5 Little-Known Facts That Feel Counterintuitive

2026-02-14 3 min

Table of Contents

Some facts are not difficult, just deeply counterintuitive.
You hear them once, assume they are fake, then realize they are actually correct.

Here are five of my favorite examples, formatted for quick reading and easy sharing.

TIP
Best delivery order for trivia: claim first -> specific date or number -> one-line explanation.

Quick Overview

Topic	Common intuition	What is actually true
Guillotines in modern times	Guillotines belong to a very distant era	France used one for an execution as late as 1977
Sharks, trees, Saturn’s rings	Trees should be older than sharks	Sharks predate trees; many models suggest Saturn’s rings are younger than both
Card shuffling	A deck order should eventually repeat often	`52!` is so large your current shuffle is almost certainly unique in history
The year 1582	Dates should progress continuously	Multiple countries skipped 10 calendar dates during reform
Everest rocks	The tallest mountain should have purely “mountain” rock	Near the summit, marine sedimentary rock records an ancient ocean origin

Most people place guillotines in a much earlier era. The timeline is tighter than it seems:

May 1977: the first Star Wars film premiered.
April 1977: France carried out its last guillotine execution (Hamida Djandoubi).
Also in 1977: Apple Computer completed incorporation.

So while pop culture was entering a modern sci-fi age, an old execution method still existed in state use.

This sounds like internet humor, but the core timeline checks out:

Shark lineages are older than 400 million years.
Large tree-like woody plants appeared around 380 million years ago.
For Saturn’s rings, common modern models often place them in a relatively young range, around 100 million years (with ongoing debate).

“Sharks are older than trees” is not a joke line. It is a real chronological mismatch.

The number of possible deck orders is:

52! = 8.07 x 10^67

That scale is hard to internalize:

Your current shuffled order is overwhelmingly likely to be the first time it has ever appeared.
Even with massive repeated shuffling, humans cannot meaningfully exhaust this state space.

That is why deck shuffling is such a common teaching example for combinatorics and randomness.

During adoption of the Gregorian calendar, some countries removed dates to correct drift accumulated under the Julian calendar.

In early-adopting regions:

This is a formal calendar reform result, not folklore. Adoption timing differed by country, so the jump happened on different dates across regions.

Everest is the highest mountain, but parts of its upper rock record ancient sea environments:

Marine sedimentary characteristics (including limestone units) are documented near summit zones.
Those layers formed in the ancient Tethys Ocean and were uplifted by plate collision.

So one classic geology paradox is real: you can stand at the top of the world on rock that began on a seafloor.

The best part of trivia is not “I know something obscure.”
It is the moment when facts force us to update intuition.