A truck crash scattered $3 to $5 million in one- and two-dollar coins across a road in northern Ontario. Several people are injured seriously. Subsequent crashes included one that scattered candy. Link.
I’m sorry. I know people have been hurt and all, but I just can’t get that Gary Larson cartoon out of my head, the one where a cat is staring helplessly out a window at a collision between trucks belonging to “Al’s Small, Flightless Birds” and “Bob’s Tasty Rodents”…
Perhaps this is the best argument yet against loonies and toonies?
Aww…all that poor candy. 
$2 million Canadian. What’s that in real money?
Yes, I know that the Canadian dollar and the US dollar are trading at about par. So what? When have I ever let reality get in the way of a joke?
Here’s another report from CTV with video. They used a magnet to pick the coins up. Another advantage of coins made from plated steel (even the loonie and toonie are plated steel now).
…thus the joke still works. 
“Look out! Now here comes a beer truck! And–oh no! It’s another truck, full of porn!”
Nickel is magnetic too, so the only post-1968 coins a magnet wouldn’t pick up are copper and zinc pennies (they’re still making zinc pennies alongside steel pennies, AFAIK).
I’ll bet they missed plenty. Who wants to go on a road trip? Bring magnets.
For the sake of the science of statistics, I really hope they wrote down the total numbers that landed as heads or tails. How often do we get this scale of flips without any effort?
Been laughing about this for ten minutes.
Without any effort? There are people who deserve statues in the Statistics Sacrifice Hall of Fame for this!
Huh? {Grabbing a magnet and a handful of coins} Penny–no. Nickel–no. Dime–no. Quarter–no. Sorry, a magnet won’t pick up any of them.
These are Canadian coins. As far as I know, they’re all plated steel now; the $1 and $2 coins were not plated steel until quite recently.
Looking at your profile, I must ask: how many Canadian coins are circulating in Kansas?
I was responding to the claim that nickel is magnetic. Except for the penny, all our coins contain nickel.
Also involved was a truck carrying thesauruses. The bystanders were shocked, horrified, astonished…
There was a smaller-scale spill around here (DC suburbs) recently. Some $5,700 fell off an armored truck, and only $100 was returned.
Not a spill, but a ton of coins nonetheless:
U.S. nickels are an alloy of 75% copper and 25% nickel. They do not have a high enough amount of nickel for the coin to be picked up by a magnet. The Canadian nickel is 94.5% steel, 2% nickel, and 3.5% copper. It has a higher abundance of magnetic metals, mostly consisting of the steel.