We live most of our lives between 0 and 100

I just came across this nifty applet that lets you look at the popularity of every number between 0 and 100,000 - based on the results of a prominent search engine.


Not surprisingly, we live most of our lives happily ensconced between 0 and 100.

I don't think there is anything earth shattering about this - it's pretty much common sense. But it's nice to see it displayed - that 'aesthetic' value of information again.

It also reminded me of a use of this type of distribution that is not commonly known. Apparently you can tell if someone is cheating on their tax forms by looking at the distribution of integers they use. If it's more perfectly random than it should be (too many numbers with the same frequency of occurrence), they might be cheating. Normal tax returns should have skewed distributions - more 1s than 7s for instance. When we cheat, we tend to be a bit too random - some important advice there.

I can't find a link for this though, but I know this type of phenomena has a name... need to do some digging.


PS: I don't condone tax fraud. I love the IRS. No, really, I do.

PPS: Isabel came to the rescue and just commented that the phenomena is call Benford's Law - thanks Isabel, I needed that. Was driving me crazy.

Sphere: Related Content

Sweating the small stuff when conveying information

It's an absolute must to sweat the small stuff when conveying information - any information.

I just came across this from the Microsoft Performance Point site. It's a description of the different system requirements for the Performance Point product.

Try to figure out if the Planning Business Modeler and the Monitoring Server have the same hardware requirements? Impossible, right? Or at least extremely hard.

This is either multiple pages or an inventive dynamic page. It's not a long list of thin columns.

Yes it's only one page out of many, and yes, they are only system requirements. But it's the small stuff you have to sweat. This one pages speaks volumes as to how difficult the help system is probably going to be, or how difficult it will be to find help full-stop.

It's the extra 10% of effort to produce an easily readable page that counts. Without it the other 90% is wasted. Yes that sucks. But that's just how it is.

Sphere: Related Content