Protesters can select a category from Agriculture to Youth using a pop-up menu or just attach their names to the latest petitions to

Protesters can select a category, from Agriculture to Youth, using a pop-up menu, or just attach their names to the latest petitions to hit the page. Other on-line facilities play to the vain illusion that you and your mouse can change the world. Not only do the media report the affairs of heads of state, or next-in-lines, but the Web can supply us with full documentation. Who needs rumour when you can download every sticky detail of the Starr report from a link obligingly supplied by a search engine? We had to go through chapter and verse to satisfy ourselves that it was more information than we needed. At least nobody kidded themselves that ploughing through that particular official publication was an act of citizenship. When broadcasters and newspapers guarded the privacy of the elite, the populace could still spread the word by its own devices. As the abdication crisis loomed in 1936, the playgrounds echoed with what the media would not admit: "Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson's pinched our King." The bush telegraph is obsolete. No doubt the telephone played a part, but the natural habitat of humour and rumour is the street, the workplace and the bar.

So tax officials are checking the numbers in tax returns to see whether or not they deviate from Benford's Law.If the numbers seem suspicious, this is not proof of fraud, but it does indicate that the return should be examined in detail.Simon Singh is the author of `Fermat's Last Theorem' (Fourth Estate). NOW that they have the Internet, the hobo life is over for jokes and gossip. In the old days, when somebody devised a wisecrack about a celebrity or an event of the day, it would spread throughout the country by hitching lifts and hopping trains. If somebody were to attempt to fabricate the numbers on their tax return, they would be tempted to ensure an even spread of numbers beginning with 1, 2, 3 and so on (which we know should not happen).

It earns 10 per cent annual interest, and you receive a statement each year. The first statement will read pounds 100, the second pounds 110, and the next statements would read pounds 112, pounds 133, pounds 146, pounds 161, pounds 177, pounds 195, pounds 214, pounds 236, pounds 259, pounds 285... up to pounds 814, pounds 895, pounds 985, pounds 1,083 and so on.The first eight numbers begin with 1, but only four numbers begin with 2; only two begin with 8, only one begins with 9; and then we are back to numbers that begin with 1. Sure enough, 30 per cent of the numbers began with 1, about 18 per cent began with 2, and the pattern continued - less than 5 per cent of the numbers began with 9. So if you open this magazine at random and find a number in an article, then there is a 30 per cent chance that its first digit will be 1.Explaining the prevalence of 1 as the first digit (now known as Benford's Law) is not simple, but the following example illustrates part of the reason Imagine, you have pounds 100 in a bank account. In fact, the tables only cover numbers from 1 to 10, and so you have to look up 2.44493 and then compensate appropriately. When Benford picked up his book of tables, he noticed that the early pages were much more worn than the later ones. This was extraordinary, because it implied that the numbers that he was looking up were more likely to begin with 1 than with any other number, as opposed to the natural assumption that as many numbers start with 1 as start with 2, 3, 4, etc.To see if numbers beginning with 1 were indeed more prevalent than other numbers, Benford checked a sample of 20,229 numbers from a wide variety of sources (lengths of rivers, baseball statistics, and so on).

For example, to do a calculation involving the area of the United Kingdom (244,493km2), you would begin by looking up this number in your log tables. WITH the tax year coming to an end, I thought I would recount the tale of a serendipitous discovery which is being used by tax officials to help spot fraudulent tax returns. The story starts in 1938, when the American physicist Frank Benford was consulting a book of logarithm tables (before electronic calculators, log tables were used to perform calculations). Sometimes he wants all the attention and doesn't realise that I want all the attention too He's incredibly scatty. Ask any of his friends about "I'll call you back": you can call him with the most devastating news and he'll never phone back.

It's not a callous thing, it's just that he's in an extraordinary world of his own. Maybe he finds there's not much point in leaving it.Sebastian Horsley's `The Flowers of Evil' is at the Grosvenor Gallery, London W1 (0171 629 0891) until 23 April. Maybe I should take this opportunity to say: "Nick! Life is futile!" Nick believes in God, and I believe in myself. I also believe passionately in nothing and he always pulls me up on that. But we both believe that a work of art has to reflect the dark side.We share vanity, ambition and oxygen, though Nick would probably deny he was ambitious I thought I was vain until I met Nick My vanity is worldwide, his is cosmic, which I love. Nick has the winning combination of vitality and vulnerability.