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Grue
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02 Jan 2013, 9:11 am

Logarithms. Can they be used to see into the future?

What I mean is, if you took the measurements of something like the thickness of the iPads that have been released to date and input them into a calculator along the years that they were released, could to infer that in a certain period of time, the iPad will be paper thin?



answeraspergers
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02 Jan 2013, 9:31 am

thats just inductive logic. but by that rationale they will eventually be negative thickness

so no it does not work

you are thinking of moores law and applying it to thickness i think



b9
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02 Jan 2013, 9:53 am

Grue wrote:
Logarithms. Can they be used to see into the future?

What I mean is, if you took the measurements of something like the thickness of the iPads that have been released to date and input them into a calculator along the years that they were released, could to infer that in a certain period of time, the iPad will be paper thin?

logarithms are pure and not subject to resistance. if it is conjectured that the elements of reality can be plotted logarithmically, then one may be disappointed.

a logarithmic reduction of a touch pad "volume" will encounter resistance in many dimensions.
the planar (l*w) dimension has to remain the same because miniaturization in that dimension will result in inaccessibility of sections of the surface area by anyone other than brain surgeons.

the only reduction that can be considered is a z axis reduction.
if (theoretically) an i pad is one atom thick, then there can be no 3 dimensional layering of printed hierarchies on top of it , so it stands to reason that the surface area of a 1 atom thick tablet would have to be infinite in order for it to contain all the "overlays" that must find room on the infinitely thin but infinitely capacious plane of existence in which it exists.
.



eric76
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02 Jan 2013, 10:04 am

Grue wrote:
Logarithms. Can they be used to see into the future?

What I mean is, if you took the measurements of something like the thickness of the iPads that have been released to date and input them into a calculator along the years that they were released, could to infer that in a certain period of time, the iPad will be paper thin?


To put it simply, no. That's preposterous.

You could come up with some mathematical model of the development of iPads and make predictions based on that model, but the accuracy of those predictions would likely be minimal and possibly worse than random guessing.



Trencher93
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02 Jan 2013, 11:16 am

You can try doing this, but with a big caveat...

http://xkcd.com/605/



Grue
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02 Jan 2013, 12:11 pm

okay. I don't understand a lot of mathematics concepts. Just I heard, "logarithmic progression" and I thought there might me a mathematical formula for predicting where things are going.

Thanks



NewDawn
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02 Jan 2013, 3:55 pm

A logarithm is the exponent ('power') of a number that has been raised to that power. Logarithms always have a base, usually 2, 10 or the number e.

So you have the powers of 10, like this

10 to the power 1 = 10
10 to the power 2 = 10 * 10 = 100
10 to the power 3 = 10 * 10 * 10 = 1000
etc.

When we take the logarithm with - say - base 10, we're calculating the power.

So

log 10 (1000) = ?

Can you tell to which power you must raise 10 to get 1000?

Logarithms make it easy to add, subtract, multiply and divide very large or very small numbers. That is what they were primarily used for before there were calculators. They are also often used if you want to express values that are very far apart. You probably have heard of a few. The Richter scale for earthquakes is a logaritmic scale, and so are radio frequencies. In computer science they are used to break a difficult problem into smaller pieces.

It's a method of calculating things, not for predicting anything.



ruveyn
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04 Jan 2013, 10:58 pm

NewDawn wrote:

It's a method of calculating things, not for predicting anything.


I think the original poster was thinking about plotting data on a log or semi-log scale.

If the data is related to a process based on an exponential law then such a plot makes good sense.

ruveyn