land O links

Here are a few links for your weekend reading:

• A magician-turned-mathematician uncovers a bias in coin flipping. “Preliminary analysis of the video-taped tosses suggests that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time.” This 7-year-old Stanford news article is a fun read.
• Anatomy of a traffic jam.  Northwestern professors explain how “traffic suddenly go[es] from 55 mph to zero, only to speed up a few minutes later with no sign of an accident.”
• More on traffic, this time when making left turns at intersections: “Can you ever truly design your way out of congestion.” (Hat tip to @iamreddave)
• If you haven’t read the OR vocabulary test taken by non-OR people from OR at the Beach, you need to read it.
• Feminism & science don’t socialize in the same circles. An OB-GYN insists that they should. “It is not a feminist choice to ignore science.”  Spacefem (an engineer) writes about this issue, too. My engineering education has definitely helped me to interpret feminist issues more optimistically (and I would argue more accurately) than others do (this article on the gender pay gap is a great example about how much progress has been made!). But I’m not really an expert so I could be wrong.