Hacks of System Engineering to Understand Exponential Growth and Vaccine Panic. Okay! Today I get to play armchair epidemiologist! But first, let's all learn the Rule of 72! The Rule of 72 is a way to understand exponential growth. Exponential growth is something we see all the time in information technologies. Moore's law [1] is an example. It says that every two years the number of transistors you can fit into a fixed area doubles. This picture is updated from one of Kurzweill's books: [2] The Singularity is Near. It shows several things that will become very useful to be able to predict exponential growth rates. There's a linear X-axis that goes in terms of years (it could be any standard increment of time, days, hours, weeks, months, etc. Then there is a Y-axis that is given in powers of 10. Each tick represents 10 times the tick below it. Thus a straight line in this graph is actually an exponential growth curve. For every increment of time you get a multiplicati
UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS (8/15/21): They painted the final lines and messed it up again at Pagemill road (going down to three lanes and taking one as a dedicated exit and barely fixed the entry of the diamond lane... so it's still a little bit screwed up at one place... backups will not be eliminated entirely. DOH! It seems the California Department of Transportation has taken my suggestions made four years ago and decided to repave the 280 freeway so that there are four continuous lanes for the entire trip between San Francisco and San Jose. My last report on this crazy backup causing 'improvement' was here: https://www.wiigf.com/2016/11/a-proposal-to-fix-unnecessary-freeway.html. I pointed out that there was space to stop the backups and increase the traffic flow and was flabbergasted as to why they had designed the freeway to impede traffic flow. Now they've gone back and repaved it and fixed it. I have no need to repaint the lines anymore as the DOT has done it thems