The article reminds me of a surprising fact I learnt recently about the Moon's orbit round the Earth. It keeps the same face towards us all of the time (except for a relatively small effect known as libration) because it does one complete rotation for every revolution. I believe this synchronous orbit is explained as a gravitational effect called tidal locking.

This motion seems to be similar to what's happening when, as described in the article, you slide but don't roll a coin A round the edge of another B so that the same point on A's edge is always in contact with B. Coin A then does one full rotation, but not two.

It's almost as if gravity answers the reverse of the question posed in the article by explaining why we get one less rotation than we should.

Chris G