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Science of the coin-toss: Bias in Heads-or-Tails
MrSharkey writes " An interesting
article published in Science
News puts a new scientific spin on the outcome of the venerable
coin-toss. "A new mathematical
analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently
biased: A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out
on.""
heads they're wrong.
tails they're right.
rock-paper-scissors to settle the disputes of mankind. And drunken boxing.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Yup, I figured this out awhile ago with quarters. My younger sister bet me that I couldn't call quarter tosses. I conveniently neglected to tell her about this random effect here, and called 9 outta 13 tosses; 7 straight :D
Moral Of The Story: don't bet on quarters.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
And the society shaking ramifications of this are what? We will stop tossing coins before football games and instead have a pocket sized random number generator and the teams pick a number?
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Yes you can, as long as the other person didn't hear this same story on NPR last week.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Their preliminary data suggest that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time.
I wonder what their margin of error was.
If you've ever watched a football game, you'll notice that the coin always hits the ground. This is done for at least one reason, to prevent tampering by the tosser.
It seems that it would also be good given the results of this study, as it could add more randomness (through the act of hitting the ground), thereby countering the "same side down" effect.
libertarianswag.com
this is not a fascinating new discovery in probability theory, though they make it sound that way. of course when you flip a coin it can be biased if you can influence the number of spins. But after a certain number of spins, it might as well be random since you have less control over it.
move along, move along.
Surely coins randomness in values and the reason they make the best 1 out of 2 decision as it were, is because of these small variables, not many of which are under human control, to bring out a "good" result. This study has also been done by a statistician. Personally, a statistician talking about the requirement of Super-human strength to do a task, does not convince me as much as, say a Biologist. If we wanted to know really, we would need an expert panel from many fields. But then again, who cares?
tim
I was expecting this article to say something about the subtle differences in weight between the Eagle and the Washington bust. I wonder if there's any consistant bias in this sense that might expose itself after several rounds of a million tosses?
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Who gets the funds to study these projects? I want a grant to study something like this. I can probably come up with a hypothesis like, hmmm, do strippers like drunks or sober people more. Wheres's my money !!!
Stay tuned for new sig...
Perhaps related, bread more often falls butter-side down because it usually only has time to complete half a rotation in the distance it falls from your countertop.
What if you pick the coin up randomly, let it roll aroudn in your pocket, call before the coin is then removed and flip it without checking
which side the coin is on to start with..
and for those who are wondering,
the bias is at 51% starting side.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on.
If this is true, we would still want to call the opposite face since we after it lands, we always flip it onto the other hand. That is, if we start with heads facing up, and it lands more frequently with heads facing up on our palms, by the time we slap it onto the back of our opposite hands, tails is facing up!
Yeah, guys, 51% is really biased there... especially when you can completely solve this by the simple expedient of not looking at the coin before you toss it. (or by having one person pass the coin over, and the other person call it)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I just don't want to think about it!
Bias:
Heads 49.9%
Tails 49.9%
Coin becomes
Self-aware 00.2%
step one: go to vegas
step two: bet on coin flipping
step three: PROFIT!
wait, that makes too much sense.
dang
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
I bet Rosencrantz is pissed to find this out!
What does this mean for...any number of things? If the coin toss is no longer a theoretically valid randomizer (or at least a completely unbiased one), what's going to happen to, for instance, the NFL? That whole initial coin toss thing kinda goes out the window, I guess.
But don't ask me, I'm not a football guy.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
"didn't-gildenstern-prove-that-already dept"
Wow, Taco, about 7 Slashdot readers will even get that. +1, Obscure!
That was a pretty funny book, actually.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You may toss.
Heads: I win.
Tails: You lose.
Nice and simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I somehow doubt it's that bad to reach 51%, it looks like it's in statistical variation. After all, an early opening chance streak of even 60/40 heads/tails (quite possible) would already skew numbers +20 out of the necessary +100 difference in 10,000 flips they performed. Standard deviation here is 50, so 100 off is well within "natural variation" at 3 sigma.
Well, if it all comes down to it, the impact of a coin on the ground should provide enough random bounce to negate all systemic bias.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
An interesting alternative is to flip the coin so that it lands on a smooth floor, spinning on a vertical axis. Then the uneven distribution of mass between the head-side and the tail-side will cause a bias.
