Thought for the day: Benford's law

The wizards at Wikipedia say: "Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values."


Below we are pointing (without permission) to a web page showing the national debt.  See how many of the numbers start with the digit one, two etc. (click on image to expand)

To see the real copy visit see:http://heartlandmusings.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/obamas-budget-and-national-debt2.jpg  (this is a good guy blog since they do not believe in AGW)