I have asked some twenty-five audiences at Business Schools in the past several years about semi-logarithmic plots. It is akin to asking if you enjoy having palsy. I've had as many as two hands go up almost always they were undergraduate biology majors.
Since the most telling story about stock market valuations getting out of whack with company fundamentals is plotting when the company's growth rate changes, I find this lack of knowledge of what Einstein termed the "eighth wonder of the world" incredibly troubling.
Imagine my delight yesterday during the UIDP talk to ask and find that at least one-third of the audience raised their hand. This is a collection of more than fifty people in one room knowing about such an esoteric topic as how to point compound interest. Amazing.
I've shared earlier that Microsoft's Instructor Guide has a paragraph (in 1,092 pages) devoted to semi-log plots, saying that "this is very important for business applications" but then fails to show a picture or even the tab for how to invoke the function.
Slide rules, of course, are based on logarithmic geometry; scientific calculators make this a trivial step. How come this isn't de rigeour?
Dream on, Charlie. If folk could do this, they might also be able to learn to read the CDC graphical studies, and conclude that these too are potentially valuable.
It might be a stretch to imagine that Algorithms could be mastered; they are not closely related to either Al Gore or to Logarithms.
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