Noticed as a kid I could flip a quarter with a certain consistency, so I experimented a bit and quickly got to be >90% accurate with an ordinary (controlled) flip.
Pretty simple. In fact I just picked up a quarter and practiced (20+ years out of practice) and have some observations:
1) harder than when I was a kid, my fingers are lot bigger + stronger so it's not as precise from the start. A bigger and heavier coin would help.
2) the timing factor is bigger than I recalled.. essentially you can watch the coin flipping and get a subconscious/automatic/predictable sort of count/feedback to it. You can bring your hand up to the coin in the air at a precise moment pretty easily and "tell" (>90% accuracy today of the flips I just did that I considered successful before looking at the result) if the flip was predictable. Hand eye coordination, spatial awareness is very correlated to this skill, I suppose.
3) it really is the same side that comes up.. again I think because of the automatic watching/count/completion of full rotations, i.e. catching the coin at the end of a full rotation instead of a partial.
Came in handy occasionally.. if I knew I was going to be wrong (other person usually waits to call mid-flip) I could catch the coin a little lower to give myself a chance, or punk them by not putting it on the back of my hand as is more standard (they might demand a re-flip.. kind of like if you are playing rock paper scissors and one person goes on 3 and the other on 4).
This. When I tried to comment briefly yesterday that the coin falls on the same side, only then did I remember that I actually did that and that it has nothing to do with physics but rather neuroscience (and innocently bent morality - which was also the object of my internal observations). then I remembered that I had actually considered different coin sizes, but I was never as thorough in my attempts to bend the results as you were. oh... the playgrounds of childhoods...
If a challenger doesn't appear soon, I may have to look into stitching together my Chromebook Plus display (12.3" 2400x1600, 3:2, with Touch Screen) to some new AMD laptop body.
Yeah, if any breweries or restaurants or what have you here in Reno are facing this issue, I'd be happy to help "store" some of it. Know quite a few buddies here in town who'd likely feel the same.
It'd be nice to be able to easily boot into, or toggle into, a performance optimized, disabled mitigations environment to do something while offline.. many computer uses don't require being connected to other computers. I've gotten into the habit of hotplugging my Ethernet connection, personally.
You can actually do that fairly easily, just add the parameters linked to a second boot entry in GRUB.
However, I would very much not advise doing so, as I still am unaware of any task that can both, be done without the need for a network connection, while also being significantly slowed down by the mitigations, after recent improvements to the kernel and software. Basically, the potential benefit is very low in a lot of tasks, whilst requiring additional security measures (ideally fully air-gapped) and that you reboot the system every time you'd do such a task.
Also note that, in theory, just being temporarily offline may not shield from being exploited fully.
As an example (the only case that I've identified personally), if your curious, I have a (windows; Intel q6600) box that I use for gaming occasionally. Single player game I like, Total War: Shogun 2, runs at about 55 fps (benchmark) pre-Meltdown/Spectre/etc. Now it gets ~22 fps. I can use https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm to toggle some mitigations to get it playable again.
Anecdotally, I've found that vodkas made by smaller, local distilleries tend to be really good for the price. I'm assuming this is because vodka is generally not their core product, but they're making a pure, neutral spirit as a base for other things (e.g. gin) anyways, so they might as well bottle it and try to sell it. Since they're not spending excessive amounts of money trying to market their vodkas, they tend to be pretty cheap.
To be fair, I am mostly surprised there are not yet EV or hybrid vans, versus PVs on the roof. Seems like stop-and-go, or lots of idling, fleets would benefit signifigantly.
I imagine vans use the battery for more than propulsion, so PVs on the roof might be welcome. Charging from a generator is probably still more cost-effective, except for some niches (e.g. boon-docking). Lots of van-dwellers have PVs on their roof.
