Any math textbook will tell you that if you flip a fair coin 100 times, you’ll probably get results of just about 50 heads and 50 tails. This, by now, is common knowledge.

But.

Specifically, textbooks all use the word “fair.” I don’t think that makes sense in today’s society. Every coin minted in the modern world, as far as my preliminary Google searches could tell, is fair. So in other words, the above sentence is pretty much like saying “In all ‘fair’ NHL games, a goal is worth 1 point.” Nobody would ever say that. So why the distinction for coins?

And now that I think about it: What’s the deal with all coins being “fair” coins in the first place? There are plenty of things in my life on which I need help deciding, and many of them I don’t want to leave up to a 50/50 shot. Whose turn is it to take out the trash? Which captain gets the first draft choice in the pickup softball game? Should you go talk to the attractive stranger at the other end of the bar?

Maybe you’re Two-Face and you want to use the unfair coin for your own unsavory motives. A typical reaction to a biased coin is that it’s a trick used to cheat unsuspecting strangers (or casinos) out of gambling monies. That’s not what I’m proposing. (Although I guess, I could see the issue of educating the masses about a newly weighted nickel. Shut up. Work with me here.)

I say that the biased coin would still be useful even if everyone knew about it. I took out the trash last time, so we’ll flip with the biased coin and it’ll probably be your turn this time. I’m a little better at softball, so you should probably get the first pick. You should almost definitely go talk to the attractive stranger at the other end of the bar (this coin should probably just have two heads).

At the very least, we thus justify the otherwise redundant diction in all those schoolbooks.