It is my experience that dimes and quarters are nearly unbiased for this test, whereas nickels are heavily biased (pun intended) toward tails . [In a past life, I taught a statistics class for which I assigned daily homework, deciding whether or not to take it up on the basis of a coin flip at the end of class. On days for which I really didn't want to spend all evening grading papers, I would use a nickel; I'd use a much-fairer quarter on other days. And none of the class caught on... ]
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
maybe the folks over at SCO could help test this theory... they're all a bunch of tossers ;) ...I'll get my coat..
First - the experiment they used to "prove" this involves creating a mechanical device that will flip a coin for you. After some tweaking, they got it to flip and land consistently with heads up.
Of course you can flip a coin (or any other object) and get it to land the same way every time. All it means is that you've eliminated the random factors of human interaction, air, friction, etc. There's nothing inherently random about a coin - it's the random factor in the action.
There goes my "randomly" generated PGP key. @%*&!
I also reply below your current threshold.
Here's the excellent NPR piece, with pics of the gadget they flipped the coins with: NPR.
I'm a magician, and a "mentalist". That means, I pretend to have psychich powers (which I don't, but I don't explain that until after I've convinced the spectator that I have).
One of my tricks is to predict the outcome of a cointoss. I start out with pseudo science explanation, and then, as I continue to be correct, continue on to a supernatural explanation.
The explanation given in this article, as to why a coin is biased, can be boiled down to this (quote from the article): For a wide range of possible spins, the coin never flips at all, the team proved. . That is - the extra bias is towards the side that was up from before the toss, and is a result of the coin not spinning at all. If that's their big scoop, I'm dissapointed, because if the coin doesn't spin, it's not within my definition of a coin toss.
The article actually mentions magicians: Magicians and charlatans may take advantage of this illusion. Keller observes, "Some people can throw the coin up so that it just wobbles but looks to the observer as if it is turning over."
He has obviously seen a magician to the same trick I do. Of course I wont reveal the secret, but I can tell you this: he's wrong. The dirty work does not happen in the toss. The coin actually do spin, and the secret move is done at an offbeat moment.
It doesn't seem to me like that would nullify the effect described in the article. If the effect of hitting the ground has a 50% chance of favoring either side, the initial bias would still show through in the final result.
Some level of added insurance would be provided by simply not allowing those selecting a landing side to see the side on which the coin begins. If the flip is being done by a third party, of course, there's the danger that there's collusion between the third party and one of the participants prior to the toss, even for a 1% better chance in the throw, but we still have a better chance of non-tampering and non-bias as a result. And regardless, even in the worst case scenario, where the participants know the side on which the flip is beginning, we only have a 1% statistical advantage to the one side. Furthermore, a non-level, somwhat randomly varied surface onto which the coin is tossed, rather than a plane, will add another randomising factor.
If you start 50% of the tosses on heads and 50% of them on tails, that will remove the bias. The fact that you would like do so without even thinking about it, explains why the bias isn't normally seen (that and it is a small bias).
You would only add memory to the system if you always started a flip on the side that it last landed on (or always on the opposite side). If you always start on a predetermined side regardless of how the coin landed last, the outcome would in no way be dependent on the previous outcome (although depending on how you predetermined the side, and how you are using the data you may have to adjust for the bias).
Magicians and charlatans may take advantage of this illusion.
As it happens, Persi Diaconis, one of the statisticians interviewed in this article and presumably one of the discoverers, was a magician.
For example see this brief bio.
Their preliminary data suggest that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time. It would take about 10,000 tosses before a casual observer would become aware of such a small bias
;)
What they mean is probably that you have to do 10000 tosses before the bias manifests itself into something that is statistically significant...
I'm pretty confident that a casual observer would fall asleep long before 10,000 tosses without noticing anything
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Yeah right. All you need to do for a fair coin toss is hook your index finger, balance the coin on it, and use your thumb to flick up at the side of it. This sends the coin into the air spinning quickly end-over-end on an axis as horizontal as your hand was - and at a vertical angle perpendicular to it. You can measure your horizontal-ness by how far to the left or right your coin goes. And believe me, it's not at all difficult to get a perfect vertical toss.
Most Interesting Part of the Article:
:-)
This slight bias pales when compared with that of spinning a coin on its edge. A spinning penny will land as tails about
80 percent of the time, Diaconis says, because the extra material on the head side shifts the center of mass slightly.
