by ButterflyEffect

Maybe my favorite part is getting an MIT professor involved:

On a phone call from her office at MIT, Professor Peko Hosoi analyzes Kelly's throw. She has wrapped a rubber band around a triangular-shaped notebook and attempts to re-create the whole thing. She walks back about 10 feet, picks out a target and tries to replicate Kelly's throw.

She nails it on her first try. "Bull's-eye," she says, as the sound of a flying notebook clangs off the wall in the background.

But when she is told some of the exact circumstances -- that Kelly was closer to 15 to 20 feet away, that the wind was 15 mph at Kelly's back, that he had to grab the pizza and throw it in a span of just a second or two -- she runs her experiment again. She starts talking about lift and drag, and she mentions Newton's second law of motion, that force equals mass times acceleration, and she ultimately figures Kelly must have thrown the pizza at roughly 11 mph.

Now, for her official attempt under more exact conditions, she tosses the notebook and ... no luck this time. She tries it a few more times before she finally hits one.

"Oh yeah, that was hard," says Hosoi, a co-founder of the MIT Sports Lab who teaches engineering and mathematics. "I got some more fluttering action that time. That's a tough throw. I'm not going to lie."