I've noticed an exponential increase in the use of "exponential" in the media. God forbid that reporters ever hear the term "hyperexponential"! E.g., when the media misquotes/misunderstands Metcalfe's Law, which is only "polynomial" (yes, I know, it sounds pretty pedantic): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law I may try to con a reporter sometime into including the term "sub-logarithmic" in a story. Hopefully, a reporter with the name of Lambert. Perhaps evolution proceeds sublogarithmically, which is why we can't see it in action? Alternatively, something that recurs cyclically is also "exponential", although this is a bit more complex to explain. At 02:14 PM 2/2/2010, rcs@xmission.com wrote:
Without commenting on the style: The remark does illustrate the need for at least three data points, for a phenomenon to be called exponential. --Rich
--- Quoting Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net>:
In the weekly NY Times column about proper usage, a commenter writes:
<< A note about "exponential": technically, the term refers to numbers that are increasing by a fixed (compounded) percentage, rather than a fixed amount, per unit of time. So it is entirely possible that the number of schools teaching Chinese has increased by a steady 18% per year from 300 a decade ago to 1,600 today; that would indeed be an exponential increase, though it's unlikely the author of the article did the research to confirm this.
Am I the only one who thinks this comment's writing style looks familiar?
--Dan