[bluesmoon]

I like the history section of the wikipedia article:

<blockquote>The discovery of this fact goes back to 1881, when the American astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in logarithm books, the earlier pages (which contained numbers that started with 1) were much more worn than the other pages.</blockquote>

Can you imagine the sense of observation and curiosity that would make someone look at a book of numbers and say, "I wonder why these pages are more worn than those ones."

[gnosis]

Before ever hearing of Benford's law I've noticed that many books are more worn at the beginning than further on.

I simply chalked it up to most people not being very serious about reading books in general and any given book in particular. It's a rare person who makes it all the way through.

I don't think my own observation was a particularly interesting or original one.

What made Newcomb's observation interesting was that it was about books of logarithm tables in particular, where (unlike a typical book) you'd think the lookups would be uniformly distributed.

The other interesting thing that did require an unusual amount of curiosity and dedication is the systematic testing of such a casual observation to try to figure out what the underlying reasons for it were and how they might apply to things other than books of logarithms. This desire and dedication to observe, test, and figure out the underlying workings of things is the hallmark of many a great scientist.

[Someone]

In those times, scientists were rather fond of their logarithm tables, in the same way they would of their slide rules, HP calculators and netbooks later on.

Imagine that your calculator break down every three-to-four months. After a couple of years, any hacker is bound to think "I should be able to take a couple of broken ones, pick working parts, and build a working one". Then, you discover that all of them have perfectly working '9' keys, but broken '1' keys.

[JonnieCache]

See also: reading android PINs by the smudges on the screen.