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by JadeNB 3791 days ago
> 5xN is easier to remember than 16xN on account of 5 being the smaller number.

By that logic, shouldn't it be easier to remember 7 * n than 10 * n, because 7 is the smaller number?

> 2^n is logarithmic

Also, as Jtsummers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10973381) points out, the function `n \mapsto 2^n` is exponential: its growth is significantly faster, not significantly slower, than exponential.

2 comments

I didn't talk about growth, i was specifically thinking about a comment that called our number system logarithmic and it stands to reason, if you wan't to find x in 10^x=y, unless you do calculus in your head at the age of five, you may as well look at a grap of the exponential progression. now that's two incoherent arguments, but the latter should point out that it doesn't really matter which way, and the first alludes that there is something more basic to the logarithm, something easier to capture. If I look at the grid pattern in logarithmic plots, it's not a runaway progression but a nice repetition where the zeros in the end of the numbers at each 10^n interval behave like the unary number system, which is the basic positional system and arguably easier even then binary.
Please read 'linear' in place of the last word 'exponential' in my reply. Oops.