12.21.09
Benford’s Law
This will keep you awake at night. This guy in the 30s discovered that numbers that are taken from real things; heights of buildings in New York, number of people on the city bus, number of minutes it takes to get to work, the number house you have in a street address, all these numbers will most likely start with the number 1. The next most likely number that they will start with is 2. The next? That’s right 3. And the least likely number to start these seemingly random sequences from nature is the number 9.
Go ahead and give it a try in the window above. You can click Generate Random to give the system some random numbers to work with or you can plug in some less naturally occurring numbers yourself and click start multiplication.
An interesting thing here is that this is not only accepted, but has been used to flag people in businesses who have tampered with their books. So if you are planning on tampering with your numbers keep in mind that 10,234,567 dollars is much less suspicious to the authorities than 9,876,543.
