Once, I was swinging and had a thought about the series, which next series should I watch?
And this time I wanted to watch something interesting and informative.
I started searching, and on Instagram, saw one live session going on. There, she mentioned a Netflix series named “Connected” which is a docu-series, where journalist Latif Nasser investigates how we are connected to the universe.
The above-written line attracted me and so I started watching that series within no time.
Now, let me give you a brief about myself…
I am Aanal Patel who is not very much into mathematics who believed that mathematics is a boring subject, but this one chapter of Connected hit me in every way possible!!!
After watching the chapter named “Digits” of the Connected series I was completely blank and I was feeling kind of everything around me to be fixed/ planned and nothing around is random at all!
Yes, you heard that right and in the following blog, I will be demonstrating some examples.
Just after watching this episode, I wanted to share it with all of my friends and not just in my group but with everyone who doesn’t know about this and to everyone who doesn’t have a Netflix account and is willing to know some mind-boggling information.
What if I say that everything around us follows a specific pattern?
A pattern of numbers!
Many years ago, one astrologer named Simon Newcomb was reading a book in a library and noticed something.
His Observation:
If you see the early pages of any book that is been used, the front pages of the books were worn out, but the later pages were as good as new ones!
(A very simple observation that we even don’t consider)
Thereafter he took some more books and found a similar thing that he observed.
Through his observations and discovery, he came up with one conclusion Everything around us follows a specific pattern of numbers and everything around us is predictable!
(Let me explain his discovery with a simple example)
(It may change the definition of “RANDOM” for you)
Pay Attention,
Suppose, there are 1000 numbers in front of the audience and everyone is asked to choose a number from these RANDOMLY.
According to his discovery, it is estimated that about 30% must have selected a number starting from 1, about 17% must have selected a number starting from 2, and the value of the percentage keeps on decreasing as we go up on the scale of 1–9.
Which follows a pattern of a logarithmic graph.
(You can relate this example to his observation of pages of books in the library)
You can try this experiment anywhere where there are DIGITS, like in the Stock Market, Street Addresses, Temperatures, Population growth…
You just have to select the first digits of the number and it will follow the following pattern.
50 years after Newcomb discovered it, an engineer named Frank Benford discovered it again and since then it is known as “The Benford’s Law”.
Now, music plays a crucial role in our lives, music is something through which one expresses his/her emotions or some listen to lighten up their mood, some of them consider music as their everything/god.
What if I say that Benford’s law is followed in music?
Yes, It is followed in musical notes. The notes that musicians use to compose a song, and their pattern is soothing to the ears, and it shows some rhythm in it.
Unknowingly, unbelievably and surely not coincidently, that pattern follows Benford’s law!
(A regularity that hides behind the music).
Unmasking Bots Online!
Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information and studies, aimed at detecting fraud on social media.
How?
She started collecting data from social media and started observing its behavior.
What she did :
She concentrated on one factor, which was the number of followers her friends have and then their friends have, and strangely all those digits followed Benford’s law!
Further, she started collecting data from all over the social media platform and she discovered something strange.
From the data she collected from the social media, almost all accounts followed Benford’s law except the last 10 accounts, of which she found that 10 accounts were Russian bots, which were managed by a single account. (how scary is that).
What do these bots do?
They would tweet in the Russian language like sentences out of novels or technical manuals or occasionally throw an emoji or would like each other’s tweets they are following, retweeting, etc…
Purpose: Maybe to collect/gather their intended information out of some people’s activity through social platforms!
The truth may be Fake!!
A computer scientist named Hany Farid specialist in image analysis exclaims that everything that is on the internet right now or is going to be on the internet cannot have any solid proof of its originality.
His aim is, to differentiate fake images/audio/video from real ones.
He explains that:
Whenever we take any image (digitally →collection of many small digits), compress it in jpeg format and save it.
Here Benford’s law is followed. (Only when the image is saved once).
But, if we open that image again and do some changes and save it again then that image has gone through double compression and it violates Benford’s law!
Even, the population follows this law.
The town and the city populations are not random at all!
Not just the birth rates, but the death rates also follow this law. It’s been applied to death rates, infectious diseases, and even the intervals between heartbeats when one is about to go into cardiac arrest.
They say that if something doesn’t work the way or the pattern of Benford’s law, then something wrong/strange must be happening.
Simply saying: These Digits have regularity of Benford’s law inside them.
Like, where there are digits, there will be Benford’s law
(stock markets)
(newspapers)
(elections)
(populations)
What if I say that we all are interconnected through such unknown bizarre yet completely trustable laws!! (maybe I am not wrong).
Like from the above examples it seems that the implementation of Benford’s law can be everywhere and we can control any disaster that may take place in the future!
Like not just on this planet, but in the universe as well!
Having a great impact of this law probably everywhere, I decided to perform a small experiment by collecting the digits from one day’s newspaper and taking their 1st digits I tried to plot the graph and the result was something as shown below, which I think seems normal yet surprising after knowing the strength of Benford’s law.
I found 1s → 91 times, 2s →36 times, 3 →35 times, and so on…
The blog’s title says my opinion, let me know yours in the comments. Thank you for giving your time! I will be obliged to have your feedback. References:
-Netflix