Oh oh - you can just see these geeky days coming, can't you?

Today's a class day, which means another morning on the dark side - maybe that just seems darker when it happens to be Monday too. Maybe there's some obscure mathematical law involved.

Which is just a roundabout way of bringing up Benford's. There's been talk of Benford's Law over at Boing Boing recently - it's a theory that predicts numbers that start with the numeral 1 will turn up more frequently than any others in certain sets. (And it has some deep and dark implications, like that business about catching homework cheats, so be warned. Next time stay away from 1s. 7s are good - with a 7 you almost never go wrong. There's a lot of math in that.)

So now here's this guy named William Fawcett who's written a nifty Flash app that illustrates Benford's Law. Type a starting number in the first field and type an incremental factor in the second, then just click the button - or, seeing it's Monday and things are still a little foggy maybe just click the bottom "automatic" button and generate a random series - and see for yourself. How outstanding is that?

Maybe not too practical. Here's the real math problem for today. How many people in the lab this morning will push the ON button and then, seeing that nothing happens right away, push it again?

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