re: #58 Teukka

Also, there’s this nasty property with anything that displays an exponential curve, such as the global temperature curve… You can go from “okay the change is manageable” to “holy fuck the graph just blew an elephant sized hole in the ceiling” really fast.

Like, if you have a bowl of bacteria that double every 30 seconds. The bowl overflowed at 12:00:00 pm sharp. At which point was the bowl half-full?

There’s a reason why people who do work with exponential curves daily hate the unchecked variety with a vengeance.

Real-world examples are the SL-1 and Chernobyl Block 4 accidents. First case, a technician jogged a control rod too much when re-attaching it to the controls, resulting in a power excursion that caused the reactor vessel to jump up 2 meters (SIC(!)). In the other, from the first idiot move to the point of no return it was 40 seconds, and a reactor designed for 3000 MWt output 30,000 MWt as its final confirmed reading (it probably went way beyond 30GWt).

The failure to understand exponential functions is the greatest flaw of the human race.