What an awful title. "Lifelong debunker": Persi Diaconis, an interesting chap who used to be a professional magician but turned to mathematics and is now a pro

What an awful title. "Lifelong debunker": Persi Diaconis, an interesting chap who used to be a professional magician but turned to mathematics and is now a professor at Stanford. (His best-known work is on the statistics of riffle-shuffles: how many such shuffles do you need to do to make your pack of cards "random enough"?) "Arbiter of neutral choices": a coin-toss. What the title actually means: Diaconis is doing some work on the behaviour of coin-tosses; he has a simplified model of coin-tossing that suggests that there should be a small bias in favour of having the coin land the same way up as it started; he's doing (or, rather, getting some other people to do) some experimental work aimed at tuning the model on the basis of high-speed video footage of real coin tosses. And, er, the story ends there: he isn't finished yet. But supposedly it's looking as if there might be a 51:49 bias. That would be large enough to be of some practical interest -- though maybe not very much since, as the article mentions, a skilled coin tosser can make them come up quite reliably whichever way s/he chooses.