Is it time to start making some bets with some friends?
I thought about it for a second, and given the odds of throwing 9 heads in a row AND doing it right as you were using it as an example were astronomically high - stood up and said 'that's a two headed coin'
Teacher smiled and proceeded to show the class the two headed quarter
I only flip it to the other hand if it doesn't land on the side I want.
paintball
So they did the experirment and got 51%. This is wholly compatible with the notion that the coin is random.
And by the way, ONE trial of 10000 does not prove anything. Show me 51% for ALL trials of 10000 and then lets' talk.
Analyzing the motion of a disc which rotates about both an axis through the side (flipping) and an axis through the face simultaneously is a straightforward physics problem that decades of physics undergrads and grad students have had to solve as part of classical mechanics classes. The problems are typically phrased in "relevant to coin-tossing" form, as well. In my mechanics class, the problem was phrased something like "what ratio of angular velocities (around the two rotational axes) is necessary to have the coin have a 2/3 chance of landing with the same side facing up as that which started?"
New scientific spin?
Considering a football game and the grass/turf on the ground, the coin doesn't really get much of a chance to add much randomness due to the amount of energy absorbed - in fact, usually, it falls and lies there - hardly any bounce back. A fairer way would be to have the coin fall on a glass plate so it bounces back more, thereby inserting much more randomness into the toss.
While we're still on the subject, what about using a roulette wheel to decide? Pick red or black and let the ball decide. You can have a nice transparent glass ball (so that you can see that there's no metal inside it to bias it in any way) hitting a metal roulette wheel and glass and metal collisions have among the highest bounce co-efficients.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
This contributes to the theory that nothing is truely random, but the laws of physics are so complicated that there are things that we just can't understand and appear to be random.
The tosser of a coin is giving it a certain ammount of force that is going to cause it to rotate while it travels up in the air and down to the ground. Given knowledge of the force and angle at which it's applied, and the distance from the thrower's hand to the ground, it might be possible to solve for the result of the toss. However, since it's not so easy to measure that force and run those numbers while the coin is in the air, that's not going to be useful in calling the coin in most situations. Likewise, it's hard to control the throwing motion to make sure there will be a heads or tails result without making the toss look clearly unfair.
Talk about research into the useless...
This article was discussed on All Things Considered on NPR last week sometime (probably Wednesday, because it was the night it was pouring in LA).
Besides the fact that neither college is government funded in any significant way, the last thing I would think we should cut is education spending to save the deficit.
And I know I shouldn't feed the trolls.
Seeing as it's the way Bush determines his foreign policy choices, I think it's very important to study the coin toss.
Actually, I see this as very important.
Everyone I personally know assumes that coin tosses is a fair, random decision. And that's a fairly fundamental assumption.
This shows that you can assume some things, and you can't assume others. And the list of things you can and can't assume is always changing.
And, just to make your head explode, I'll point out that that means that, over the long term, you can't assume anything.
Think of this research as a sort of lesson in appropriate behavior
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Another case of duh. I observed this in High School in the late 1980s when my friends and I used to play various quarter games for money. It greatly increased my chances when spinning a quarter for money during lunch.
I also used it to increase my chances when playing same/different with another player. Each person spins a quarter, and both players stop their respective quarters wihtout letting the other see the results. The person can look at their own results, and one person guesses whether the quarters are they same or different. If the person guesses correctly, then they take the money. Otherwise, the other person takes the money. Other amounts of money oculd be bet, but only quarters were used to spin in the game. You can really gain a psychological advantage over a person when you win a few without looking at your results and winning each one!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
There is a neat trick for dealing with a biased coin in a coin toss:
- Flip twice.
- Discard the pair of throws if it's both heads (HH) or both tails (TT).
- Count HT as heads, and TH as tails.
(I think this idea was from John von Neumann.)
Applied to the current situation: Flip twice, once starting H down, once with T down.
I'd post a longer comment but I'm heading to Vegas
an ill wind that blows no good
I remember my middle school science teacher would have a "coin tossing" lab each year with students, students would keep track and submit the totals. It was all a lesson in probability. He had everyone use pennies dated after 1982 (when they changed the alloy). Heads up was almost 51% of the time. His theory was that heads was "rounder" than tails and that accounted for the difference. Course, 7th grade students don't exactly make the best objective testers
> Seeing as it's the way Bush determines his foreign policy choices,
> I think it's very important to study the coin toss.
