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10/20/2007: "Number-based conspiracy thinking is insane"

Dr. Benford derived a formula to explain this. If absolute certainty is defined as 1 and absolute impossibility as 0, then the probability of any number "d" from 1 through 9 being the first digit is log to the base 10 of (1 + 1/d). This formula predicts the frequencies of numbers found in many categories of statistics.

Dr. Benford discovered, in a huge assortment of number sequences -- random samples from a day's stock quotations, a tournament's tennis scores, the numbers on the front page of The New York Times, the populations of towns, electricity bills in the Solomon Islands, the molecular weights of compounds the half-lives of radioactive atoms and much more -- "random" numbers followed a pattern.

Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, as many people would imagine; according to Benford's Law, it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance.

[ Numbers appear in multiple places because of inherent properties of mathematics in this universe. Conspiracy theories often rely on number and wordplay, but it's junk data. Also, there is no "free will" in the purest sense. Deal with science. ]

http://www.rexswain.com/benford.html