Take the observation of an approximately exponential decay of some "thing" over 
time. Pick the value of the number of things you had when you started making 
the observation. Scale your subsequent observations by the initial value. By 
eyeball pick a timescale over which the ratio is really much smaller than one, 
and scale your observation time by that amount. Now plot thing-ratio to 
time-ratio and fit an exponential curve. The timescale you eyeballed divided by 
the dimensionless exponent from your curve fit gives you the decay time 
constant of the process.

Logarithm is inverse. So rotate and flip your graph paper around.

We teach this kind of thing in freshman physics labs. 

Les


Sent from my iPad

On Aug 14, 2012, at 6:50 AM, Paul Cockshott <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> I am not quite sure how to handle this if the functional form we have is 
> exponential 

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