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Last evening Kenna, Grandson, and I were watching the playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orlean Saints.Â
Our team, the Cowboys, got thoroughly creamed by Minnesota last week, but we decided we could just as easily root for Minnesota since former Sooner Adrian Peterson plays for them,
Alas, the Saints won in overtime, thanks to a field goal by Garrett Hartley after New Orleans won the coin toss to begin the sudden death period.
Well, we were devastated until it dawned on us that Hartley ALSO played for Oklahoma, so we will be rooting for New Orleans when they meet the Colts in the Super Bowl!!
Now, if it turns out that Indianapolis also has a former Sooner on its team, I guess we'll just have to flip a coin.
That should be fair, shouldn't it? After all, we're giving each team a 50-50 chance to be lucky enough NOT to have us root for them. Fact is, right now we are 0 for 2 in picking a winner.
Or are we----giving each team a 50-50 chance, that is??? I firmly believed so until I opened my browser this morning only to be confronted by a post discussing whether a coin toss is truly random.
Perhaps some of you have read Tom Stoppard’s 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a hilarious take on the lives of two minor (and more or less interchangeable) characters from Hamlet.
 A lot of the dialog has to do with the philosophical question of destiny. At the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, and incredibly, 100 consecutive spins come up heads until a “lucky†toss finally comes up tails.
This nicely illustrates the futility of the characters’ actions and also puts them squarely in some alternative reality—we all know that in the real world, coin tosses are random and couldn’t possibly come up heads 100 times in a row.
We depend on this fact; otherwise, all the bets and disagreements that have been settled by this simple selection mechanism must be in doubt.
It might come as a surprise to you, I know it did to me, to discover that statisticians have actually studied this phenomenum--the tossing of a coin that is--to determine if throwing it in the air 100 times will truly yield 50 heads and 50 tails. In fact, these same guys have even written books on the subject.
Which leads me to believe that they must lead extremely dull lives; but, now that I think about it, I have never really known a statistician who turned me on!
After all, how sexy can a guy be if all he does is sit around and toss coins all day?
BUT, back to the subject. It seems that the results are NOT random because these pitiful little guys really did discover a few things.Â
Now, I could get really technical here; but, believe me, that would bore you beyond belief. I know because I nearly decided to go back to bed just reading about it. I mean, these guys didn't become statisticians because they were witty, gifted, clever writers.
So, in a nutshell, this is what the whiz kids discovered. Tossing a coin is not truly random because such things as  velocity, angle, air resistance, and other physical variables affect whether it lands heads or tails. There! I just said in one sentence what these guys have written entire books about.
One especially dull fellow managed to prove this by constructing a machine which eliminated all the variables--told you these guys needed a life--which did then create a true random selection.
Something else I learned! Always call "heads". The Saints called "heads" last night, winning the coin toss and the game, so it must work!!
