I love #6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
People say lol a lot when they didn't really. But I really did at that one. Because I know exactly why it is true. What's going on is that you have a high order term that dominates the big-O. As long as that is anything of the form x^k it will be linear, and the lower order terms will show up as minor deviations, which the magic marker smoothes out.
Since big-O scaling terms of that form arise in a lot of different equations, it is very common that real data DOES show up as a (reasonably) straight line on a log-log graph. And the slope of that approximate line tends to be very useful to know.
But if you see data set after data set plotted on log-log with magic marker lines drawn, it is easy to ridicule the phenomena. :-)
People say lol a lot when they didn't really. But I really did at that one. Because I know exactly why it is true. What's going on is that you have a high order term that dominates the big-O. As long as that is anything of the form x^k it will be linear, and the lower order terms will show up as minor deviations, which the magic marker smoothes out.
Since big-O scaling terms of that form arise in a lot of different equations, it is very common that real data DOES show up as a (reasonably) straight line on a log-log graph. And the slope of that approximate line tends to be very useful to know.
But if you see data set after data set plotted on log-log with magic marker lines drawn, it is easy to ridicule the phenomena. :-)