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by bingaling 3388 days ago
With darts: https://www.youtube.com/embed/M34TO71SKGk
4 comments

I prefer Buffon's needle method as a 'physical' way of calculating pi.
Beer would probably help the calculation.
"Does that look random to you?" https://youtu.be/M34TO71SKGk?t=1m20s

Golden!

I remember a Mythbusters episode where they were building a buttered-toast-dropper. To test the null hypothesis, they first did 10 runs without buttered toast, just marking one side with an X. They got 7/10 landing the same way up... and declared "It should be 5/10! This is not random enough!"...
One hour Radiolab worth listening to:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91684-stochasticity/

the intro to this video explained the calculation very well (up to 1 minute)