This is not new.  See http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A045707 The paper Cohen, Daniel I. A. and Katz, Talbot M., Prime numbers and the first digit phenomenon. J. Number Theory 18 (1984), 261-268 deals with arbitrary prespecified strings of leading digits. Victor On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Ray Tayek <rtayek@ca.rr.com> wrote:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/10/1322207

<mailto:stephen.schaubach@wellsfargo.com>stephen.schaubach writes "Spanish Mathematicians have <http://www.physorg.com/news160994102.html>discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law>Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'" ...

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