It's fun to extrapolate trends backwards -- e.g., Moore's Law. If I take one of Intel's own charts on Moore's Law, I get approximately #transistors(year) = 2^((year-1947)/2), which is more like a doubling every 24 months instead of 18 months. http://library.thinkquest.org/4116/Science/moore%27s1.htm But the cool thing is that year zero is 1947, when the transistor was first invented ! 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