The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards in the same way twice in the history of the world are infinitesimally small, statistically speaking. The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is '52 factorial' otherwise known as 52! or 52 shriek. This is 52 times 51 times 50 . . . all the way down to one. Here's what that looks like: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766, 975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.

To give you an idea of how many that is, here is how long it would take to go through every possible permutation of cards. If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang, they'd only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.

Aisling Bea said in a somewhat recent episode "Oh, great, they're gonna GIF this, aren't they?" and I assumed she just meant the internet was gonna do what the internet does. Apparently she was talking about the Elves who run a Giphy channel.

Enjoy: https://giphy.com/QIElves/

Sandi and Alan discuss how the Klaxon was Alan's idea, their favorite guests, and possibilities after Series Z

Fry is amused that, in Germany, mobile phones are called "handies".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15295739

I tried to cue the video up in the link, but if it doesn't work, that clip is at 2:37 mark.

> "In our first series, it was Greek letters. But then people wrote in and said 'we like the show, but we find that pretentious'. So we began Series 3 with an apology: "We'd like to say to everyone that's been enjoying the show but found the Greek letters a bit pretentious, we've listened. It's your BBC. You've reached out, we've heard you. Please choose....your Egyptian hieroglyph.

Forgot how much I missed seeing Sue Perkins on QI. She was always fun.

I know she's got her own projects, but so do most of the other panelists. Anyone know if there's a reason she hasn't been on in forever?

Totally forgot Teri Hatcher was on.

Alan's unique and heartwarming way of welcoming Sandi to the seat. I think this was like her 2nd or 3rd show after taking over from Fry.