{"id":3290,"date":"2020-03-14T12:03:20","date_gmt":"2020-03-14T12:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/14\/but-its-exponential\/"},"modified":"2020-03-14T12:03:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-14T12:03:20","slug":"but-its-exponential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/14\/but-its-exponential\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;But it&#8217;s exponential!&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Peggy Noonan <a href=\"http:\/\/peggynoonan.com\/dont-panic-is-rotten-advice\/\">advertises her ignorance<\/a> in this opening sentence:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">This coronavirus is new to our species\u2014it is \u201cnovel.\u201d It spreads more easily than the flu\u2014\u201cexponentially,\u201d as we now say\u2014and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Why is it &quot;novel&quot;? It <em>is<\/em> a form of flu, and it is <em>not<\/em> unique in spreading exponentially. <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">Noonan seems to think that &#39;exponentially&#39; is some newfangled buzzword.&#0160; Not so. It has a precise mathematical meaning, and the Wuhan Flu &#8212; to use my preferred politically incorrect moniker &#8212; is not unique in spreading geometrically (exponentially) as opposed to arithmetically.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 12pt;\">If you have forgotten, or have never learned, the difference between arithmetic and geometric progressions, Dr. Math has a simple and clear <a href=\"http:\/\/mathforum.org\/library\/drmath\/view\/52335.html\">explanation<\/a> for you.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peggy Noonan advertises her ignorance in this opening sentence: This coronavirus is new to our species\u2014it is \u201cnovel.\u201d It spreads more easily than the flu\u2014\u201cexponentially,\u201d as we now say\u2014and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal. Why is it &quot;novel&quot;? It is a form of flu, and it is not unique in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/14\/but-its-exponential\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8220;But it&#8217;s exponential!&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,622,476],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-and-fitness","category-innumeracy","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}