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Comment by tromp | Hacker News Reader

> He guesses the ice in the berg is at least 1,000 years old, but could also be exponentially more ancient — even formed as many as 100,000 years ago.

That's not exponentially more (which would be a preposterous 2^1000 or 10^1000 years old). It's just 100 times more. Should I stop being annoyed at how media use the word and just accept their alternative meaning of "a lot" ?

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It's two numbers. It's a constant increase, you can fit a line between them, but also a degree 10 polynomial or an exponential curve.

Yes, it just means "a lot".

I agree, you can also say exponential if there's 4 or more numbers.

High variance/confidence interval. Probably needs some C14 / O18 dating to narrow it down by field researchers gathering samples rather than us speculating from afar.

This is how language develops, I’m afraid. But imagine that the age is 10^k where k is something like “age class”. Then indeed the age grows exponentially :)

It still doesn’t grow exponentially, it is just orders of magnitude older.

Possibly, because if I read between the lines, their answer is “huh I dunno”.

Orders of magnitude is an exponential measure.

1*10^n

so then every change can be called exponential

> This chair is 4 years old. Or, maybe 5 years old.

Yeah, exponential growth!!!

Yes, but where is the growth? They just said that the age of iceberg is 1000 years or maybe older 100.000.

There is no exponential growth there, just someone not having any clue about the iceberg wanting to sound knowledgeable about the subject.

1.0116^10000 ≈ 100000

Journalists tend to just think of it as "a lot more", but since they didn't specify the base of the exponential we can at least find a way to make the article technically correct. There are fun classes that admit incomparable values, such as the Surreal games. If they'd said "the game {1 | -1} is exponentially more than { | }" then it'd be impossible to find a base to make the statement true. There's lots of fun to be had with this sort of math, as you know.

If we want to express ourselves using exponents, consider that 1000 years (1×10^3) and 9000 years (9×10^3) would be of the same "degree" of ancestry, while 100,000 years (1×10^5) would be of completely different (exponential) significance.

it's not only the media.

it's just a figure of speech, (used like some people (ab)use "literally"), which I am sure you know, considering your profile, or even otherwise.

other people than the media use it too:

e.g. this Rob Pike post about Go (the programming language, not the game you like):

Less is exponentially more

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

10^2 in exponential form...

At least he didn't say logarithmically more

1.01158^1000 ~= 100000

Exponentially more!

1000^(5/3)=100 000

any exponential can reasonably be approximated to a linear in the right range

1000^1⅔=100000

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