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February 19, 2010

Strange But True!

Q. In one of the biggest tests ever of Murphy's Law (“If something can go wrong, it will”), experimenters put to rest a nagging old question: Why does dropped toast tend to land butter-side down?

A. When young British schoolkids were coaxed to slide pieces of toast off plates 10,000 times and watch what happened, 62 percent of the time the bread landed butter-side down, worse than expected by chance alone. Why? Robert Matthews in “The Telegraph” of Britain explained it this way: Toast pieces simply don't have enough time for a full revolution, and completing only half a revolution, land on their buttered side.


 
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