A new doorway to the brain
nautil.us
nautil.us
One thing it doesn’t discuss is the latency of the observed signals relative to brain activity — in MRI there is a 5-6 second delay due to the time it takes for brain activity to translate into blood flow and oxygen signals, whereas electrical activity is in real time.
https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
Enjoy.
The only negative mentioned was the sheer amount of data produced (they didn't say anything about processing that data into an image which I assume is also taxing). The necessity of a contrast agent is also an (insignificant, comparatively, but worth mentioning) limitation
Or in my case, a lone tumbleweed
> But ultrafast ultrasound is exponentially faster, more powerful, and more spatially sensitive than standard ultrasound: It can produce many thousands of detailed high-resolution images per second.
is there any way to stop this weird mutation of the meaning of the word "exponentially"? Probably not, I guess. I trip over it when reading: "Hmm... so it's exponential in... oh, dammit, they just mean 'way faster'."
If Gary tells me that he made twice as much at poker as Fred, I'm not going to bother considering the possibility that he lost $1000 to Fred's $500.
"Terrific" hasn't meant "inspiring terror" for a very long time.
"Exponentially" being used to mean "a lot" is bad not because it's a new usage, but because "exponentially" is being demoted to a word that has a bunch (a shitload, a fuckton, lots, plenty, too many) synonyms when in its accurate usage it's a word with few or none. You're losing meaning when you make a thing more complicated to say.
Of course, this sort of usage happens a lot, too, but it's always because some people are using a technical-sounding word to substitute for a common word in order to give the impression of expertise.*
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* as opposed to when technicians steal a common word and make it a very specific technical term, which also happens all the time.
its never really unclear which is which. two objects is comparison, one object is process, as in, lily pads filled the pond exponentially. Which modifies filled not a comparative.
> exponentially is just an intensifier applied to a comparative.
That is how it is misused, yes. Used correctly, it refers to a class of functions that take a varying quantity as input. cf linearly, quadratically.
> ...lily pads filled the pond exponentially. Which modifies filled not a comparative.
I don't have a problem with that example. Well, I would prefer it to be "lily pads multiplied exponentially to fill the pond", but that's not much of a jump.
The verb "filled" suggests the input: time. "ultrafast ultrasound is exponentially faster [than traditional ultrasound]" does not. Is it exponential in the amount of power you apply? The duration of a reading? The number of goats you sacrifice?
The context of uses is almost always entirely disjoint as well. Compare:
Covid cases are growing exponentially, we need to do something. (covid spreads in proportion to number of infected)
Twitter is growing exponentially, I must invest! (network effects are causing something to accelerate, but obviously users don't create new users, nor do tweets create tweets)
My love for you grows exponentially day by day, let's get married! (basic intensifier)
I would guess these sentences are in descending order of acceptability for you.
As I said in my original post, I doubt there's a way of halting the shift in meaning in real-world usage. I just find that it impoverishes the word and degrades the ability to express something that is worth expressing.
I don't, in fact, have any problem with any of your three examples. The Twitter one is the most problematic, but it still works because I disagree with "users don't create new users"—they kind of do: if 10% of users convince one friend to join, then you have exponential growth. If size were proportional to the network effects, which are quadratic, then the statement would bother me. And it might be, for all I know, but given that (1) there's a decent argument for it being exponential and (2) it's not like there's that big of a difference between a quadratic curve and an exponential curve bounded at the very least by the world population, well... I guess I'm not that pedantic!
As for the 3rd sentence, what kind of jerk would I be to reject such a warm and honest expression of your love? ;-) More seriously, once something is figurative then keeping the original meaning of exponential enhances the declaration—there's a subtle implication that love produces love.
I've gotta stop replying to this thread, though!