What does our Standard Celeration Chart do?

[This question and its answer was contributed by Dr. Ogden R. Lindsley, in a message posted to the SC List on 9-9-2000.]

Hi All: You often hear people ask, "What does our Standard Celeration Chart Do?" Of the many answers, one of the best is, "It simplifies things."

• It simplifies charting so that six year olds can learn it and teach it to others.
• It simplifies chart reading, making it so fast that we can share charts at 2 minutes each.
• It simplifies chart checking so much that you can check for x2 learning on 60 charts posted on a ten foot stretch of wall as you walk past without slowing your pace.
• It simplifies understanding of all growth and decay. An example of this is how our standard chart simplifies the famous Fibonacci series.

In the early 1970's when I worked out "ChartStat" I was amazed to find that almost every mathematical series, that I had learned years ago in calculus, was a straight line on our standard chart. The formulas for harmonic series, and Fibonacci series, and others, were very different. But they were straight lines, just at different angles, different constant multiples, and therefore different celerations.

The Fibonacci series, that Owen White finds so interesting in his "Log" and "Power" charts List serv post, where the next number is the sum of the two numbers before it, follows:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229, 832040, 1346269....

What surprised me, and will surprise Owen, and should surprise you, is that the Fibonacci is merely a times 1.618 series,

5 x 1.618 = 8, 8 x 1.618 = 13, 13 x 1.618 = 21, etc

This means, of course, that it forms a straight line on our Standard Celeration Chart.

Charted on a daily chart, x1.618 per day makes a straight line celeration of about x47 per week. Charted on a daily chart at x1.618 per week makes a celeration of x1.6 per week. Charted on a yearly chart at x1.618 per year makes a straight line celeration of x10 every five years.

When things are actually only multiplying, we simplify by telling how much they multiply. No need to create puzzles as did Fibonacci, and White, by calling attention to a strange addition formula to describe constant multiple growth. Describing multiplication by addition just complicates and confuses.

Resist being led back to Fibonacci and the year 1228. Think multiply!

We have a good thing going for us. We have multiplication!

Keep it Simple. Keep it multiply. Keep it graphic. Keep it standard.

As ever, Og