Some, like mathematician Roger Antonsen, believe that numbers are the key to understanding the world. (Antonsen even gave a brilliant TED talk to explain this statement, which I highly recommend.) And there's a Reddit thread that vividly illustrates the point.
It started when platform user JustinMGH made a post, asking others to share facts and stats that sound like obvious exaggerations but actually aren't.
Immediately, people started delivering fascinating, weird, and even disturbing titbits of information, changing each other's perspective about everything around them, even if ever so slightly.
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The difference between million and billion is huge (relatively):
1 Million seconds = 11 Days
1 Billion seconds = 31 years
The budget to send to the Curiosity Rover to the Mars is less than the worldwide military expenditure for thirteen hours
Cleopatra was alive closer to the Moon landing than she was to the construction of the great pyramids.
I’ve heard this one a hundred times and it blows my mind every single time… what a history
USA citizens privately own more firearms than all countries combined. Even more than most militaries.
Pocahontas and William Shakespeare died less than a year apart less than 150 miles away from each other.
Barbara Walters, Anne Frank, and Martin Luther King Jr were all born the same year.
The original height of Mount Everest was calculated to be exactly 29,000 ft high, but was publicly declared to be 29,002 ft in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet was nothing more than a rounded estimate.
1 in 2 Australians will get skin cancer in their lifetime
Neutron stars are so dense that if you dropped a gummy bear from one meter away it would hit the surface in a microsecond with the force of 1,000 nuclear bombs.
The state of Maine has more Black Bears than black people.
This does actually appear to be more-or-less correct, depending on the estimation of the bear population and the accuracy of the first Maine demographic statistics which popped up in a quick web search. Also, with the same caveat, there seems to be approximately one black bear for every square mile of Maine.
Vatican city has a population of 2 popes per 1 square kilometer.
More silent films have been lost than saved
We live in an era where everything is saved, and it's hard to imagine such a massive loss of creative material. Plenty of films are lost, as late as the 1970s too.
Monsters Inc was released closer to the fall of the Berlin wall than to the present day.
All the ants in the world weigh about the same as all the people in the world.
Also, they work extremely hard and live only about 8 days, while turtles don't do shït and get to live 150 years. Let it sink in.
Nintendo existed at the same time as the Ottoman Empire.
You could walk from North Korea to Norway and only pass through one other country.
Also, your feet would be a little sore.
Radio astronomer here! You exert more energy when you unfold a single piece of paper than we have collected in *all* the radio waves we have *ever* collected from outer space.
In a room with 23 people there is a ~50% chance that 2 people share a birthday
funnily enough, my twin and i don’t share a birthday, or even a birth month. she just LOVES to say “i’m a month older than you LISTEN TO ME I AM WISE”
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I've met loads of birthday with my birthday. I went to school with two people who were born on the same day as me. That's what happens when your birthday is in September 🤣
Good point. I was getting ready to say that some months have way more birthdays than others. My birthday is in late January, and I rarely meet anyone with my birthday.
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I heard about this in school. Never had anyone had mine. Now I didn't know until I was in my teens that the neighbor I had lived next to for 15 or 16 yrs.old had my birthday. Also oddly enough when I turned 16 I was walking to my bus and found $16 all fanned out on the rain soaked ground. I started looking around and nobody was there. The money was wet from the rain. It really freaked me out to be honest.
I was behind a guy in the supermarket, buying a bottle of whiskey. It's my birthday tomorrow he said, I'll be 49. The next day was also my 49th birthday. Weird. I didn't buy whiskey though. We had an interesting chat.
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Even though I googled it and I am not the worst in this kind of mathematics (sorry, I don't know how to call it in English, I'm not native) I still don't get how it works. Can somebody please explain? :3
The calculation is as follows: For 1 person the chance is 0% or the chance that no one has the same birthday is 100%. For the 2nd person the chance of having a different birthday than everyone else is 364/365 (I use the rounded value 365 to make it simpler). For the next persons the chances are 363/365, 362/365 and so on. For person number 23 the chances are 343/365. If you multiply these numbers (365/365 x 364/365 x … x 343/365) you get a chance of 49.3% for all of them having different birthdays and 50.7% that at least two persons have the same birthday.
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I share a birthday with Graham Norton, Jonathan Agnew and Robert Downey Jr. We're so similar.
and a lot of them will be related depending on which state you're in.
At my age, on my birthday I'm generally in a state of depression.
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I was at a training course for my job when someone mentioned this, there were 12 people in the room and we all proceed to say our birthday's. There were 2 sets of 2 people who shared the same birthday as well as 3 people who all shared my birthday. So 2/3rds of the people there shared the same 3 birthdays! Crazy.
According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, every two days human beings create as much information as we did from the dawn of time until 2003.
The same facts that BP has posted 20 million times before. This s**t has been posted over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Annoying af
I try posting new articles and for whatever reason BP just won't publish them. Wonder how many people try and get the same results.
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9 US states have more cattle than people. Texas is not one of them due to being very populous but Texas has more cattle than there are people in 45 states and DC.
A light bulb, which is known as the Centennial Light, has been burning at a Livermore, CA firehouse since 1901. It is very rarely turned off, which accounts for its longevity, since turning bulbs off and on contributes to wear and tear. To put it in perspective, this bulb has been around longer than powered flight, and was shining all through the Chicago Cubs' notorious World Series drought.
The same facts that BP has posted 20 million times before. This s**t has been posted over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Annoying af
I try posting new articles and for whatever reason BP just won't publish them. Wonder how many people try and get the same results.
Load More Replies... 9 US states have more cattle than people. Texas is not one of them due to being very populous but Texas has more cattle than there are people in 45 states and DC.
A light bulb, which is known as the Centennial Light, has been burning at a Livermore, CA firehouse since 1901. It is very rarely turned off, which accounts for its longevity, since turning bulbs off and on contributes to wear and tear. To put it in perspective, this bulb has been around longer than powered flight, and was shining all through the Chicago Cubs' notorious World Series drought.
