A look at COVID-19 case reports from around the world to see how well the numbers of daily positive cases fit into Benford’s Law. The better the fit, the more accurate the data.
What is Benford’s Law?
Numbers that represent real-life events follow a certain regularity. Specifically, the first digit of these numbers follows a strange pattern with the number 1 appearing about 30% of the time, the number 2 about 18% of the time, etc. — a frequency that declines logarithmically. This pattern is known as Benford’s Law, and it can be used to identify fraud and other irregularities with reported numbers. …
President Trump has sent 23,858 tweets since taking office in 2017. I downloaded all of them from Twitter to look for patterns, and here is what I found in a few graphs.
Donald Trump had been a prolific tweeter even before he became President, sending thousands of tweets per year. When he was elected in 2016, there was an expectation that he might mold into the job and change some of his habits, including his tweeting habit. …
This is my version of a sleep box that Mark Zuckerberg created and posted on Facebook on April 27, 2019.
What is It?
The Facebook founder invented a box to help his wife sleep better through the night. Priscilla was having a hard time falling back asleep after checking the time in the middle of the night to see if the kids might wake up soon, so he created what he called a “sleep box” as a way to tell if it was a good time to wake up without having to actually check the time. …