Eek ! Somebody please hand him the coin with the "don't bomb" face showing next time !
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Somehow I doubt this was the most expensive experiment ever...
Research materials budget - 0.01 $
This is just a result of standard statistics. This has been known in Gambling for some time. If a game has a 50/50 chance, and you start losing, you are most likely to keep on losing. You are starting the next game that has a 50/50 chance of winning, however, *YOU ARE ALREADY LOSING*. The same goes on the flip side. If you are already winning, and you continue a game where you have a 50/50 chance of winning, *YOU ARE ALREADY WINNING*
Think about this. The coin first lands on tails. On the next two throws, it's 50/50 chance of tails or heads. Thus, if it landed once on tails, and once on heads, you have 2/3 tosses tails, and 1/3 toss heads.
However, statistics also says, the more you play the game, the more the overall outcome will get close to 50/50. However, if you start out losing, you are more likely to stay losing. You will just get closer and closer to 50/50 even if you don't win overall.
This is one of the number one myths of gambling. Just because you've been losing, doesn't mean your "luck" will change and you can start winning. In fact, you are more likely to stay a loser overall.
The other person calls it in the air, that way the tosser can't favor the odds and the caller doesn't see which side it started on.
...because these scientists are useless tossers.
I don't know wether the article or the researcher is talking nonsense. But this makes no sense.
The article starts out stating:
A new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased
And somewhere later it states:
In experiments, the researchers were surprised...
So what is it? Mathematical or experimental proof?
The hand waiving explanation in paragrahs 6 through seven is not very convincing, one could also argue that the tilting of the axis is an inherent part of the randomness of the toss.
that coin tosses is a fair, random decision
if the person who calls the toss never sees the face of the coin upon the toss, and doesn't call it until its in the air, is it not still random, and fair?
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Of course one could also just flip a coin to see which side to start up before performing a coin toss (begin infinite loop regression)....
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I'm guessing Persi Diaconis (a Havard educated statistician who has appearantly published a lot of work in statistics [I'm estimating from his site he's published 150 papers on the subject, and no I'm obviously not a statistician]), his wife Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery probably had a conversation over a couple of beers at a conference.
They probably didn't get any funding. They're statisticians and probably used to it.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Looks like I'll have to find a new way to make those all-important, life-changing decisions.
Once a coin is flipped and then covered so that the outcome is not revealed the coin is in both states*. Heads or tails.
Of course I 'll leave it up to the astute reader to determine if heads means the cat dies or if tails does.
-- Robert
* of course if you are standing on the border facing north between California and Nevada it also depends if you are left or right handed to determine which state it lands.
Bet this
shit. now how am I supposed to choose my response reliably to a slashdot poll?
It would very useful to learn how to flip a coin (into the air), but not have it actually flip (end-over-end) as per the article. They implied that if the coin is oscillating or wobbling, people would not notice that it's not actually flipping. This could win me a lot of root beers!
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm a geek, so I don't toss coins: I roll a d20 instead. 1-10 I win, 11-20 you lose!
Eek ! Somebody please hand him the coin with the "don't bomb" face showing next time !
Thats not how it works in this white house. His coin says "Bomb Iraq" and "Bomb Syria"
Thousands of children die every day, yet things like faster semiconductors are getting funded. Riiiiight.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
If you have a mortgage, but your salary more than covers your mortgage payments, you do not have a deficit.
However, if you already can't pay your mortgage and your solution is to move to a bigger house in the hope that by stimulating the housing market it might get you a better-paying job, the US goverment would probably like to hire you as a financial adviser.
from my understanding (which could be wrong) in all instances of a 'random generator', the numbers will never be random, as proven in programming.
True, a finite state machine with no continuous input can generate only repeating sequences. However, there do exist sources of entropy; the most common is the least significant bits of an ADC wired to a reasonably unpredictable analog process, such as an FM receiver, a microphone, or even a moving trackball. If your random number generator is based on hashing an entropy source, then the numbers will not follow a repeating sequence. And even in mobile devices that don't have an analog input, it's possible to use a long-period PRNG such as Mersenne Twister and re-seed it with entropy whenever you dock it.
