Benford’s Law

“Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger numbers occur as the leading digit with less and less frequency as they grow in magnitude, to the point that 9 is the first digit less than one time in twenty. This is based on the observation that real-world measurements are generally distributed logarithmically, thus the logarithm of a set of real-world measurements is generally distributed uniformly.”

Had an email about this in my inbox this morning.  Fascinating.  The question, now—how can I use this knowledge to my advantage?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Notes