Brandon Clements

The other day I stumbled across this website where people were voting on the most mind-blowing facts. I know some of the things on there are not “facts” (and some are just silly), but still there were some very interesting ones. Two of them stood out in particular to me that really are incredible (if they are true). Here they are below. If any of you are really smart and know whether these are true or not, I’d love to hear about it!

1) If you properly shuffle a deck of cards, in all likelihood, the resulting deck has never been seen before in the history of the world.

Details: There are permutations of a deck of 52 cards (52!). The modern deck of cards as we know it was invented in 1480. There are approximately seconds between now and then. In order for there to even be a 0.001% chance of a random shuffle to have been seen before, the world would have needed to have generated shuffles to date or approximately shuffles per second. Not even Vegas can shuffle that fast.

2) A small enough animal can fall at terminal velocity without suffering any injury upon impact. An ant (or even a smallish spider) dropped from a tall building will be just fine.

Taken from here.