Fans of natural logarithms (Ln) will realise that they now seem to have been rebranded as "lorns". I think we've agreed on that spelling instead of "Lawn", which is a suburb of Swindon. Well, at least it's better than the class who used to refer to it as the "in" button on the calculator. So imagine my pleasure to discover that my Scottish holiday was to the region of Lorn. I want to be MacDougall of Lorn when I grow up. (NB1 some of you might take this as evidence that it will be a long time before I do grow up) (NB2 the carving is in the marvellous church of St Conan - not the barbarian- which is very close to the Ben Cruachan pumped storage facility at Loch Awe)Logarithms (ordinary Log on a calculator) are a great way of working out how to express any number to the power of 10. I'm not fond of the number 3. To avoid using it, I can do Log3, which is 0.477. So instead of saying 3, I can just say "10 to the power 0.477" instead, because they mean the same thing.
Natural logarithms are based on the number "e", which is another fantastic irrational number like pi. It helps you to work out a way to write any number as a power of e. We use it a lot in physics to analyse exponential decay in radioactivity and in capacitors. It helps us turn curved graphs into straight lines. (Now Ln3 = 1.099, so I could avoid saying 3 by calling it "e to the power 1.099" instead.)
