The Verifiably Absurd

A Curriculum the Education System Forgot to Mention

Syllabus Update

School taught us many things: long division, the mitochondria, and how to pretend we understood Macbeth.

What it didn’t teach us were the truly important facts — the ones that sound like lies.

The kind that you read and then check your calendar to see if it’s April 1 — and yet they are absolutely, undeniably true.

So, in the spirit of lifelong learning, here is a revised syllabus which includes some of the things we weren’t taught but maybe should’ve been.

Same subjects.

Better material.

But facts so strange and unusual, they may just unsettle you.

“Something wicked this way comes.”

Don’t worry.

It’s just the new curriculum.

Biology

A farewell to arms

You likely have more arms than the average person.

Because “average” includes people with fewer than two arms — and there are far more of them than there are people with three or four arms to balance things out.

This sounds like something that Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg might have told you if they were a professor of introductory probability and statistics.

Exactly the same, only different

Identical twins are only truly identical at the moment the zygote splits in two. After that, small environmental differences — even in the womb — begin nudging their DNA in slightly different directions. In some cases, these changes happen shortly after the split. After birth, lifestyle and diet influence how genes are expressed, making twins more different as they age.

This includes their fingerprints.

This all said, identical twins are still, by a wide margin, the closest genetic matches possible between humans.

Geography

The geography quiz most of us get wrong

We all know the US is our closest neighbour — geographically speaking, anyway.

But here’s the real question: what are the next two closest countries to Canada?

Greenland — an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark — lies just 26 kilometres across the Nares Strait from Ellesmere Island in Nunavut (and thanks to the famously polite “Whisky War” over Hans Island — a decades‑long “conflict” in which each country left behind its own flag and a bottle of liquor to claim the island, finally resolved in 2022 — Canada and Denmark now even share a tiny land border).

And the French territorial islands of Saint‑Pierre and Miquelon lie just 20 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland — a literal piece of France, complete with euros, French licence plates, and grocery stores full of butter that tastes like it flew in from Paris that morning, where Newfoundlanders routinely pop over for wine, cheese, and a weekend in “Europe.”

Which means Canada’s closest neighbours are:

• the United States

• the Kingdom of Denmark

• and the tiny part of France that really likes cod.

There’s a small sliver of Yellowstone Park where you can get away with murder

In theory.

Here’s the short version:

• Crimes committed within Yellowstone Park can only be prosecuted federally.

• Congress assigned the entire park — including the small parts in Idaho and Montana — to the federal judicial district of Wyoming.

• The Sixth Amendment requires jurors to come from both the state and the district where the crime occurred.

• But the 50‑square‑mile portion of Yellowstone that is in the state of Idaho and the district of Wyoming has zero residents.

No residents means no jury.

No jury means no trial.

No trial means no conviction.

Again, in theory.

Law professor Brian Kalt discovered this loophole in 2005 and dubbed the area “The Zone of Death” — not to encourage would-be assassins to test the murky legal waters here, but to encourage Congress to fix it.

To date, they have not.

Astronomy

A day on Venus lasts longer than its year

Venus rotates so slowly that its day is longer than the time it takes to orbit the sun.

Which means that on Venus, if your birthday is today, your next birthday will be sometime before tomorrow.

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth

Not just on a beach — on the entire planet.

Every coastline, desert, sandbox, golf trap, hourglass, and beach-trip bellybutton. All of it.

Earth has around 7.5 quintillion grains of sand. I say “around” because I’m reasonably certain that no one has actually counted.

The observable universe has at least 10 sextillion stars — and possibly 100 times that. So, there are anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 stars for every grain of sand.

The universe isn’t just winning.

It’s running up the score.

Science

An average cloud weighs around a million pounds

A typical white, fluffy cumulus cloud — the kind old people like me and Grandpa Simpson occasionally yell at — weighs about 500,000 kg. Clouds float because the moisture in them is so widely dispersed, which means they are supported by denser and heavier air underneath them.

And storm clouds, which are larger and hold even more water, can weigh over a million tons.

So the next time someone tells you to “get your head out of the clouds,” remember they’re asking you to avoid a floating herd of elephants.

Wearing a tie can reduce blood flow to the brain by 7.5%

Finally, a scientific explanation for middle management.

Sometimes jokes write themselves.

History

When daylight savings makes time travel possible

On November 6, 2016, twins Samuel and Ronan Peterson were born 31 minutes apart in Massachusetts.

