Here are a couple of links to Benford's law. It a phenomena many people probably suspect intuitively, but I did not realize it had been formally studied.

http://www.pballew.net/arithm12.html
http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/zipfLaw.shtml

Note that if one adapts the equation to binary and uses log-base 2, the digit 1 has a frequency of 1, of course

Any additional comments? Any more stories about its use you can add? --John

 

That seems to make sense even for electronics - there is a higher chance that component values start in 1 because the preferred values are on a logarithmic scale.

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