A Quote by T. Colin Campbell

If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it’s probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That’s the concept behind statistical significance—it’s the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn’t just random chance.

T. Colin Campbell

Quote Topics

Behind Both Both Sides Chance Coin Concept Correlation Each Each Time Finding Flip Heads Hundred Hundred Times Just Lands Odds Other Pretty Random Random Chance Real Sides Significance Statistical Sure Three Three Times Time Times

Quote Author

T. Colin Campbell
American - Biochemist
Born: 1934

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

Laura Lippman

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her.

David Eagleman

I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?

David Brooks

We're deciding the fate of the multiverse with a flip of a coin. Heads or tails, doc. If that isn't a game, I don't know what is.

E. C. Myers

There are three sides to every coin (Heads, Tails, and The Edge). Your ability to understand contrasting points of view and your ability to glean what information you believe to be valuable from each side is a crucial skill.

Robert Kiyosaki

In tournament play, it's generally advisable to avoid risking large sums of chips in coin flip situations, like pocket sixes versus A-K. After all, the pocket pair is only a very slight heads-up favorite.

Daniel Negreanu

I had to choose, I'd be so sad. They are flip sides of the same coin. I love both comedy and drama.

Dianne Wiest

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

Alan Greenspan

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.

Gabrielle Zevin

The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

Gayle Forman

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Gayle Forman

There's two heads to every coin.

Jerry Coleman

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

Barbara Kingsolver

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Gunter Grass

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.