It's just observational/anecdotal -- I haven't gotten around to testing it thoroughly. But it often seems to me that for the applications that come up most often in daily life, the particular magnitude of English units is ideally adapted for what we do. That is, the English units are in their main range at the same place that human applications are.
What I mean is this. When you choose a particular unit for a particular application, ideally the leading digit would change a lot over the range of items being measured. If it's always the same, then the unit is kind of maladapted. Actually (contrary to my case), the pound is a good example of this with weight: for a huge percentage of the adult population, the first digit of their weight is going to be 1, 2, or 3. So really, if the pound were three times as big, it would kind of be more useful for this application, because then we'd all be in the tens, and the leading digit would be relevant again.
(Remember that, by Benford's law, 1 will in general tend to be the most common leading digit in measured quantities anyway, followed by 2, etc. The goal is to choose a system of units to minimize this in the interesting applications).
Well, notwithstanding the example against interest that I just gave, I find this tends to happen more often with metric than English units (and again, yes, I know this is anecdotal). Too often, metric units are _slightly_ too small, and get driven into the 100s too quickly, where they sit, making you think more to digest and compare. Think of distance between cities, for example. Kilometers too quickly get into 3 digits, and also too quickly get into 4. One way to look at this is that, because they grow faster, they converge to Benford's law quicker.
Here's a random recent example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-stop_flight#Currently_scheduled_.28top_30.2C_by_distance.29
Notice the distinction between the distances in km and miles: the km all start with 1 (making it an irrelevant digit); the miles do not.
So also with feet. Now you might say, "semck, you're being inconsistent. Feet are smaller than meters, so this time, feet and not meters should be subject to Benford's law." But the beauty of the English system is that you choose the unit that's best for the scale, and those are NOT related by factors of ten (and factors of 10 automatically lock you into the same leading-digit problem at every scale). Either inches or feet or yards or miles is going to be a good scale for just about anything. The metric system is just awkward, forcing either meters or centimeters (say) for human height, neither of which is good at all (and in either of which, again, you'll virtually always have a useless leading 1).
What's so bad about leading ones? Well, first of all, they're inefficient, and also, they tend to be more common anyway, if you don't fight it (B's law). And also, they just put us in a numeric range where we don't think as naturally. We have a better intuitive grasp of the difference between 6 and 8 than the difference between 13 and 16 (even though those are pretty close to each other) or even the difference between 23 and 29. So you want your leading digit to do a lot of the work.
Because the world mixes a lot of different random important scales, that's hard to do, but it's part of the beauty of a measuring system that also mixes a lot of different random scales.
Well, I hope that made any sense. I haven't developed it very well, but it's a set of thoughts that have kind of been growing in me as I've looked in various tables over the years.
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