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
The Scientific Method applied to groups of People
“But what…is it good for?” – Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968 (commenting on the microchip).
Solutions, not platitudes. Do-good, results oriented planning and solution building. Share the knowledge that makes the future better, then put it into practice. We are the rational optimists that make the world better for everyone.
Faith. Religion. Science. Does the difference make a difference?