hermes
19th January 2004, 10:14 PM
Here's a statistical curiosity I picked up somewhere. Some guy in a pub in Darwin noticed the correlation. Long time ago. Don't think it was on this forum.
The story goes that in the 1880s a bored American maths teacher noticed that certain pages of logarhythm tables were worn and grubbied faster than others. Over years of students he did stats on this and honed it down to a formula. Some tables are used more commonly than others.
No one took any notice until the 1930s when a physicist named Benford found the same maths in number frequency. He collected over 20,000 numbers from various sources like drainage logs and old magazines, noting whatever numbers were used. He found that the #1 is the first digit in 30% of all numbers used in his samples. #2 was 18% etc. This was constant.
You can check this by looking at all the numbers visible in your room right now. About 30% of them will be or begin with the digit one. (Its 11:10 and my printer is an ultra-crappy z12, for instance.) The universe, or the human environment, is stacked that way.
Now these proportions correlate uncannily, not with TAB numbers but with first, second, third favourites winning. Faves win about 30% of the time, second faves about 18% of the time and so on, very, very near to Benford's constant.
Another useless fact from
Hermes.
The story goes that in the 1880s a bored American maths teacher noticed that certain pages of logarhythm tables were worn and grubbied faster than others. Over years of students he did stats on this and honed it down to a formula. Some tables are used more commonly than others.
No one took any notice until the 1930s when a physicist named Benford found the same maths in number frequency. He collected over 20,000 numbers from various sources like drainage logs and old magazines, noting whatever numbers were used. He found that the #1 is the first digit in 30% of all numbers used in his samples. #2 was 18% etc. This was constant.
You can check this by looking at all the numbers visible in your room right now. About 30% of them will be or begin with the digit one. (Its 11:10 and my printer is an ultra-crappy z12, for instance.) The universe, or the human environment, is stacked that way.
Now these proportions correlate uncannily, not with TAB numbers but with first, second, third favourites winning. Faves win about 30% of the time, second faves about 18% of the time and so on, very, very near to Benford's constant.
Another useless fact from
Hermes.