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A comment on Heroku for Science. Parent comment

Re:Heroku for Science by emmett on Monday July 28, 2014 @11:48PM (#8100588)
Keep fighting the good fight, Eliezer.

To add on: Some words have valuable and specific meanings! We don't have a good substitute word for "exponential" that means the same thing. Please make an effort not to do this!

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Re:Heroku for Science by irollboozers on Monday August 11, 2014 @02:32PM (#8164525)
Sorry, but in this case, it's actually N^x. Even running PCR and gel analysis requires steps where the time is dependent on the number of samples (e.g. pipetting, walking to the centrifuge, making multiple gels)
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Re:Heroku for Science by emmett on Monday August 11, 2014 @03:36PM (#8164814)
Generally speaking, running double the number of samples requires approximately double the amount of work, maybe a little less since you're doing it in bulk.

Are you really saying that going from 10 samples to 11 samples causes a doubling (or 1.2x-ing or tripling or whatever) of the time/work required? That's what exponential means.

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