Tag Archives: FactSlap

Pick an Atom, Any Atom

Evidentialism Factslap: There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth.


Think of your last card game – euchre, poker, Go Fish, whatever it was. Would you believe every time you gave the whole deck a proper shuffle, you were holding a sequence of cards which had never before existed in all of history? Consider how many card games must have taken place across the world since the beginning of humankind. No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game.

It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros. To put that in perspective, even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. This is the nature of probabilities with such great numbers. Though a long-time blackjack dealer might feel like they have shuffled thousands of cards in their lifetime, against a number this big, their rearrangements are irrelevant. There are simply too many ways to arrange 52 cards for any randomly organized set of cards to have repeated itself.

Don’t believe it? Consider how many ways you can order a deck of just four aces.

Image by Cassandra Lee, McGill Univ.

As you deal out the deck, each subsequent position in the row has one fewer card to select from. So the first spot has four options, the next spot has three, and so on until one card remains. This mathematical pattern can be used to calculate how many ways a set of things can be organized by multiplying these numbers together.

Image by Cassandra Lee.

This literally exciting calculation is denoted by an exclamation mark and is called a factorial.  As a rule, factorials multiply the number of things in a set by consecutively smaller numbers until 1. Since there are 4 cards in our mini-deck, there are 4 factorial or 4! numbers of ways it can be arranged, which equals 24. While this might not seem like a particularly large number, by the time you get to 52! (or 52x51x50 … ) you get a number with 68 total digits – an integer much larger than all the atoms estimated to be on Earth.

Now you might say, wait, 52 cards arranged in order from least to greatest cannot possibly be unique; you’ve probably even done it several times in your life playing Solitaire. And you’d be right. Card games tend to order decks in common ways, so you need to shuffle really well (about seven times using the “riffle” method) before you’re holding any deck which is truly one-of-a-kind

Buddy, Can You Spare an Airbus?

Evidentialism Factslap: An estimated $58 million in loose change is left behind on airplanes every year.

If you think the change in your couch adds up, just try a 747. It’s been estimated that as much as $58 million is left behind on airplanes every year — a princely sum, to be sure, but one that makes sense when you remember how many people are often in the air at any given time. In an average year, the Federal Aviation Administration handles more than 16 million flights — which is to say that you probably won’t become a millionaire by looking through the seats of your next flight as you deplane. (Global air passenger traffic dropped 61% in 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic; some projections see global air traffic returning to 2019 levels around 2024.) 

In fact, a great deal of loose change never even makes it off the ground. Nearly $1 million was left behind in security bins in 2018, all of which was collected — and kept — by the Transportation Security Administration. That amount, which the TSA is required to report, has been steadily growing in recent years: $531,000 was left behind in 2012, compared to $960,105 in 2018. If you don’t want to add to that number, you may want to go cashless on your next cross-country flight.

A Name By Any Other Rose

Evidentialism Factslap: People breathe primarily through one nostril at a time.

The human nose is a biological wonder. It can smell up to 1 trillion odors, trap harmful debris in the air before it enters your lungs, and affect your sex life. But arguably its most important job is to condition the air you breathe before that air enters your respiratory tract. This means warming and humidifying the air before it passes to your throat and beyond. To do this, the nose undergoes a nasal cycle in which one nostril sucks in the majority of the air while the other nostril takes in the remaining portion. A few hours later (on average), the nostrils switch roles. This cycle is regulated by the body’s autonomic nervous system, which swells or deflates  tissue found in the nose. Although we don’t notice this switch throughout the day, if you cover your nostrils with your thumb one at a time, you’ll likely observe that air flow through one is significantly higher than the other. This is also why one nostril tends to be more congested than the other when you have a cold (the non-dominant one gets more filled with mucous).

There are a few possible reasons for this nasal back-and-forth. Some scientists theorize that the cycle actually improves our sense of smell. Because scent molecules degrade at differing rates, some smells are easier to identify through fast-moving air (in the dominant nostril), while others are more easily picked out in slower currents of the non-dominant, usually more congested, nostril. Very few smells can get past our nose undetected thanks to this alternating nasal superpower.

Except, of course, for political bullshit.