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The Secret Lives Of Numbers Visualized

posted by Editor on Thursday March 14, @12:34PM

J.J. Larrea writes "This site describes a project where the authors
conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.
This analysis is presented with a lovely visualization applet, allowing free exploration of patterns in cultural numerical usage."

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Empirical 'number theory' (Score:1)

by Greg Weiss on Friday March 15, @09:05AM EST (#1)
(User #10 Info)

Nice visualization applet. And a nice empirical cross-check for Benford's Law.

I do wonder about merit of the data- the sampling seems strange. How does one explain the immense popularity of all numbers (obviously 'dates') up to 1997 and the total unpopularity of 1998? It'd make sense if the data was snapshotted in 1997, but they claim to have been collecting the data at intervals since 1997...

--Greg

The default is 1997 (Score:0)

by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15, @11:26AM EST (#2)

I think the default data set is from 1997. You can choose others, though.

Most Unpopular Number (Score:0)

by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16, @05:30AM EST (#3)

I find the most interesting aspect of this study is the total lack of the solution to 2 X 1000 + 3 X 100 + 9 X 10 + 8 in their default data set (and, no, I won't change the data by including it here). Given that the surrounding numbers are in lne with other results, why would this number have no information? A google search for only this number results in "about 174,000" results, including some references to 1996 data (which we might have expected to have been included). Any speculation?

I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth. -- Fry