Lost will soon be gone, but fortunately, there's something that can fill the hole it will leave in the world. Namely, the world. That's right: There's evidence all around you that reality itself is just a great big Lost flash-sideways.
Sure, you don't think you're living in a TV show. Neither does Jack Shephard. Here are six real-life plot twists that suggest, if reality isn't being written by the people behind Lost, it's at least being written by some pretty devoted fans.
6
Benford's Law aka The Inexplicably Repeating Number
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Let's start off with an easy question. Think of a number from one to 20.
It was 17, wasn't it?
For some reason, people are three times more likely to pick 17 than chance would suggest. That's not too mind-blowing, though, because people are idiots. It's no surprise that when you ask us to pick a random number, we fall back on one or two old favorites. There's probably a 17 tattooed somewhere on the inside of our stupid ape brains.
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What is freaky is that nature and reality also seem to have their favorite number: one.
The phenomena was first discovered by a physicist named Simon Newcomb in 1881. Then it was rediscovered by a guy named Benford 53 years later, and it became known as "Benford's Law." Meanwhile, the principle that no matter how cool your discovery is, "somebody is going to come along decades later and take credit for it became known as "Newcomb's Law."
From town populations to the heights of the tallest buildings in the world to the number of people who vote for a given candidate: the first digit is going to be one at least 30 percent of the time despite the fact that one is only 11 percent of the numbers that could possibly show up there.
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To illustrate just how weird that is, imagine you're an architect of one of the world's tallest buildings. You check with the mayor to find out just how tall you can go, check with the engineers to ensure that you can maintain structural integrity, evaluate the skyline to make sure all other architects who have built in this city know whose got the biggest wang. You are not keeping track of what the final measurement in feet will be, but when it's done, no matter what your decision is based on, the first digit in your building's height is six times as likely to start with one than nine.
If you switch to measuring that height in meters, doesn't matter. Is your building near a river? The length of the river is more likely to start with "1" than any other digit. And so on.
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