Remember Douglas Adam's Babel Fish - so mind-bogglingly improbable that it proved/disproved the existence of God? The only problem, of course, is that the Babel Fish is fictional, and thus not so completely mind-boggling after all. But what if there were something, something actual, and yet so fantastically strange that it made you question just how this universe could ever have happened? Well, I give you... Benford's Law!
Roughly speaking, Benford's Law states that naturally occuring numbers are more likely to start with the digit "1" than the digit "2", which is in turn more likely than digit "3", etc. In fact, a massive 30% of all numbers you will ever encounter will start with "1"! And what do I mean by "naturally occuring numbers"? It's hard to get a handle on this, but it appears to be numbers that measure stuff. According to Wikipedia, this includes "electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants", and it doesn't even matter what numerical base you use (we generally use base 10).
No! It can't be true!
When I heard about this (this morning), I was sceptical, so I grabbed a big page of "universal contants' from the web, and dumped them into a spreadsheet. And it worked. And then I found a page with all the countries in the world together with their populations, land areas in square kilometres, land areas in square miles, population densities.... and they all worked!
But why??? I'm going to find out, but for now, I really have no idea. Sigh.
I must thank the guys at RadioLab who brought this to my attention. I'm going to write more about them real soon, my favourite podcast, but that will do for today. I have to think about this...
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