Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 10/16/2010 5:27:23 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
What do earthquakes, spinning stellar remnants, bright space objects and a host of other natural phenomena have in common? Some of their properties conform to a curious and little known mathematical law, which could now find new uses.
A subject of fascination to mathematicians, Benford's law states that for many sets of numbers, the first or "leading" digit of each number is not random. Instead, there is a 30.1 per cent chance that a number's leading digit is a 1. Progressively higher leading digits get increasingly unlikely, and a number has just a 4.6 per cent chance of beginning with a 9 (see diagram).
The law is named after physicist Frank Benford, who in 1938 showed that the trend appears in many number sets, from the surface area of rivers to baseball statistics to figures picked randomly from a newspaper. It later emerged that such distributions are "scale-invariant": if you convert the units of the numbers in the set, from metres to yards, say, the set will still conform to Benford's law.
Not all sets of numbers obey this law, but it crops up surprisingly often. As a result, mathematicians have put it to work, using deviations from it to detect cases of tax fraud, voter fraud and even digital image manipulation.
Now Malcolm Sambridge of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues have extended the list of natural phenomena with properties that follow Benford's law. Their new list includes the depths of almost 250,000 earthquakes that occurred worldwide between 1989 and 2009, the brightness of gamma rays that reach Earth as recorded by the Fermi space telescope, the rotation rates of spinning star remnants known as pulsars, and 987 infectious disease numbers reported to the World Health Organization in 2007.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
K:’D
Here’s an even stranger one: In binary numbers, 100% of numbers start with one.
:’D
Hey, if anyone figures that out, they’ll keep it to themselves.
I was looking for the Powerball website one time and found a page written by a Minnesota math prof; he stated the odds of winning the PB, and then noted that, according to the Feds’ stats, the odds of being *involved* in a fatal auto crash during a three mile round trip to get the lottery ticket was twice as great as the odds of winning.
My response to that is, ya buy two or more tickets. Duh.
The answer is 42.
Only half of them do. Nyah nyah. ;’)
BTW, what do we do with it when we get it, besides realize that it’s His PIN #?
Free calling universe wide?
Reduced rates overnight and weekends?
Rollover minutes?
Bump to post #25.
LOL.
/johnny
YEARS ago there was a very neat comic strip called "Prince Valiant" and, unlike many of the time, was richly drawn. PV's adventures, ca 500 AD, took him all over the world. In one series he was in China. One day the whole court was in an uproar as a horrible omen had appeared.
That morning, as the emperor prepared to eat, he dropped a piece of bread on the floor, and it landed dry side up - Super Bad Luck, according to the seers. They were wringing their hands trying to explain the disaster away, when PV took one of 'em aside and whispered in his ear.
The seer beamed and explained to the emperor that it was not the disaster everyone thought because it was obvious the bread was buttered (or whatever) on the WRONG side.
Hal Foster was the artist at the time and I don't know if he also did the story line, but I thought the solution was ingenious and reminded me of some politicians excuses years later.
The comic strip "Prince Valiant" is still alive and well, the poor prince still hasn't found contentment.
Well yes, picking units which are nearly equal to each other does help.
While it doesn't hold up quite so well converting meters to feet, it's flawless when converting from meters to kilometers, centimeters, etc. :=)
Bookmark
This must explain why I always end up with ONE sock that doesn’t have a match. It’s just the universe seeking its normal state.
How about yards?
Woah. “Anthropocentric” What do you mean by that?
I seem to remember that one theory says that observations create the universe, both back and forward from whatever the thing/event of an observation is called. I’ll call it the Beta point. So of course the universe is anthropocentric.
I’ve often wondered hose to blame for that problem.
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