Wordie: Exponential: Comments

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 11:05:41 +0000

Now *there's* a thought....

Comment by oroboros, about 1 year ago

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:00:20 +0000

Just slip it a Mickey Finn and be a math genius! (hee hee)

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:44:44 +0000

If that's the case, oroboros, my number governor is a damned tyrant. ;-)

Comment by oroboros, about 1 year ago

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:14:52 +0000

Gotta be designed for it or there wouldn't BE "exponential numbers". Maybe most brains have a "number governor" installed; the ones that don't are right at home with exponentials and equations like e^iπ = -1 and so on.

Comment by seanahan, about 1 year ago

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:17:41 +0000

There is a fundamental human difficultly in dealing with exponential numbers. The mind has evolved to understand small quantities, the integers. The rational numbers, or fractions, are probably a rather recent invention, other than perhaps, I'll take 1/4 of that Woolly Mammoth we just killed. The human brain is just not designed to deal with numbers on an exponential scale.

Take, for example, the problem of the grains of rice on the chess board. At first glance, 1, 2, 4, 8, doesn't seem like a big deal. Of course, if you do the math, 2^64 is more grains of rice than have ever existed, but intuitively, it doesn't seem to be.

Comment by uselessness, about 1 year ago

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:50:20 +0000

More like a curvy L... or a J, as long as it's not one of those Js that curves back up on the short side. ;-)

Comment by seanahan, about 1 year ago

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:23:11 +0000

I took an intro biology class where they referred to it as a "J-shaped curve", which seemed like a pointless simplification.

Comment by whichbe, about 1 year ago

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:03:23 +0000

what if exponentially more people understood this word?

Comment by azzurre, about 1 year ago

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:42:58 +0000

if more people understood this word....