Not really related to any explicit field of study, but...

Most recently, I was surprised by the extent to which the Japanese still use faxes.

Before that, I was really surprised by the whole Planetary Resources thing. My model of the world claimed that aside for some relatively minor stuff like space tourism and such, plausible pushes to actually do something new and non-trivial in space simply do not happen, and that there would be essentially no real progress in any kind of space exploration before the Singularity. At best, there would be a new private space station in orbit, or NASA would announce a manned Mars mission that would get quietly killed by budget cuts a few years later. Having a bunch of billionaires announce a real effort to actually mine asteroids was something that made it slightly easier for me to alieve in the Singularity happening some day. Before, both asteroid mining and the Singularity used to belong to the mental category of "things that I intellectually acknowledge as possible, but which would be such huge changes to the current paradigm that on a gut level, I don't really grasp either of them happening".