Share stuff that blows your mind!

I thought this was an interesting thread and decided I would pull out the things I found the most interesting. This wasn't necessarily the first time I'd heard of these things, but that doesn't make them any less interesting.

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The Virtual Hair Cut
You must use headphones for it to work.

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The Stopped Clock Illusion
Watch the second hand go around the clock. Focus just to the side of it and the hand stops. Not a big deal right? The brain doesn't process what isn't directly "told to". However, looking back at the clock causes the hand to pick up where it left off. Where'd that time go?

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To travel 1 light year in our fastest spacecraft (so far 36,000 mph) it would take 18,640 years. The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri, a mere 4.37 light years away. So it would take us 81,459 years to just get to our closest star.

Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. So to travel across our galaxy it would take 1,864,000,000 years.

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Euler's_identity

e^πi + 1 = 0

Five of mathematics' core constants coming together in such a simple equation.

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If you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which would have been you.

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Gravity moves at the speed of light, so if the sun was suddenly nabbed away and gone, we would be orbiting nothing for 8.3 minutes before we we're "flung" in a straight line out into space.

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4^4^4^4 is a monstrously huge number.

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The exact value of Pi has an infinite decimal expansion: its decimal expansion never ends and does not repeat. Turn the odd numbers in pi into 1's, and the even numbers into 0's. Then 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 becomes
3.10111 00111 01111 01000 00011 01011 10000 01111 01111 11110.

If that goes on forever, and never repeats then every binary sequence ever created, or that could ever be created, would be present. That means that somewhere in pi is every picture ever made, every movie ever created, everything mankind could ever know.

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Despite there being 365 days in a year, the odds that a group of 50 random people will have 2 people with the same birthday is over 97%.

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The Monty Hall Problem

It's named after the game show "Let's Make a Deal." A contestant was allowed to choose one of three doors, a valuable prize was behind one, and worthless prizes were behind the others.

Once the contestant made their choice, Monty Hall opened one of the other doors, revealing one of the gag prizes. He would then open the contestant's chosen door to reveal whether they picked the real prize or not. Now, let's assume the contestant could change doors once a new door was opened. Would it be to their advantage to switch doors? If the contestant guesses that the good prize was behind door #2, door #1 was opened to reveal a gag prize, is the good prize more likely to be behind door #2, or door #3?

Our brain incorrectly reduces the problem thinking that to begin we had a 33% chance, and now have a 50/50 shot at the good prize. In actuality you'd be twice as likely to win if you switched to door #3.

Without getting into the math and set theory as to why it happens it's easiest to think about the problem by increasing the scale. Say there were 10,000 doors, you pick one, and are then shown 9998 of the doors that aren't the good prize. Which is more likely to hold the good prize, the door you picked out of 10,000, or the one door they just happened to not show you out of the 9,999 you didn't pick?

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That's all I feel like doing now. I'll see if I can dig up some more stuff, assuming anyone finds this stuff interesting anyway.
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