“If I could do anything, I would…”

• Create technology that would change people’s lives
• Build a beautiful house for every family in the world
• Eliminate poverty, eliminate diseases, and get rid of pornography
• Provide everybody in the world the chance to fulfill their dreams
• Create a bridge from Michigan to Cebu, or perhaps a tunnel or a teleport machine…
• Have YFC/SFC household on the moon
• Learn the ability to walk on water so I can run around the world..
• Travel the solar system within 3 days, starting from the Sun, with a pit-stop at the rings of Saturn, and finally surfing around the outskirts of the milky way. Then I would fly back to Earth, rest for a few days, and Start making plans to travel to a different universe..
• Allow snow to fall in the Philippines (for a few days the most) so people there can finally experience their first snow
• Swim with a blue whale as he takes me around to the wonders of the ocean
• Travel the world with my wife
• If I could do anything, I would still read books, go to Grad school, and be able to learn and explore the fascinating world around us..
• If I could do anything, I would… Do more…

If you could do anything, what would you do?

In its simplest form, Benford’s Law says that there is a distinctive pattern on the “population” of numbers. If you gather all the numbers in the world (from numbers found in stock prices, to newspapers, height of buildings, temperatures, cash registers, etc.), approximately 30% of them start with # 1. Let me repeat that, about 30% of numbers in the world start with #1.

But wait there’s more!

About 18% of all numbers in the world begin with #2. About 13% begin with #3. See the pattern?

And here’s the entire gamut:

• #4:  9.7%
• #5:  7.9%
• #6:  6.7%
• #7:  5.8%
• #8:  5.1%
• #9:  4.6%

Visualizing this pattern, we get:

So what’s so significant about Benford’s Law? Surprisingly, the natural distribution of numbers is so universal that it can be applied to any numerical context (i.e. finance reports, random numbers). Any deviation from this pattern denotes that the numbers have been manually modified. In fact, Benford’s Law has been used to detect accounting fraud and other related crimes (see example below).

Lesson: don’t mess with numbers (unless you follow Benford’s Law).