#4. How to Beat Solitaire
Odds are pretty high that you're reading this article while you're at
work. And once you're done wasting time with Cracked, odds are you'll
continue to waste time with something else. And conveniently at your
fingertips is one of the most played and addictive games of all time,
one that you don't even need a partner for: solitaire.
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"Mrs. Jones in the cancer ward can wait. I just got the fourth ace!"
More specifically, Klondike
solitaire, which is as familiar to career procrastinators as
Minesweeper. All of us at some point, usually around our 10th
consecutive loss, have buckled down and tried to figure out the secret.
After all, if Rain Man can break Vegas, surely you can beat a goddamn
Windows game.
Wrong!
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"I just got the king of diamonds. Engage Protocol Delta."
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that scientists get distracted when "studying" solitaire, or the fact that solitaire may have evolved
from freaking black magic, but pretty much every damn thing about the
game has remained a mystery since the 1800s. In fact, big-time
mathematicians openly admit
that it's one of the "embarrassments of applied mathematics" that
almost nothing about the standard Klondike solitaire game is currently
known.
For example, when the math geeks tried to find the odds of winning,
they ran into a problem. They couldn't even get a fixed idea of how many
winning hands are
possible. The mathematicians came up with
an approximate percentage of how many hands are winnable that was
somewhere around 80 or 90 percent. But think about it -- when you play
solitaire, do you win
at least eight out of every 10 hands? Either you have the lamest X-Men superpower ever, or you're lying.
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Sorry, kid. No one in history has ever gotten laid for their ability at solitaire.
Now, there's some wild-ass guesses out there as to what the actual odds of winning Klondike are, but you'll never get an exact answer, even if many computer people agree that you don't have a good chance of winning at the game.
You might think that it's just because scientists are too busy
breaking apart neutrons and quarks to bother trying to hack a card game.
But consider that science has already cracked the secrets to the
seemingly much more complicated game of Monopoly.
But solitaire? It's simply beyond our powers of understanding. Then
again, if we actually did know how to beat solitaire, we'd have to go
back to work faster.
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"Ma'am, I've told you this before. I'll deal with your 'home invasion' when I've won two in a row."
#3. How Many Species of Animal Exist
In the 21st century, the days of Marco Polo and Columbus are long
behind us. Nobody is exploring new lands and finding exotic new
creatures like the platypus for the rest of the world to call bullshit
on. So surely, having stomped across every nook and cranny of this blue
earth, we should by now have some kind of ballpark figure about how many
species we have left to kill, right?
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Gotta catch 'em all!
Actually, not even close. When you ask taxonomists (scientists
specially tasked with finding and cataloging animals), they'll tell you
they haven't even scratched the surface in their attempts to find all
the creatures that live on the planet. However, despite working on this
mission for almost 250 years, along with discovering
over 15,000 new living beings each year, taxonomists don't even have the faintest idea of how many species live on Earth.
In fact, although scientists have identified almost 2 million of the species we've got, estimates for the amount of species that are actually on the planet range from a measly 5 million up to a daunting
100 million. The reason for this supernova-sized room for error is that, no matter what method the scientists use to make their estimates, there's always some amount of guesswork involved.
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"Anyone have a d10googol we can roll?"
One of the early estimates from 19th century taxonomists said that
there were about 400,000 species on Earth, and seeing as how we've
already discovered five times that many, it's only logical to conclude
there was some faulty sciencing involved there. In fact, the most recent
estimate, which claims that that there's less than 10 million species, is being heavily criticized by scientists. Hell, even the people who put out this estimate admitted publicly that they might be way off.
There are a few good reasons why the birds, bees, and bacteria remain woefully uncounted. First off, the research on species takes place mostly in the northern hemisphere,
which remains more technologically advanced than the southern, so it's
very likely that places like Australia have yet to show us the complete
horror of their fauna.
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Somewhere, deep in the outback, the fabled and terrible Murder Koala waits.
