22 December 2008

Logarithmic jihadism

From the Wall Street Journal:
U.S. counterterrorism officials have been on guard for homegrown recruitment by radical groups. Intelligence analysts from the New York Police Department, in a study of radicalization in Western Muslim communities, warned that "jihadist ideology" is "proliferating in Western democracies at a logarithmic rate."
Maybe it's just me, but logarithmic proliferation doesn't seem all that scary.

5 comments:

Jeff said...

Well, logarithmic growth has a very steep initial climb...

JD said...

Well, logarithmic growth does diverge to infinity...

plam said...

I always hate it when people misuse exponential. "Sir, you mean quadratic!" But this cracked me up.

Ed Webb said...

Is 'police intelligence' the new oxymoron, replacing 'military intelligence'? I hope not, given the scale of the al-gebraic threat.

Kweetal said...

One way to make sense out the "logarithmic growth" comment is to imagine straight-line growth on (semi)logarithmic paper. That would amount to exponential growth.