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Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)

(www.researchgate.net)
392 points seanhunter | 2 comments | 19 Nov 24 09:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.436s | source
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thih9 ◴[19 Nov 24 15:10 UTC] No.42184225[source]▶
This paper is also this year's Ig Nobel Prize winner:

> Probability: A team of 50 researchers, for performing 350,757 experiments to show that when a coin is flipped, it is slightly more likely to land on the same side as it started.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...

replies(1): >>42184403 #
damidekronik ◴[19 Nov 24 15:22 UTC] No.42184403[source]▶
From this year's Iq:

Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding that certain plants imitate the leaf shape of nearby plastic plants and concluding that "plant vision" is plausible.

This somehow doesn't fit the Iq award in my mind.

replies(1): >>42187700 #
1. anigbrowl ◴[19 Nov 24 20:23 UTC] No.42187700[source]▶
They 'need' to fill slots not that the IN awards have become an annual media event (presumably yielding some profit) so they've taken to mocking perfectly legitimate research as long as it is in some way scatalogical or counterintuitive. I lost interest in the Ig Nobel prize as a result; they've gone from an intermittent amusement to a celebration of ignorance.

Incidentally the plant mimicry thing seems to be a defense against herbivorous mammals. It was previously theorized that the shape information was transmitted by symbiotic bacteria; the ability to imitate fake plants is a genuinely perplexing result imo.

replies(1): >>42188296 #
2. boomboomsubban ◴[19 Nov 24 21:30 UTC] No.42188296[source]▶
The Ig Nobel has always been for serious science that sounds silly. Their website begins with

>The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

There goal has never been to mock the award winners.