Benford's Law

Benford's law, Zipf's law and other power laws tend to fascinate but they are a manifestation of something really simple. It's how things behave when they are evenly distributed over multiplicative operations instead of additive operations. By this I mean things are as likely to be x% bigger than x% smaller instead of the more common definition of evenly distributed (things x unit larger are as likely as x unit smaller). Being evenly distributed over multiplication is natural for many…

Did my thesis trying to apply insights from Benford's law to the design of the adders in your CPU. The idea was you make your low order bits, which see more activity, slower and more power efficient and your high order bits faster and less efficient. Meet the same timing overall but with less energy on average. Sadly, memory addresses were close to pure entropy for my purposes and the savings I was able to get were only around 5%…

"Benford's Law can be used to show that binary is the best base for doing floating point math." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2005/01/13/float...

Of course not. There are whole books on the subject: http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/rnbookindex.html