But the biggest reason that science is still shrugging its shoulders and making sad trumpet noises is that 99 percent of all living space is under the ocean, and humans have explored less than 10 percent of it (experts say we have better maps of the surface of Mars than of our own oceans). We discover new and horrible types of life there all the time!
Prosanta Chakrabarty
GAH!
#2. The Length of the U.S. Coastline (Or Any Coastline, For That Matter)
Of all the subjects we learned in high school, the one with the least
amount of mystery was probably geography. The continents, rivers and
mountains aren't going anywhere. At least not very fast, they're not.
Sure, the fine points can get more complicated. Maybe the tallest mountain isn't the one you think, and maybe the largest desert
will surprise you, but even then, it's all just a matter of committing
definitions to memory and spewing them back to your teacher. It's all
freaking measurements! Surely the length of the United States coast
isn't something "up for debate."
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What do you need besides a ruler?
Yet estimates vary wildly. The Central Intelligence Agency, for example, officially lists the length of the U.S. coast as around 12,380 miles. But another study came up with 29,093 miles. Then this study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (a U.S. government agency) came up with
95,471.
What the hell?
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"Somewhere around that second set of docks we found a pub and blew the whole damn count."
You see, measuring coasts isn't simple and indisputable, like
measuring a straight line on a piece of paper. It's complex and prone to
wild exaggeration, like measuring your dong in the bathroom. The reason
is that, depending on how much detail of a coast you want to measure,
you'll always get a different final outcome from someone who chose to
take into account a different amount of detail. If you want to just take
the rough outline of a coast, you can get a measurement like the CIA
has. But when you get into the fine details of every little inlet and
estuary, suddenly the numbers get much bigger as you calculate in all of
these twists and turns.
Avsa, Wikipedia Commons
Keep zooming in, and this can literally continue for infinity.
And the thing about all those numbers is that they can all be adopted
as "official" measurements by government agencies, and nobody would bat
an eye. In fact, the disparity between coastline measurements is
accepted and is a pretty well-known problem
in geography dubbed the "coastline paradox." This coastal conundrum
comes from the fact that, no matter how much detail you choose to take
into account in your measurement of a coastline, no matter how many of
the zigs and zags you measure, there is always more detail to get. This
paradoxically makes every single coastline of every single country
infinitely long.
#1. How Gravity Works
Come on, it's gravity. Is there any concept in the universe quite so
basic? You throw shit up, it comes down again. Despite his textbook
reputation, Newton didn't discover gravity. It was discovered by the
first fish ancestor who crawled onto land and found it had lost the
ability to swim upward. What's to understand?
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One aborted attempt at parkour and the subsequent ER visit can drum the basics into even the thickest skull.
Turns out there are four basic forces that hold the universe together, and out of these four, gravity is the only one that
doesn't make any sense.
Specifically, how it can be so incredibly weak and incredibly strong at
the same time. Gravity holds the entire universe together, and no
matter how far out you travel, it never completely disappears. And yet,
it is the weakest force in existence.
To illustrate, you know when you bring two magnets near each other and
they snap together? That force is actually 10^36 times stronger than
gravity. Yeah, the technical term for that is "a big-ass order of
magnitude" stronger.
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"Using the scale devised by Dr. R. J. Fuckton, of course."
To add to the confusion, because all these other forces are
controlled by their own particles, it stands to reason that gravity
should have its own particles, too. But this hypothetical critter -- the graviton -- is basically the only one we haven't found yet, unlike the particles that mediate a lot of the other important forces in nature, which have been altogether more cooperative.
But the mother of all baffling gravity mysteries is that, once you
get down to the level of atoms and molecules and even smaller stuff,
gravity just plain stops working.
In fact, gravity is one of the biggest reasons why quantum physicists
and real-world physicists have nothing to say to each other. We know
more about what's inside an atom than we do about why a ball comes back
down when we throw it in the air. For all science knows, it's because of
ghosts.
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"Ghosts are one of the four fundamental forces, along with poltergeists, unicorns and David Bowie."
