Mind-blowing Facts?

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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 ~8 *10^{67} per­mu­ta­tions of a deck of 52 cards (52!). The mod­ern deck of cards as we know it was invented in 1480. There are approx­i­mately 1.6 * 10^{10} 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 ~8 * 10^{62} shuf­fles to date or approx­i­mately 5 * 10^{52} 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.

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