r/theydidthemath

As an off an on wow player, I've always wondered this. edit: let's also assume that each expansion was an extra 40 per active player.

If there was a button that gave a $1 million every time you pressed it, but doubled the cost of everything (only for you), how many times could you press it before you were unable to afford anything (effectively impoverished)? When I say everything, I mean gas, food, car prices, house prices, utilities, anything money can purchase, the price is doubled for you only.

The panama canal is again having water reliability issues. Ships use 50 million gallons to cross the canal. A san diego desalination plant cost 1 billion to build and produces the same amount of water per day. Assuming a 30 year lifespan of the plant and operating costs of 55 million a year. A ship recently paid 4 million to skip the but prices are usually between 1-2 million. What cost to skip the line would be needed to make this economically feasable?

Citizens of San Antonio, Texas pay an average electricity rate of 12.5 to 12.9 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). They were asked during a energy conservation day (from 3pm to 7pm) to unplug all chargers that weren't charging anything from their outlets. Would that really help that much? Seems like less than a drop in the bucket.

Benford’s law states that the probability that the first digit of a randomly chosen number in a naturally occurring dataset is equal to 1 is 30.1% And there is a solid information theoretic reason for this (the frequencies of digits scale logarithmically, so the probability that the most significant digit is d is log(d+1)-log(d)).

How about the following scenario: If we ask people to choose a positive integer without setting an upper limit, would the first digit of the numbers they choose follow Benford’s law?

I understand this is more of a psychology/human behavior question rather than math question, but it is still interesting from a mathematical perspective.