Heads

What a coin, when spun into the air and allowed to land on the ground, or in one's hand will have facing upwards 50% of the time. However one must remember that each consecutive flip of the coin does not reduce the chance of it landing on heads, no matter how many previous heads have been flipped. However if you are a character in a play by Tom Stoppard you can be assured of your coin coming up heads every single time it is flipped.

British Royal Navy slang for the toilet. The American version is head, in the singular.

Although I hate to say it, the Americans have this one right: the word derives from the olden days of real ships, when sailors would 'go' off the head of the ship (the bow, or pointy end to lubbers). The deck at this part of the vessel was furnished with holes for this purpose.

Heads is a short novel by Greg Bear about a science outpost on the moon, a thinly veiled scientology religion, and the politics of a future world. The book is a prequel in the same continuum with Slant, Queen of Angels, and Moving Mars. The events that occur in Heads are hinted at in Moving Mars, when the disaster at the Pit on the moon is mentioned.

Two science projects proceed simultaneously in the book. One scientist has acquired a group of "corpsicles", people who had their heads cryogenically preserved so that they could be revived in the future. Her goal is to be able to map the locked memories of the human brain, and a huge political turmoil erupts when it is discovered that one of the frozen heads belongs to none other than the founder of the "Logology" religion, who had supposedly transcended.

Her experiments succeed, and the truth about this self-proclaimed messiah is discovered, to the dismay of the leader of the huge political faction which has grown from this religion.

Meanwhile, another scientist is exploring the composition of matter, the information stored on the quantum level about particles. He starts learning to modify that information directly, and causes a disaster that serves as a warning for future generations about the responsibilities of scientific knowledge.