21–30 of 193 posts
This is clearly the law of conservation of reality at work. Likewise, when you hear a word for the first time suddenly you hear it five times in a row. Or if you see somebody once you suddenly start running into them all over the place. It's because it's cheaper to repeat past realities than to create new ones.
This is probably just because the coins aren’t actually fair. If the coin is slightly biased towards heads, the first throw is more likely to heads, and so are all subsequent throws. Same for tails.
Flip it twice. Once to determine which side is up at second throw. Reverse to counter bias at start of second throw. Then flip again for final result.
They're very low RPM and very low time in the air. Nothing I would accept for any decision worth flipping a coin for.
This is probably just because the coins aren’t actually fair. If the coin is slightly biased towards heads, the first throw is more likely to heads, and so are all subsequent throws. Same for tails.
That's the opposite of what the paper says. If the coin was biased you'd expect it to land on heads more often regardless of what side it starts on. The coins land on the side they start on more often.
This is probably just because the coins aren’t actually fair. If the coin is slightly biased towards heads, the first throw is more likely to heads, and so are all subsequent throws. Same for tails.
That's not the problem. You can test that by using a highly secure random number generator, e.g. /dev/random in Linux, to select the initial side. Keep track of that initial side, record the side it lands on. This paper shows a same-side bias, not a heads bias.
And I'm sure if you got 30 magicians together to pool data we'd have a meta-analysis of about this size but with experiments a century ago
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh sure, let's doubt the evidence of our senses in favor of convention. That's good science.
How good are you at Bayesian statistics, conditionalization, and understanding various biases? The simulation here should be good (it's better than mine).
Easy way to get a fair result from an unfair coin toss: Flip the coin twice in a row, in this case starting with the same side facing up both times, so it's equally unfair for both tosses. If you get heads-heads or tails-tails, discard and start over until you get either heads-tails or tails-heads, which have equal probabilities (so you can say something like HT = "heads" and TH = "tails"). This works even if the coi…