I thought about this, but it might actually make things worse. If you ask a random person-on-the-street, I suspect that the only association they have for "quadratic" is the quadratic formula, which has a square root in it. So now we will get people confusing "quadratic" with "sub-linear". So even "super-linearly" (or the more pedantic/punditic "supralinearly") might have to suffice. At 02:04 PM 8/14/2015, meekerdb wrote:
I'm sure that if you write a few letters you can get them to adopt "quadratically", because it sounds just as sciency. In fact you could probably even get them to use "cosmogonically" or "brobdingnagianly" or even "linearly".
Brent
On 8/14/2015 1:46 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
If I hear another TV pundit talk about "exponential" increase in something, when the vast majority of these examples are *polynomial* (usually only quadratic), I'm going to scream.
Today, I heard the following nonsequitur: "Do the math. This {whatever] is increasing exponentially ...".
Well, I did the math, and it was increasing quadratically, at best.
Can we hook an electrode to some lower extremity of each news person/politician to Pavlov them into understanding the true meaning of "exponential" ?