Even pulsars follow Benford's law (Image: NASA)
Natural law?
Posted on 10/16/2010 5:27:23 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Even pulsars follow Benford's law (Image: NASA)
Natural law?
I wonder if it crops up in University of East Anglia emails?
God is one.
THANKS THANKS.
One IS the lonliest number.
What's the next clue? Any of the two numbers equals a prime?
BTW, what do we do with it when we get it, besides realize that it's His PIN #?
/johnny
Well yes, picking units which are nearly equal to each other does help.
Do the percentages change if the number system is other than base 10? I presume they would have to.
Someone let me know if they figure out how to pick winning lottery numbers.
Well, that lets the Masons off the hook. Popular Mason conspiracies involve the digit string 195.
I've known this for, I think, 35 years when doing analysis of the early state lotteries. I never thought it to be remarkable. Didn't even know it had a name. I spent a good part of my childhood trying to figure what I knew that others did not. Stuff like the principle underlying this law. At some point I gave up on that effort.
Speaking of peculiarities, I recall a scientific study from several years back, that toast actually does fall buttered side down far more frequently than not, that carrying an umbrella actually decreases the chance of getting rained upon and forgetting it increases the chance, and that it actually does rain more frequently on the weekend. The universe really is stacked against us, lol.
It doesn’t seem to apply to the price of cars, or houses (in US $).
I think more like pi, 3.14159
1492 ( pin hint : Ocean Blue)
The other commonly used number systems are binary and hexadecimal; a childhood friend of mine quite extravagantly claimed that modern decimal system mathematics was either overlooking or deliberately hiding something, and wanted to redo the whol thing from scratch using the Babylonians’ hexagesimal (base 60) system.
But anyway, I dunno. ;’)
Computer scientists have been using this odd phenomena for some time now. Just about all computer floating point packages assume that the first number is a one, and so just throw it away. Ha! The hidden 1.
Metrics are the result of having ten fingers.
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