Samuel arrived first at 1:39 a.m.

At 2:00 a.m., the clocks fell back an hour for the end of Daylight Saving Time.

Ten minutes later, Ronan was born — at 1:10 a.m.

So even though Ronan was born 31 minutes after Samuel, he is officially recorded as being 29 minutes older than the brother he was born after.

Cleopatra’s life was closer to the iPhone than the construction of the Egyptian pyramids

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BCE.

Cleopatra died about 2,530 years later in 30 BCE.

The first iPhone was released just 2,037 years after that, in 2007 CE.

Which means hieroglyphics depicting Cleopatra playing Candy Crush on an iPhone are more historically accurate than ones showing her standing in front of the pyramids during their construction.

The last guillotine execution in France happened the day before Star Wars premiered there

On September 10, 1977, France carried out its final guillotine execution — of a Tunisian immigrant.

And the next day, Star Wars: A New Hope premiered at the Deauville American Film Festival in France — featuring sweeping desert scenes filmed in Tunisia.

So to summarize: France celebrated a futuristic sci‑fi blockbuster filmed in the home country of the man they’d executed with 18th‑century technology just one day earlier.

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire

Some scholars — and people like me who can Google things — date the Aztec Empire to the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325.

Others — also people like me who can Google things — argue the empire didn’t formally begin until 1428.

Either way, Oxford University had already been teaching students since 1096.

Imagine sitting in a lecture hall for your Recent History class and learning about The Battle of Hastings.

Imagine wanting to prank a rival university by stealing their mascot, only to realize there weren’t any other universities yet — forcing you to sneak into the Vatican and pilfer the Pope instead.

Depending on which date you choose, Oxford was up and running — and probably organizing campus orientation tours for freshies — two or three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed.

Math

If you could fold a piece of paper in half 50 times, it would reach about three-quarters the distance to the sun

A sheet of printer paper is 0.1 millimetres thick. Each fold doubles the number of layers.

After 14 folds, the paper is over 1.6 metres tall.

After 27 folds, it’s almost five kilometres taller than Mount Everest.

After 50 folds, it’s over 112 million kilometres tall — about 75% of the distance to the sun.

This is exponential growth: the concept that explains compound interest, how viruses spread, and why every morning more of my lawn is covered in dandelions.

The astronomical math hiding in a deck of cards

Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you’re putting the cards in a new order. But have you ever wondered just how many different orders there are?

As it happens, the answer is: lots.

Which is a bit of an understatement.

Because the number of possible arrangements is 52! (52 factorial):

52 × 51 × 50 × 49 × … × 3 × 2 × 1

Which equals:

80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

This is a staggeringly enormous number — so large that just reading the digits out loud would take you several seconds, and understanding it would take you several lifetimes.

So here’s a way to visualize it:

Imagine you have a timer set with this many seconds on it — the full 52! worth.

Stand on the equator. Start the timer.

Take one step forward every billion years.

After about 40 trillion years, you’ll have walked around the Earth once.

Now remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean.

Repeat:

Walk around the world one step per billion years and remove another drop of water each time you complete a lap.

When the Pacific is finally empty, it’s automatically refilled — but to mark the occasion, you now place a single sheet of printer paper on the ground.

Keep doing the same thing.

Eventually, your stack of paper will reach the sun.

And what will your timer say?

Almost exactly what it said when you started.

In fact, the first three digits on your timer still haven’t changed. After one full “paper tower to the sun” cycle, your timer would still show more than 99.9% of those seconds remaining.

As it turns out, using this somewhat time‑consuming method, you’d need to build a stack of paper to the sun around 3,000 times before the last second finally ticks away.

What does this mean?

It means exactly what I said: 52! is stupefyingly enormous.

It means that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, it is a statistical certainty that you are holding a deck in an order that has never existed before in the history of the universe — and never will again.

Final Exam

The world is full of lies that sound like facts.

I prefer the opposite — facts so bizarre and incomprehensible that they sound like lies.

Reality, it would seem, appears to be under no obligation to make sense.

Maybe school didn’t fail us — maybe it was just saving the good stuff for later.

So enjoy the new curriculum.

And that way, when the school year is finished and you’re wondering what to do in the summer, you’ll maybe be a little suspicious of an invitation from someone to go camping in this “really neat” part of Yellowstone they read about.

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