Thursday 20 January 2011

Exponential Decrease on Exponential Growth

In a fit of randomness, I decided to look up math lectures on YouTube, and got distracted watching "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy". A lecture by Dr. Albert Bartlett about exponential growth and what it means for populations and energy usage, and warnings thereof. ... And yeah, it is rather compelling...

The video is labeled as "The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See", and it comes in eight parts. (You can tell it's important because of the capital letters.) And the first part, added below, has over two million viewers... as I said, it is oddly watchable.

However, looking at part two, there isn't quite as many... in fact (at time of writing):
Part One: 2,212,586 viewers
Part Two: 604,322 viewers
Part Three: 450,124 viewers
Part Four: 370,463 viewers
Part Five: 175,983 viewers
Part Six: 277,386 viewers
Part Seven: 270,737 viewers
Part Eight: 359,072 viewers

It is over an hour, so it's not surprising that not everyone made it though the entire series. However it drops fairly radically to under 10% by part 5. That's a dramatic drop! But then it picks up again to end on around 14%. However, there's a lot of people who clearly jumped over the middle videos to find out what's going on at the end. It's an interesting curve. Looking for math, I found math about the math... it's a meta world out there...


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