You are incorrect on this statement. Bush does not use a coin on complex decisions of this gravity. It show a total lack of politcal acumen to even suggest such a thing. First he must have his advisors input, by viture of this the EINY, MEINY or Rock, Paper, Scissors methodology of the forgien policy decision making tree. For example, The Iraq War had three proponents. Chaney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. In studing each persons initial, mind you initial, public position, it is obvious the EINY, MEINY method was used as Powell was out goes Y O U. So please give our government its due for having a more educated matrix of decision making.
> Ever seen the movie "Black Hawk Down"? Bill did that.
Bill produces movies ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I studied magic, and you can get good at making the coin land on the desired side after a while. You start flipping the coin exactly the same way the same number of rotations. They should have gone to the streets and had randome people flip the coins for them and see if most people's flips have an even number of rotations. They have found a statistical anomoly based on thier own flipping tendencies.
And at least Bill never sent a troop into battle who didn't come home to his or her family.
Is that true?
Or do you include coming home dead as coming home?
I mean, I would take Bill of any Bush any year, but I find it a little unlikely that no soldier died during duty during Clinton's stretch...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
This has to do with "moment of inertia". Basically, the mass distribution of an object determines how a spinning motion precesses (the spin axis itself rotates around a different axis - you might think of this as "wobble", like a spinning top does over time).
Try it with a rectangular block of wood. You'll find the following simple fact to be true: you can create a sustained, non-wobbling rotation ONLY about the longest and the shortest axis. For a book shaped object, this would be either around a line thru from the front cover to the back (the short axis), or a line from the top center to the bottom center (the long axis). You CANNOT get a stable spin around the middle axis - in the case of a book, this would be the left-to-right axis.
The same holds true for any object - the tennis racket has a long axis (handle thru the tip) which you can spin it about easily, and a short axis (a flat-plate spin), but the middle axis, which is trying to flip it like a pancake-griddle-flip motion, simply WILL NOT STAY STABLE, no matter what you do.
Notice that a bullet (with an obvious long axis) stays pointed in the right direction even though it may spin millions of times before hitting its target. That's why.
The reasons have to do with the mass distribution, so if you have an object with uneven mass it won't be so simple. And it's easist to see with an object with three distinctly different dimensions, like a book or a block of wood. It's not so obvious at first glance with your tennis racket. And it's even more interesting when you get to a cube, where extremely small weight differences are not apparent to the naked eye - try spinning a die (dice) about its face... You'll discover that the "long axis" is really from corner to corner, so you can easily spin a die on a corner, but if you toss it in the air you won't be able to spin it about a face.
I don't recall the details offhand, as it has to do with rotational inertia and momentum and so forth, but essentially, when you try to flip something about the middle axis, the weight at the ends of the long axis wants to move outwards, and this disrupts the stable spin. This is easily and 100% repeatably demonstrated. Just another good science fact to get your kids interested in the natural world.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
There is a big difference between the deficit and the debt. You do need to cut back spending until the deficit is zero. This does not mean you will stop spending money or even that you will have no debt when your deficit is 0. The deficit is the year-to-year shortage. The debt is the accumulated deficit. You mortgage is like the debt. The deficit is how much money you have to borrow each week to be able to buy everything you want and still afford to buy food.
Imagine every week you had to borrow $100 on your credit card to be able to afford everything you bought. At the end of the year you'd have your mortgage still, and an additional $5200 debt. If you continue to borrow at a greater rate than you earn money you will never get out of debt and your deficit will continue to grow.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
No, that doesnt matter either, I can tell the difference between the head and tail sides of a coin before I take it out of my pocket. I can also flip a coin so that it lands the same way up almost every time.
The easiest way to learn this is to use a "lucky" coin to make simple decisions such as "should I clean the bathroom today ?" you will quickly learn to cheat, even if only subconciously.
There is a rather simple way of generating a "fair" event (i.e. probability 1/2) using an unfair coin. Instead of calling on a single toss, you call on a sequence of 2 tosses (H on first, T on second OR the other way around). You toss the coin twice - and reject the pair of tosses if you observe both H or both T. Even if the coin is biased - the probability of HT versus TH are equal. (This of course does not address the question of "Does the starting side have a greater probability of showing up finally?" - but that is now irrelevant. You always start with the same side showing up since the fact that the toss is biased is no longer of any consequence.
