Monday, June 03, 2013

It's Not Flipping Fair!


Not sure I actually believe this.  But, here you go.

"What he and his fellow researchers discovered (here’s a PDF of their paper) is that most games of chance involving coins aren’t as even as you’d think. For example, even the 50/50 coin toss really isn’t 50/50 — it’s closer to 51/49, biased toward whatever side was up when the coin was thrown into the air.

But more incredibly, as reported by Science News, spinning a penny, in this case one with the Lincoln Memorial on the back, gives even more pronounced odds — the [American] penny will land tails side up roughly 80 percent of the time."

With a nod to Jay Larson…

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is nothing sacred? Even a coin toss?