{"id":255,"date":"2002-01-03T08:38:29","date_gmt":"2002-01-03T16:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/01\/03\/255.html"},"modified":"2002-01-03T08:38:29","modified_gmt":"2002-01-03T16:38:29","slug":"throwing-the-zloty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/01\/03\/throwing-the-zloty\/","title":{"rendered":"Throwing the zloty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2002\/WORLD\/europe\/01\/03\/euro.review\/index.html\">CNN<\/a> (which got it from <cite>Die Welt<\/cite>), the 1-euro coin (like the 2-zloty coin before it) is more likely to come up on one side than the other if spun:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Polish mathematicians Tomasz Gliszczynski and WaclawZawadowski and their students at the Podlaska Academy in Siedlce spun one Belgian euro coin 250 times.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. King Albert's head landed facing up 140 times.<\/p>\n<p>\"The euro is struck asymmetrically,\" [said] Gliszczynski, who teaches statistics.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. \"I know the phenomenon from other coins like the two zloty piece, which we have thrown more than 10,000 times.\"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Partly, I'm intrigued by the notion of a mathematically imbalanced coin; I tend to think of a coin flip as the canonical example of a random process, so finding out that one coin is asymmetrical feels a bit like the first time I learned there could be bugs in a compiler; it's a flaw in some fundamentally solid aspect of the world.  Partly, I'm surprised to learn (from a paragraph I didn't quote) that spinning the coin in the air is more likely to be random than spinning it on a table.  Partly, I'm amused at the notion of throwing a two-zloty piece more than 10,000 times.  And partly, I find the word <i>zloty<\/i> inherently funny.  I think it's mostly the <i>zl<\/i> at the beginning, though the rest of it helps.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I realize that this makes me terribly provincial (for thinking a word is funny just 'cause it doesn't conform to English spelling rules).  But we knew that already.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to CNN (which got it from Die Welt), the 1-euro coin (like the 2-zloty coin before it) is more&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}