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[Ruatha]

Butter study

Earlier this year over a thousand schoolchildren across Britain took part in a mass experiment to get to the bottom of one of the most vexing questions of our time: is it true that tumbling toast tends to land butter-side down? The experiment was the world’s biggest-ever investigation of Murphy’s Law – that "if something can go wrong, it will." Over 20,000 tumbles of toast later, the truth was finally revealed. When it slides off a plate, toast really does land butter-side down more often than not: 62% of the time, to be precise.

The experiment had finally got to the bottom of what many scientists have dismissed as a silly urban myth, yet countless breakfast-eaters insist is an irksome reality. Indeed, the study went further, showing that the cause of the trouble wasn’t the weight of the butter or the aerodynamics of the toast, but simply the fact that toast tumbling from table-height doesn’t spin fast enough to bring the buttered side on top again before the toast hits the floor.

[ December 16, 2002, 07:51: Message edited by: Ruatha ]