Today's blogpost* is brought to you by a math problem (what happens when one works with geeks). *actually this is a repost of an old post cos reasons. But here's the math problem.

The Proclaimers have famously expressed that they would walk five hundred miles, and five hundred more to "fall down at your door". So let's say that this is not about Craig Reid's lover's (more likely a prospective one's) door – but falling down at the door of your idol.

Since the Proclaimers aren't touring in 2017, we'll just use their tour from 2016. Here's a breakdown of what happened.

The tour kicked of in Australia's Perth

As this map shows, these 29 UK dates overlap greatly with one another. With 29 dates they still only barely cover Western Europe. This would give us about 427M people.

So 10 dates cover the roughly 27M population in Australia, New Zealand + parts of Papua New Guinea.

Now we're talking Proclaimers. Just one event in Dubai, which scores about 210M people. This is much more like it

Again. Horribly ineffective. One event in Washington DC, should cover all of Canada's and the US's East Coast, or about 216M people. Moving the middle of the radius from Washington DC to the boarder of Tennessee and Kentucky though, should cover 250M people. Now that's good work!

Let us propose a much better tour schedule, with much fewer dates.

Btw, super well done Europe on that Mercator projection. Good work. So in under 10 dates, The Proclaimers could be within a thousand miles of 67% of all the Earth's population. Nine dates to be exact. The numbers are rounded, because this isn't exact science people.

Let's find out how many it would take to be less than a thousand miles from all Earthlings. We're including Hawaii, but if there are some more isolated islands in the middle of an ocean, we apologise in advance for not including those.

The Proclaimers 2016 tour had 57 dates. The percent of Earthlings that could reach their live performance by walking five hundred miles and then five hundred more is by our best estimate 400M (UK, Europe) + 30M (Aus, NZ, PNG) + 200M (East Coast) + 70M (West Coast) giving us a total of 700 million people. That's not even 10% of the Earth's population.

We've already suggested an option with only nine dates that would let 67% of all Earthlings be less than a thousand miles from The Proclaimers. Which is obviously way better.

Like a good student, let's answer the original problem posed: "How many gigs do The Proclaimers need to play to be within 1000M from every person on Earth?"

Answer: 40 gigs.