially on a scale of zero to being really freaking excited, of being around about a third of the way up. Right because what we're going to do is start to zoom out so you can see more of the spreadsheet at once.
If we come one step back, you can start to see there are some structures where the large and small numbers are. Right? And if we come a second step further out, you see the numbers mean that the formatting makes a picture of someone's face.
Look at that: that's someone's eyes made entirely out of numbers. So good! In fact if you zoom out again, you can see this is a spreadsheet of a picture of me!
Yes! Ladies and gentlemen I have really Excelled myself! That's the one joke, that's it.
<Music> I sense I'm being patronised. It's fine, technically a joke; I can log it in my spreadsheet. There we go.
Right. So, the reason I did this is I wanted to show people that all digital photographs are actually just spreadsheets. Whenever you take a photo on your camera the sensor in your camera, each little bit, when the light hits it, it measures the amount of red, green, and blue light contacting it, and it scores it on a scale of 0 to 255.
255 being the largest value you can have with an eight digit binary number. Yes! Alright, and then it put those three values into three cells of a spreadsheet.
And so each group of three cells is one pixel. And to prove this beyond all doubt that your mobile phone is actually just a spreadsheet display I have brought along a microscope. If someone prepared to lend me their smartphone, preferably someone to the front.
I will, if someone who's not that keen would like too lend me their smartphone I will put it under the microscope and we'll have a look at the spreadsheet. Is there anyone down? Okay ma'am would you mind taking that.
Thank you very much. Thank you kindly. So we have a iPhone which is not pass code locked.
I think it's a lot funnier when I update your facebook status "At a nerd show, lolz! " So actually if I can get into the camera, all right give me a second. Camera function I'll actually take a photo of the audience and I.
. . you know what let's do a selfie.
they're all the rage right? So if I get a shot of me in. .
. Actually, can we get the house lights up? Can we get everyone in this shot?
Perfect. Right. So here's what we'll do.
that's lovely. Okay, hang on. Okay you're all gonna have to bunch in a bit.
Alright, so I'll say one, two, three, spreadsheets. Right, and we take the photo. Okay, ready?
Actually whose phone is this? Okay well I'll make sure you get, where are you? Wave.
Okay, you're right there. We'll get you in the shot. Okay, ready, 1, 2, 3, Audience "Spreadsheets!
" Perfect. Alright, so what we're going to do now is I'll bring that picture up and I'm going to put it under the microscope. So it will take me a second to get this zoomed correctly.
Give me a second. Okay, so we'll start off this is just the original screen of the camera. If i get that in focus you see, Oh that is a horrifying sight, oh that's me.
Hang on a second let's put me up the right way. Ok so there's there's me. Nice and over here whose phone, Wow is that your phone?
You're very excited for someone just had their phone stolen. Okay, so we'll zoom right in down to the pixel level. And we get right down there you will see that this is just a spreadsheet here we go.
Hang on. Oh, hang on, let me get in focus. The rest of the show to just me focusing this.
Is there a screen protector on this? Foiled by the refractive index. Okay, hang on.
Here we go. I should be able to get that to rest there and the screen turned on. Okay here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen the spreadsheet. And you can see it's exactly the same as the one I showed you, except of course the numbers aren't on there so if I give this back to you phone does smell vaguely like a pickle now. If I pass that back could you tweet that during the interval and we'll put up on the screen.
Okay, so now at this point a lot of you are thinking, I want a piece of this action. Right. How can I turn my photograph into a spreadsheet?
And when I did originally I did it the long way. I got a digital file popped it open. Scooped out all the numbers.
They're just in there with commas between them, right? Grab those, paste them into Excel and then spent the entire weekend doing the conditional formatting. Turns out Excel, not designed for this.
But now I've automated the process. If you go to the website for my new book "Things To Make And Do In The Fourth Dimension . com" There's a button that says spreadsheets.
If you click on that button you can upload any photograph you want, and immediately download it as an already formatted spreadsheet. It is literally ones of hours of fun right there. And the whole point of this is: all digital displays are just showing you spreadsheets.
Whenever you take a selfie you're actually taking an excelfie. Right whatever. Sorry - Two jokes, who knew?
Whenever you're looking at any kind of display. So if you do go home after work and watch TV. Let's say enjoy the latest in high quality nerd comedy DVD entertainment you're actually looking at around about 25 spread sheets per second.
I told you there are great way to relax, right. And this this is a digital projector that we're using to do the show. There's a projector back there, it only projects red, green, and blue cells so you're looking at an approximation, its a spreadsheet of all the images.
It's not like back in the day right back when we have overhead projectors. Those were the days, weren't they? And on an OHP you got, whatever you write is what you get.
Right where is now you get a spreadsheet of it. So what you're looking at there is a spreadsheet of a spreadsheet. Right, and you have to agree this is pretty conclusive for how nerdy that you can go.
But you'd be wrong! I did not stop here. Oh no.
If you zoom further you will see this is a spreadsheet of the spreadsheet of a picture of me on my laptop making a spreadsheet of another picture of me on my laptop making another spreadsheet and at this point I have to wrap up because from here it is just spreadsheets all the way down. Thank you very much. Well, thanks for watching that excerpt from the stand-up show full frontal nerdity was done by myself, Helen Army, and Steve Mould, together we are Festival of The Spoken Nerd and while you saw very little of them in that clip if you head over to our Spoken Nerd channel you will find the rest of Full-Frontal Nerdity available as the DVD and download.
And those guys are much more into science than mathematics which believe me is hugely disappointing but if you wade through all the science and ridiculous setting stuff on fire and the rest of the show there's plenty more mathematics to keep you happy. If you just want to support more entertaining mathematics there are a few things better you can do then to merely subscribe to my stand-up maths channel of all of them for you fine people watching and sharing these videos believe me they'll be very little point in me making them. I still would make them they'll just be hugely pointless.
If you are new here attracted by the promise of spreadsheets and computing, a good place to start might be my Domino computer. You can see 10,000 dominoes doing basic binary arithmetic or frankly just have a look around. If you just want to make a picture spreadsheet like you saw in the video you can go to the website for my book Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension or you can go to the website for my organization 'Think Maths' there are a lot of things to plug today 'Think Maths' is myself and some other mathematicians we go into secondary schools and give talks to school students and we do basically a family friendly version of the spreadsheet talk on top of that we have loads of free resources for maths teachers and there is a converter that schools can use.
It should handle entire class of students all converting photos into spreadsheet at the same time Okay I think that's everything if you want to see "Festival of the Spoken Nerd" either when we are performing live or a DVD or download head to our YouTube channel or our website which are linked below If you're a mathematics teacher you can go to 'Think Maths' free the free resources to get us to come into a talk in your school or if you just want to use the online spreadsheet converter, in fact anyone can use the online spreadsheet converter either there or on my book's website.
