Diaconis next coaxed Ali Ercan, an electrical engineering doctoral student in El Gamal's lab, into helping collect the data. For each coin flip, they wanted at least 10 consecutive frames -- good, crisp images of the coin's position in the air. From these sequences they would derive the angular momentum vectors they needed to describe, in quantitative terms, the coin's complicated motion.

[...]

Preliminary analysis of the video-taped tosses suggests that a coin will land the same way it started about 51 percent of the time. "It's a gem-like example of what we know that isn't so," Diaconis says. Though a skeptic since childhood, he believed that "if you flipped a coin vigorously, it was going to be fair.

"But it's not so bad," he says. "One in a hundred is pretty close, actually. It gives me faith that probability assumptions can be validated and useful, but you have to look at them case by case."

Kangas believes it's the clown's face that bedevils. A grinning, mocking skull is how one clown hater on the Internet describes classic whiteface. Some people fear anything with a covered face. The Easter Bunny. Santa Claus. Bozo.

"I think part of the fear is because people in masks make us uncomfortable, and clowns have masks that are painted on their faces," Kangas says. "It may even be creepier because the masks can move, since it's only paint. Another thing is the smile that's painted on is artificial, and I think kids pick up on that deceit when they see a clown for the first time.

"They can't see the clown's real face. A lot of those kids will react to the deception with distrust, maybe even fear. ... Those kids take their fear into adulthood."

Dietrologia: One such element involves the Italian concept of dietrologia, which translated literally into English means "behindology." Dietrologia is a belief that for every public action, some sort of conspiracy exists behind it. The Italian public believes it never knows the whole story, but is nevertheless obsessed with speculating about what the whole story could be.

The Monster of Florence: A satanic sect, the hypothesis runs, commissioned the murders in order to obtain intimate parts of female flesh for use in depraved rituals in the Tuscan countryside; esoteric stone circles (and a curious granite pyramid) found at some of the murder sites hint at black magic.

Giuttari's theory tallies with the thesis developed in a report prepared for the Italian secret services in 1985. Written by Francesco Bruno, the most famous criminologist in Italy, the report was, inexplicably, never passed to the police; Giuttari came upon it only two years ago.

Both men now believe the report may have been buried to protect a Monster who had powerful allies.

First of all, whether or not the ancient Greeks felt that the Golden Ratio was the most perfect proportion for a rectangle, many modern humans do not. Numerous tests have failed to show up any one rectangle that most observers prefer, and preferences are easily influenced by other factors. As to the Parthenon, all it takes is more than a cursory glance at all the photos on the Web that purport to show the Golden Ratio in the structure, to see that they do nothing of the kind. (Look carefully at where and how the superimposed rectangle - usually red or yellow - is drawn and ask yourself: why put it exactly there and why make the lines so thick?)

Another claim is that if you measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor and divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor, you get GR. But this nonsense. First of all, you won't get exactly the number GR. You never can; GR is irrational, remember. But in the case of measuring the human body, there is a lot of variation. True, the answers will always be fairly close to 1.6. But there's nothing special about 1.6. Why not say the answer is 1.603? Besides, there's no reason to divide the human body by the navel. If you spend a half an hour or so taking measurements of various parts of the body and tabulating the results, you will find any number of pairs of figures whose ratio is close to 1.6, or 1.5, or whatever you want.

Then there is the claim that Leonardo Da Vinci believed the Golden Ratio is the ratio of the height to the width of a "perfect" human face and that he used GR in his Vitruvian Man painting. While there is no concrete evidence against this belief, there is no evidence for it either, so once again the only reason to believe it is that you want to. The same is also true for the common claims that Boticelli used GR to proportion Venus in his famous painting The Birth of Venus and that Georges Seurat based his painting The Parade of a Circus on GR.

Mr. Wonnacott said a pipe header system would be installed in the holes and chilled brine would be pumped in, creating a ring of frozen soil down about 60 metres to bedrock.

"We want to be sure that whatever is in the money pit is inside that frozen ring, and we think we've got the correct location for the shaft to do it."