I see London, I see France...

...I see a wonderful example of exponential decay! For reasons that I can't remember, I decided to record the number of cars burned in France during each night of their recent riot season in an Excel spreadsheet. When plotted, I discovered that this number dropped exponentially each day. And, before I found which day the number of burnt cars reached the "near-normal" amount of 93, I was able to predict when it would happen! Here is the approximating equation (note that it only holds true for the range of days starting Nov. 11 and ending when the number of cars burned returns to normal), and the plot (click on the image for a clearer picture):If I get around to it, I will see if I can derive a theoretical reason for this plot, which might yield an equation which allows for the ~93 cars burned regularly, and might show us just how good the French cops are. Stay tuned...

Incedentally, another potential case of exponential decay was cut short by Xanga. David Ludwig, who murdered his girlfriend's parents, had a blog hosted by Xanga. The day that the address for his blog was posted by various news sources, his SiteMeter log showed that his page visits spiked to 95,000. After that, the number of visits each day started dropping exponentially, until Xanga shut it down.

In any case, one can't help but marvel at the function whose wonderful properties can be expressed succinctly (ignoring arbitrary constants) as: