Comment from Rex, February 5, 1999
Very readable article. But I take objection to the statement, "The logarithm of a number is how many times you have to multiply 10 by itself to get that number." The example was:

10 000 = 10 x 10 x 10 x 10

Here 10 was multiplied by itself three times, not four. Just count the multiplication signs! A better statement is "The logarithm of a number is how many factors of 10 are multiplied together to get that number".

Author's Response:
I wrote the paper and I agree with Rex's comment. I don't intend to rewrite it, but I have actually thought about this comment many times over the intervening years. If he ever comes back here, I hope he will be glad that his comment made me do a lot of thinking. He may have thought I never saw his comment or that I didn't care. Quite the opposite. I don't know why I never wrote a reply before now, though. In my mind, I refer this this as the "N-1 problem". Sometimes, we count from 1 and sometimes we count from 0. Computer programmers ofter count from 0.

I've even toyed with the idea of writing a PUMAS paper called "The N-1 Problem." Some of the reasons I never rewrote the paper is that I though the wording would get pedantic and I couldn't think of an easy way to express it. I also figured that anyone reading the paper would see Rex's comment and they would understand what I meant as a result and could deal with it. Thanks for the comment, Rex. I really do appreciate it.