> He guesses the ice in the berg is at least 1,000 years old, but could also be exponentially more ancient — even formed as many as 100,000 years ago.
That's not exponentially more (which would be a preposterous 2^1000 or 10^1000 years old). It's just 100 times more. Should I stop being annoyed at how media use the word and just accept their alternative meaning of "a lot" ?
High variance/confidence interval. Probably needs some C14 / O18 dating to narrow it down by field researchers gathering samples rather than us speculating from afar.
This is how language develops, I’m afraid. But imagine that the age is 10^k where k is something like “age class”. Then indeed the age grows exponentially :)
Journalists tend to just think of it as "a lot more", but since they didn't specify the base of the exponential we can at least find a way to make the article technically correct. There are fun classes that admit incomparable values, such as the Surreal games. If they'd said "the game {1 | -1} is exponentially more than { | }" then it'd be impossible to find a base to make the statement true. There's lots of fun to be had with this sort of math, as you know.
If we want to express ourselves using exponents, consider that 1000 years (1×10^3) and 9000 years (9×10^3) would be of the same "degree" of ancestry, while 100,000 years (1×10^5) would be of completely different (exponential) significance.
That's not exponentially more (which would be a preposterous 2^1000 or 10^1000 years old). It's just 100 times more. Should I stop being annoyed at how media use the word and just accept their alternative meaning of "a lot" ?