Flippin Sweet Dude

We took 4 young men and their dates out on date night tonight.   We started by going out to dinner at the local Chili’s restaurant.  We all sat at a huge table, and talked for what seemed an hour before the food came.   We were all enjoying ourselves when some poor dad had to take his kid that was puking his guts out to the bathroom.  He was holding his hand in front of his face, and it just spread the projectile vomit all over the place.  It was wicked nasty, and did not help peoples appetites.

Then we went to Temple Square to see the Christmas lights.    It was wicked cold, and the wind was blowing too. There were definitely two distinct groups, one very quiet, and one not so quiet.   Erika and I enjoyed when we got to the lights and we could be by ourselves, and we loved the peace and quiet.

They all seemed to have fun.  And I had so much fun I fastened this knife out of paper, to hopefully put me out of my misery. 

Benford’s Law is a pretty amazing discovery.  It states that for real data, like statistical tables, numerical listing ( like addresses, populations, lengths of rivers, etc… ) and other groups of numbers, that we are not to expect a uniform distribution of leading digits.  For example, one would think that for a list of all river lengths, in any unit of measurement, that there would be relatively equal number of them that start with the number 1, 2, 3 and so forth, with each number having 1/9th the possibility of being the leading digit. However it is proven that the distribution looks more like this:

1 = 30.1%
2 = 17.6%
3  12.5%
4 = 9.6%
5 = 7.9%
6 = 6.6%
7 = 5.8%
8 = 5.1%
9 = 4.5%

I thought a good idea would be to see if this law holds true, for the file sizes found on my hard drive.  There is a good listing of number, found in the real world, and at first glance, I would think that there is an equal likelihood that all the numbers are represented equally as the leading digit.

You can download and run my program below, you’ll need the .net Framework to run it.  Find that here, if you don’t already have it.

BenfordHardDrive

Family found a used book store nearby that we had not seen before. We all have a great love for books, and for some reason an old book is more appealing than a new book. Either way, Benjamin and I found this algebra book from 1911, and bought it for $3 even. He wanted to ‘learn more math’ so we are going to go through it together. There are some interesting doodles, and a old school plastic rule inside.