Journal of Statistics: Advances in Theory and ApplicationsAuthor's: Michael R. Golinski
Pages: [159] - [166]
Received Date: May 23, 2015
Submitted by:
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18642/jsata_7100121503
Based on cooking times and spatial distributions of common food items in a microwave, I show that the directionality of any food item spinning at a specific rate varies as a function of time. Originally, I assumed that this rate would follow a pattern predicted by Benford’s law, in which the orientation of a microwaved item is a function of cooking times (i.e., with higher frequency, low times would lead to a return to the same spatial orientation in the microwave, where higher times would not). In addition, I found that Bendford’s law does not apply to non-integer numbers such as fractions (e.g., a cooking time of 1:26 would still use the leading term 1). Therefore, for this example, the cooking time would be 1, and Benford’s law would predict that the cooked item would start and stop at the same place (with high probability (high frequency)) on the cooking plate. Alternatively, I hypothesized that given Benford’s law, cooking times with higher leading terms would occur less frequently. In what follows, I show that the overall distribution was highly skewed. Given these results, I end the paper by discussing why this pattern may have been observed and how the results of this study could be applied to a wide range of phenomena observed in nature.
Benford’s law, household item, power-law, spatial orientation, skewed distribution.
