How to predict the outcome of a coin toss
Coins are fair. Their tossers, less so
Legend holds that the city of Portland, Oregon, was nearly called Boston. A coin toss in 1845 between Francis Pettygrove, who hailed from a different Portland, in Maine, and Asa Lovejoy, from Boston (the one in Massachusetts) eventually decided the matter. But things might have turned out differently, per Frantisek Bartos, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, if people were not such wobbly tossers.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “How to predict a coin toss”
From the October 21st 2023 edition
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