this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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First of all I love this question. My suggestion is that you shuffle a deck of cards, flip them over and note their exact order, then shuffle again and note the order again then keep shuffling and checking the order until the deck resets to the original shuffled order. It's gotta happen eventually, but it might take you a while. In fact a lot of people have studied that very specific problem and there's actually really good odds that every shuffled deck you've ever held has been the only deck of that order in history. So, yes, it almost certainly has happened somewhere, but good luck finding it.
It's like when playing the lottery, if you say you're picking all your numbers in a sequence, like 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. People will tell you're crazy because sequences like that "never" happen. But the same is true for every other combination of numbers too. The sequence just makes it clearer how unlikely you are to ever pick the winning numbers.
52!
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
I was fascinated for a couple years, back when flash player was coming to an end. I built a deck of cards in AS3 with the original goal of a simple single player blackjack. This was introductory research I came across that has held a fascination for me ever since.
A while is a great euphemism here... A deck of 52 cards (poker playing cards) has so many potential orders that it is said that each time someone shuffles a deck nowadays, it's really likely to get a deck order that has never been gotten before!
That's exactly what they just said.
Found it! It had actually just fallen into the couch cushions.
This is my favorite reply everyone else can go home.
There are more combinations in a deck of cards than atoms on earth.
But since we're talking about early life forming (actually chemical replicators, much simpler than a virus) let's use the card shuffling odds, but decks of cards are being shuffled in billions or trillions of places on early Earth every second for millions of years. Even a very low odds of finding a working sequence of molecules will be found geologically quickly given the amount of times done over area and time. We're pretty sure now that life began very soon once the Earth cooled down enough to allow it. What took much longer was the more complex forms of life like viruses and single cells, then even longer for multicellular.
What's more fucked is the "perfect container" thought experiment with infinity.
Take for an example an apple, you put it in your "perfect container" that nothing can pass thru. This is a hypothetical, it doesn't exist.
What happens to the apple?
Fucking everything. It will rot and degrade, eventually breaking down to fundamental elements, but all the energy/matter to make an apple is in there. On an infinite timeline that stuff will go thru every possible permeation. Including an exact and perfect copy of the very same apple. Even if it takes billions and billions of years.
Maybe at some point in the middle. You get an orange.
no because entropy.
an apple is more like an ice sculpture. energetically far from equilibrium. once reduced to a puddle, the molecules will never spontaneously rearrange into the sculpture. It will just be a puddle. the molecules, yes, will constantly rearrange, into also, a puddle.
there has to be a force to act on them to push them out of equilibrium.
life is a state of matter held far from equilibrium.
Way too early for this shit.
Blame plants. Get back at them by smoking/ drinking some of them.
*permutation