On The Origin of The Containment Entity - 10

Fig. 1 deg. C conversion to deg. F
Formula: (deg. C * 9/5) + 32 = deg. F

I. Background

To test Benford's Law a bit more than was done in On The Origin of The Containment Entity - 9, I downloaded a CSV file from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

The file I chose was: Temperature: Statistical mean data links (woa18_t_decav_1.00_csv.tar.gz).

My purpose was to process the Seawater temperatures (T) listed in the CSV files and then display the results in both graph and HTML formats.

They were stored only in degrees Celsius (deg. C) values, so for comparison purposes I converted those deg. C values into degrees Fahrenheit (deg. F).

Fig. 2 Deg. C Graphed And
Compared To Benford's Law

Then I graphed both C and F values so as to compare them with Benford's Law values.

Fig. 2 is the graph of the deg. C results and Fig. 1 shows the formula for converting deg. C into deg. F and the graph results comparing deg. F with Benford's Law.

The shock was that the deg. F results didn't match the Benford Law values, but the deg. C results matched quite closely.

The values that were graphed are also shown in the HTML tables in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 below.

II. Discussion

What I gather from these results is that Benford's Law is useless in these (and many other) similar circumstances ("There are lies, damned lies and statistics." - Mark Twain).

I am at a loss as to why they are allowed in court cases (On The Origin of The Containment Entity - 9) and if that has anything to do with all the innocent people in jails.

But I digress.

---

Fig. 3

Benford's Law applied to
Seawater in situ T(deg. C):
(Instances processed: 281,115,728)

First Digit	1st Digit Count	1st Digit Percent	Benford Percent	Difference
1	79,140,349	28.15	30.10	1.95
2	49,881,052	17.74	17.60	0.14
3	31,203,330	11.10	12.50	1.40
4	31,357,614	11.15	9.70	1.45
5	26,330,785	9.37	7.90	1.47
6	21,101,303	7.51	6.70	0.81
7	16,603,552	5.91	5.80	0.11
8	13,932,588	4.96	5.10	0.14
9	11,565,155	4.11	4.60	0.49

Fig. 4

Benford's Law applied to
Seawater in situ T(deg. F):
(Instances processed: 291,454,324)

First Digit	1st Digit Count	1st Digit Percent	Benford Percent	Difference
1	33,491,758	11.49	30.10	18.61
2	8,084,379	2.77	17.60	14.83
3	184,909,924	63.44	12.50	50.94
4	25,238,791	8.66	9.70	1.04
5	14,677,889	5.04	7.90	2.86
6	9,306,740	3.19	6.70	3.51
7	8,081,894	2.77	5.80	3.03
8	5,653,538	1.94	5.10	3.16
9	2,009,411	0.69	4.60	3.91

---

III. Closing Comments

Replying "1 deg. C" or "33.8 deg. F" to the question "what is the seawater temperature?" does not in any way change the actual seawater temperature.

So, for Benford's Law to treat that temperature as if it were on Venus in one case or on Earth in another (depending on the two different ways to express the same temperature) renders that law less useful than it could be.

The only redemption I see is that if one knows that deg. C is the only language in which Benford's Law will apply in processing seawater temps coherently, then there is "no problemo".

Don't get caught up in a disingenuous containment entity, or as Jim Frost wrote "Proceed Carefully!"

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

---

---