wmassingham
tl;dr:
The standard model of coin flipping was extended by Persi Diaconis [12] who proposed that when people flip a ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of ‘precession’ or wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin’s trajectory. According to the Diaconis model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., ‘same-side bias’).
“Higher chance” being 50.77% to land on the same side it started from. But this varies by person; apparently some people introduce more precession than others. But even if you could figure out how to do it reliably, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Does Ctrl+Alt+Backspace not kill X any more (assuming you’re using X)?
Does Ctrl+Alt+Delete reboot the system from a graphical desktop? Or is that only from the virtual consoles?
I wonder if locking the session would have stopped it as well. I doubt the Alt+SysRq combos would have been useful since other random input was happening at the same time (unless the next keystroke happened to be an I, U, or B).