Increased by a power of 2

[jack]

Dear Science Fiction Author,

I love humorously circuitous circumlocutions as much as the next Three Musketeers fan, but even I have to admit that "increased the rate of those incidents by a power of two" could more easily be written as "doubled". (Or if you mean, by a higher power of two, or if you mean "squared", then I think you're using numbers wrong.)

Love Cartesian Daemon

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I'm not sure two is the automatic choice of power of two. Why not, say, 1.000000001? That's a power of two as well, albeit not an integer power.

Moreover, is there anything other than a lack of units to suggest they meant "increased... by a factor of a power of two" rather than by an absolute amount that's a factor of two? :-p

[jack]

The context is "fights in a bar by military personnel", suggesting a dramatic increase, but not one that completely dominates the original. It _could_ be any factor, but as I say, the sentence would be meaningless, since ANY factor would be a power of two. So I'm very much inclined to assume it was woolly wording for "two", simply because that's the simplest interpretation, but I'm happy to switch if someone suggests a better interpretation.

Or I suppose, since it was a throw-away line, the author may not have had any specific number in mind, just the connotations I described, which is still a bit duff.

[simont]

Taken completely literally, "increased by a power of two" doesn't even sound multiplicative – it suggests to me that if there were A incidents last year and B incidents this year, then they are claiming that B = A + 2ⁿ for some n.

I think surely they just wrote 'power' when they meant to write 'factor', probably because 'power of two' is a common phrase in other contexts and the wrong neuron fired.