I heard something the other day that really blew my mind.
Imagine a deck of cards that has been fully shuffled so that its order is totally random. Now suppose you record its ordering from the top card to the bottom card. It'd be something like king of spades, two of hearts, seven of hearts, nine of clubs, queen of diamonds, so and so forth. Now suppose you do this every time a deck of cards is shuffled at a casino. How many times throughout a typical day do you think that you would hit upon the exact same ordering more than once? The answer is almost certainly never. Every ordering would be different.
Now suppose you extend that not to a single casino but to all casinos in the world, and you extended the time period from a day to a year. How many times now do you think you would record the same ordering? The answer again is almost certainly never. That's pretty crazy, huh? Even considering every shuffle at every casino in the world for a year, you are very unlikely to find two exact same orderings.
But here's the truly mind-blowing part: If you extend this experiment not just to casinos, but to any shuffle* anywhere in the world, and you extended the timeline to all of human history in both directions, past and future, you are still almost certainly never going to record two orderings that are the same. Every shuffle that has ever been and ever will be almost certainly has a unique ordering -- no two shuffles have ever or will ever produce the exact same ordering. 🤯
*For this to be valid, we only consider shuffles that are actually in random order. Obviously, if you manipulate the order or don't mix them up very well, they could be the same.
Somebody said this at a conference, and I found it unbelievable at first, but I did a smell test, and it totally passes.* The reason is because there are 52! (52 factorial) distinct orderings of a deck of cards, and 52! is 52 times 51 times 50 times 49 times every integer all the way down to 1, and that is an unfathomably large number. Doing some back of the envelope math, I calculated that 52! is larger than 2^203, which is larger than 10^60. So, 52! is larger than the number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and this is more than the estimated number of atoms in solar system.
*When I get a bit more free time, I'll calculate the actual percentage of hitting upon the same ordering at some point in human history, given some reasonable assumptions.
So, if, instead of shuffling cards, we imagine we are randomly picking atoms in the solar system (there are roughly 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a droplet of water, by the way), then, yeah, it's completely believable -- obvious even -- that we could basically never pick the exact same same atom, even if every human who has ever existed and will ever exist did nothing put pick atoms all day for their entire life.
Here's another absurd example of how big 52! is. If you counted 10 billion numbers a second, and starting counting the moment the big bang happened, you would not even be one third of the way to 52! as of today. Like I said above, it is unfathomably large, and I mean that literally -- I don't think we as humans are capable of completely fathoming a number that big. Anything beyond a certain value just qualifies as nutty large. For example, I don't think we have any deep intuition about the difference between 10^15 and 10^21 even though one is a million times the other.
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Here's something fathomable, but still weird. I was telling the family about this gorilla who lived at the B&I shopping center in Tacoma, when I was a kid, named Ivan, and Lil' S1 told me he knew of that gorilla because he read a book inspired by his story: The One and Only Ivan. I did not even know that such a book existed, let alone that he had read it, but the coincidence isn't the part that's weird. The weird part is that a gorilla lived in a shopping center in Tacoma, Washington throughout my childhood. Lil' S2 asked me if I would go see him, and I was like, yeah, because you would just go to the mall, and he'd be there. I would be tagging along with my dad to get some sleeping bags,* or what have you, and we would stop and look at the gorilla in the cage for a few minutes.
*We didn't go to the B&I often, but I specifically remember going there once with my dad once to buy camping equipment. They also had a sports card kiosk there that was a really treat for me. I think they held a big swap meet there every so often too.
That would never fly today. It didn't really fly back then either, to be honest. Ivan was near the end of his time in the Tacoma when I last saw him, as animal rights activists eventually facilitated his move to a more suitable environment in the early '90s. Still, it's weird to think back on it today.
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Speaking of gorillas, we saw Godzilla x Kong today. I went in expecting it to be terrible, and my expectations were met. It's just a stream of violent CGI pap. Poor S, all she wants is to see Dune: Part Two, and nobody wants to see it with her. Actually, I would have today, but we had the kids with us, and neither of them was very keen on seeing it, but they did want to watch Godzilla x Kong. We probably could've cajoled them to see Dune instead, but cajoling preteens to see a nearly three hour movie is likely not the wisest thing to do, if you want to enjoy yourself. Godzilla was an hour shorter, and Lil' S2 still started getting antsy toward the end.
The worst part about the whole thing is that it cost $85. When I was buying the tickets, I selected 3-D I-Max, thinking, If the movie is terrible, at least we'll be getting a cool theater experience. I mean, why not? And then I saw the price, and was like, Right, that's why. The 3-D didn't even do much for me because I had trouble keeping my eyes open for large stretches of the film. I kept dozing off, which is crazy considering the volume was seemingly set to 200 decibels. Next time I'll bring a pair of earplugs.
The best part about the movie is that it had a few good old songs in it -- not like good good, but campy good -- that Loverboy song* that goes I gotta do it my w-a-a-a-ay or no at a-l-l-l-l and that Badfinger song that starts I remember finding out about you.
*This video looks like it was made today to parody a rock video from 1981.
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Speaking of old, campy rock songs, I went in to Dick's Sporting Goods during my lunch break the other day to buy some boxer briefs, and then when I went to Krav Maga that night, the (old) black shorts I was wearing got a big hole in them, so I had to go back to Dick's a day later to get some new black shorts,* and when I went in the, the same song was playing that was playing the first time I went in: "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. Mommy's alright, daddy's alright, they just seem a little w-e-e-e-i-r-d...
*Black shorts are the only color that goes with my black tights, which I wear to wrestling class to alleviate mat burn. I only had one pair -- much to S's bewilderment ("Why do you only have one of things?! Why don't you have a backup?!") -- so it was imperative I get a new set. This time I listened to my wife and bought two pairs.
I went in at the same time of the day, so I'm sure they just have one of those prepackaged playlists that they turn on at opening and just let run. Those things suck for the employees. We had one when I worked at The Sports Authority back in aught-zero, and I grew to mark the time of the day by how annoyed I was at hearing the same song I heard yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that... It was mostly filled with the same type of inoffensive arena rock from the late '70s and early '80s, but, for some reason, it had that David Bowie/Trent Reznor song "I'm Afraid of Americans." It was such an outlier both in genre and lyrical messaging. I always wondered how it got on there.
That's all for today.
Until next time...
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