I love learning and I just learned something new today I thought I would share. It’s called Benford’s law and it has to do with mathematics. Don’t worry, it’s not hard.
Isn’t that awesome?!!
You’re probably thinking, “nice going dork, that is totally complicated.” You’re right it is. I can’t read that equation I just think it looks cool. But let me put it into plain English and then tell you why it is so cool.
If you took the lengths of all the rivers in Canada and and wrote out the first digit of every length, that is if the river is 356 km long you take “3” If it is 87 km long you take “8” and so on these digits would distribute according to universal probability.
Essentially it means that the number 1 will occur more frequently than the number 2. The number 2 more frequently than the number 3. The number 3 will occur more frequently than the number 4 and so on…
The cool part is, forensic investigators use it when the think some one is cooking the books! Check out this cool video on it and actual data sets. It’s kind of freaky too.
A day without learning is a day wasted.