This is a very common idea in statistics - the "order" HT versus TH is what is called an "ancillary statistic".
you can't know for sure what yours is or his so looking at yours gives you enough of a advantage that it might help
But looking at yours doesn't change what his is, so looking doesn't give you any advantage at all.
I have misplaced my pants.
His wife is in a coma.
Actually, they turned out a profit by selling their research meterials on ebay:
For Sale: Unique Gambling Penny
Scientifically proven to land on tails 59.439% of the time!*
(*Special throwing instructions included.)
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
>> And at least Bill never sent a troop into battle who didn't come home to his or her family.
> Is that true?
It is. There were a number of casualties in Somalia. But remember, Bush Sr. sent those troops in, not Bill Clinton.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Who said it was government funded?
Lot's of cheap research has been and continues to be done on the researchers own tab, as long as the costs are low enough. If they are genuinely interested in the outcome, who is to say that it's not worthwhile?
Read, L
And because there's always time for 'one more useless fact'...
One might think that the purpose of 'tosser' as an insult is to imply that the person referred to as 'tosser' in fact throws up at a regular basis and therefore either is a pregnant woman or an incompetent drinker.
One could not be farther from the truth... Like most subtle insults in the english language, this particular abuse of the term 'tosser' originates from the east side of the Atlantic Ocean and in fact refers to someone dealing (tossing cards). This movement resembles the act of masturbation, which in the UK apparently is as bad an insult as 'fucker' is in the US.
Deficit is not the same as debt. Debt is how much you're in the hole. Deficit is the rate at which you're going deeper into the hole.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
You're right, of course. I think the difference really is that Bill Clinton actually attended the funerals of those who were killed in action. Bush not only doesn't attend, he doesn't even allow the funerals to be mentioned by the media. Oh, and he also cuts the benefits to any soldier that does survive. A true patriot.
What I do is write comments on slashdot that look plausible but are actually completely false. I like to use pseudo-science and obscure jargon to back up my arguments and convince the unsuspecting spectator. Sometimes I just make unverifiable claims with an air of authority and that's enough to convince people to give me karma.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Insightful? You mods must all be American. This is why the US cannot manage it's economy.
Debt is how much you owe. A deficit is the amount each period (year) you are going further into debt.
If you have a mortgage you have a debt. But since you are paying off the mortgage each month you are getting a little bit less in debt. So you do not have any kind of deficit. It will take you a long time to pay off that mortgage, but it's entirely possible to pay it off without changing your spending habits.
If you have a deficit, like many first world countries do today you are completely screwed. The debt is already huge but get this: EVERY YEAR WE MAKE IT BIGGER. Without a serious change in spending habits these countries will NEVER be able to pay off their debts, let alone reduce them.
Do you understand the difference? If you don't, try running for office. The US needs can always use a few more politicians who don't understand why this is bad.
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
That has huge impications for one of Austrlia's favourite gambling games, two-up, which is tradionally played (illegally) on Anzac day, and is an game you can legally play in our Casino's casinos.
Bush not only doesn't attend, he doesn't even allow the funerals to be mentioned by the media.
1. If he did attend a funeral, I am damn sure he would be accused of grandstanding.
2. Your second point is B.S. You may be thinking of the rules developed during the Clinton administration regarding limiting press access to off-loaded caskets. This has nothing to do with funerals being "mentioned by the media," nor does it preclude families from inviting the press to a funeral if they so desire.
Evil is the money of root.
"if the person who calls the toss never sees the face of the coin upon the toss,"
Then the coin was showing both heads and tails until you resolved it by looking at it.
you're a fucking moron. ask anyone in the military if they prefer Bill 'draft-dodger' Clinton, or George W. who has given the military pay raise after pay raise since he went into office?
When was the last time you WENT to a fucking funeral? Don't tell me about soldier's funerals. I was at one a few months ago for a friend of mine who was killed in Iraq. Was I sad? Yes. Do I think he died for no reason? Hell no. And neither did he. He knew what he was getting into, and he loved his job. PERIOD.
Believe me, his family is absolutely getting taken care of and I'm joining the Air Force to defend this country, so morons like you can voice your opinions.
Mod me down for being off topic, but these goddamn bleeding heart liberals thing they know everything about everything, when really they just want to stir up trouble.
-jg