[personal] RE: [Husker] And now Mizzou! (fwd)

[Skylar Dodds]

Hello Husker Fans,

Wow, Friday evenings at the Nolan residence must be intense!  :)

But to give you credit, I haven't the time nor the patience (internet
or not) to flip a coin 1000 times.

I'm quite certain that after flip 200 I'd be moving on to something
else.

-- 
Go Skers,
 Skylar                            mailto:Sklarbodds at cox.net

>> Well, that all depends on whether the coin is a Nebraska state quarter or a Missouri one. Also, who is flipping the coin? Is there wind to influence the flip? ;)

MN> I haven't tested any of the state quarters, but I did test the 'sandwich'
MN> quarter versus a silver quarter some years ago, by doing over 1000 coin
MN> flips with 5 quarters of each type, flipping  onto a solid surface.  This
MN> took me quite a few hours, about 2 1/2 days as I recall, but it was
MN> before we had the Internet to consume all our spare time.  :-)

MN> My conclusion was that the sandwich quarter was slightly more biased in
MN> favor of heads than a silver quarter was.  I think it has to do with
MN> the physics of the surfaces.

MN> BTW, one of my favorite stats-related questions in college was this:

MN> You're given a number of quarters and a roll of tape.  How many quarters
MN> do you have to tape together in a stack until the odds are roughly
MN> even that you will get 'heads', 'tails', or 'edge'?

MN> It turns out there is a solution to the problem based on the ratio of the
MN> diameter of the coin to its thickness, but it is a non-trivial problem in
MN> mechanical dynamics.

MN> Engineers are weird, another bull-session question we used to debate 
MN> had to do with how hard the Jolly Green Giant would have to push on the
MN> John Hancock building in Chicago to topple it.  (This one is related to
MN> the wind strength question that engineers have to consider when analyzing
MN> the plans for a tall bulding, so it isn't just an 'academic' issue.)
MN> --
MN> Mike Nolan


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