To begin with:
I learned that
THIRTY PERCENT OF ALL NUMBERS START WITH 1!
No, seriously. This is true, and it is called Benford's Law.
Here, have some math about it:
I guess this thing only works when you have lots of numbers distributed over orders of magnitude, but it works with everything that has a large enough set, and it doesn't care about unit conversion. The applications of this rule are crazy. You can go to prison because of it.
By that I mean, Benford's Law is used in Forensic Accounting. They use it to find numbers that people make up, which generally don't fit the curve generated by Benford's Law. This evidence is admissible in criminal cases.
What's even more nuts, is the way it was discovered. This one guy, Simon Newcomb, noticed that all the pages of his logarithm books starting with the number one were way more worn and weathered than the other ones.
That's nuts.
Another thing I learned is how to use the logarithm button on a graphing calculator, and why, but that's not really very interesting to anyone but me who just learned it so late in life, but that lead to me learning that our senses operate on a logarithmic scale, which I guess just means movement of orders of magnitude.
In general the greater the difference between two numbers the easier it is for people to perceive a change between them, but that seems simple until you think about the size of number's being talked about when people mention orders of magnitude.
Big numbers usually.
Also I learned that Budweiser isn't necessarily an Annheuser-Busch product. Back in the day lots of people brewed Budweiser:
Weird.
I was going to talk about hedges today. But I'm too tired.
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