Dark Helmet: So the combination is... one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
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 ...
That’s the result of having 36 fingers. Wait, what?
That’s one that I learned oh so long ago; it’s perhaps more familiarly “the anthropic principle”.
http://www.google.com/search?q=anthropocentric
http://www.google.com/search?q=anthropocentric+site:freerepublic.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=anthropic+principle
http://www.google.com/search?q=anthropic+principle+site:freerepublic.com
Nah. It's the result of having three feet!
Actually, the missing sock enters the ho-zone in order to preserve the primacy of number 1.
Dark Helmet: So the combination is... one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
A poor attempt at "modeling the universe" indeed.
But since we are part of that "universe" -- that we are attempting to model -- the "modeling" becomes problematic.
Still(anthropocentric or not)one could argue that there is something of the universe in our selves, and something of our selves in the universe.
Perhaps man's search for order -- in an apparently chaotic universe -- is not so unnatural as it would appear?
STE=Q
There’s a simple explanation about the toast, it’s all about the height of fall and the number of times it can turn around before reaching the ground. If tables were taller by some exact amount it’d be the opposite.
Bump....
The table is the height it is because the humans who use it are the height they are. It’s not arbitrary.
Maybe we should try smaller toast.
Newscientist ran this article almost verbatim 10 years ago.
and a number has just a 4.6 per cent chance of beginning with a 9
Oh yeah, tell that to the Beatles...
Number nine, Number nine, Number nine, Number nine ...IMHO, John had waaaaay too much acid that day.
;-)
‘urn me on, deadman. ‘urn me on, deadman.
It’s a big timesaver. :’)
For that matter, and given my usual habits, I should have searched more thoroughly and revived an existing topic about it. :’) Maybe the original version. But I didn’t find one. ;’)
Wasn’t there a math professor from Texas(?) who had won the lottery a couple of times? Obviously she wasn’t telling.
Do they use negative numbers for real calculations in the anti-matter universe?
Would that be cow pi?
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