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Flip Side of a Coin

If someone else doesn't beat me to it. Flip side -- The song on the reverse side of a record. From "Flappers 2 Rappers: While one does "flip" a coin, I've never heard "the flip side" used to refer to coins. It's heads or tails.

the other side of the coin

Or, another way, imagine an American English conversation: It sounds logical to use "flip side" in relation to coins, but this is one of those times where usage seemingly trumps logic. Anders, the back side of a coin is called the "reverse," as the front is called the "obverse. The American Heritage Dictionary agrees with you, giving the phonograph record as the origin. However, it may interest you to know that "flip side of the coin" has more than ten thousand hits on Google, cf.

On the other hand, Google has hits for "flip side of the moon," an object not easily flippable - a fact that cautions you against taking your cues from Google. I have never understood it in that sense.

Flip side of the coin - phrase meaning and origin

The flip side of the coin usually means the other side of an argument or issue. It sounds like the author means it the way you see it. Sounds wrong to me for this usage. The author is essentially making a pun on the phrase "the flip side of the coin," meaning the alternate side of a duality or dichotomy. He is suggesting that every subjective person is an entity with two opposing natures, just like any objective duality the expression is commonly applied to.

The flip side of your coin

JasonMel , Mar 30, The National Football League also has a coin toss for tie-breaking among teams for playoff berths and seeding, but the rules make the need for coin toss, which is random rather than competitive, very unlikely. A similar procedure breaks ties for the purposes of seeding in the NFL Draft ; these coin tosses are more common, since the tie-breaking procedure for the draft is much less elaborate than the one used for playoff seeding.

Major League Baseball once conducted a series of coin flips as a contingency on the last month of its regular season to determine home teams for any potential one-game playoff games that might need to be added to the regular season.


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Most of these cases did not occur. From the season , the method to determine home-field advantage was changed. Although in most international matches this is now done electronically by the scoring apparatus.

flip side of the coin

Pettygrove , who each owned the claim to the land that would later become Portland, Oregon , wanted to name the new town after their respective hometowns of Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine ; Pettygrove won the coin flip. Scientists sometimes use coin flipping to determine the order in which they appear on the list of authors of scholarly papers.

In December , Australian television networks Seven and Ten , which shared the broadcasting of the AFL Season , decided who would broadcast the Grand Final with the toss of a coin. In some jurisdictions, a coin is flipped to decide between two candidates who poll equal number of votes in an election , or two companies tendering equal prices for a project. Each candidate will be given five chances to flip a coin; the candidate with the most number of "heads" wins.

The mayoral election in San Teodoro, Oriental Mindoro was decided on a coin flip, with a winner being proclaimed after the second round when both candidates remained tied in the first round. In the United States , a coin toss determines the class of the senators of a state being added to the Union, with the new state's senators due to be entering the US Senate.

Under state law, the election was to be decided by drawing a name from a bowl, although a coin toss would also have been an acceptable option. The chair of the Board of Elections drew the film canister with Yancey's name, and he was declared the winner. A Yancey win extended the Republican advantage to , whereas a Simmonds win would have resulted in a tie. As there is no provision for breaking ties in the House as a whole, this would have forced a power sharing agreement between the two parties.

The outcome of coin flipping has been studied by Persi Diaconis and his collaborators.


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Further, in actual flipping, people exhibit slight bias — "coin tossing is fair to two decimals but not to three. That is, typical flips show biases such as. In studying coin flipping, to observe the rotation speed of coin flips, Diaconis first used a strobe light and a coin with one side painted black, the other white, so that when the speed of the strobe flash equaled the rotation rate of the coin, it would appear to always show the same side.

This proved difficult to use, and rotation rate was more accurately computed by attaching floss to a coin, such that it would wind around the coin — after a flip, one could count rotations by unwinding the floss, and then compute rotation rate as flips over air time. Moreover, their theoretical analysis of the physics of coin tosses predicts a slight bias for a caught coin to be caught the same way up as it was thrown, with a probability of around 0.

Since the images on the two sides of actual coins are made of raised metal, the toss is likely to slightly favor one face or the other if the coin is allowed to roll on one edge upon landing. Coin spinning is much more likely to be biased than flipping, and conjurers trim the edges of coins so that when spun they usually land on a particular face. Human intuition about conditional probability is often very poor and can give rise to some seemingly surprising observations.

For example, if the successive tosses of a coin are recorded as a string of "H" and "T", then for any trial of tosses, it is twice as likely that the triplet TTH will occur before THT than after it. The mathematical abstraction of the statistics of coin flipping is described by means of the Bernoulli process ; a single flip of a coin is a Bernoulli trial. In the study of statistics, coin-flipping plays the role of being an introductory example of the complexities of statistics.

A commonly treated textbook topic is that of checking if a coin is fair. There is no reliable way to use a true coin flip to settle a dispute between two parties if they cannot both see the coin—for example, over the phone. The flipping party could easily lie about the outcome of the toss. In telecommunications and cryptography , the following algorithm can be used:.

The New Zealand lottery game Big Wednesday uses a coin toss. The coin toss is also used in determining the Second Chance winner's prize. A technique attributed to Sigmund Freud to help in making difficult decisions is to toss a coin not actually to determine the decision, but to clarify the decision-maker's feelings.