So close

From this NYT article:

Chief Justice Roberts took issue with both restrictions. The Navy had agreed to shut down its sonar if marine mammals were sighted within 200 yards. The appeals court’s requirement that it increase the zone to 2,200 yards, Chief Justice Roberts said, would “expand the surface area of the shutdown zone by a factor of over 100,” given “the exponential relationship between radius length and surface area.”

So close to sounding smart and yet so far. Well, at least he got the numbers right.

(x^2 is a polynomial, 2^x is an exponential function, the area of a circle would get really big really fast if it was an exponential function of the radius)

Am I being really petty? Yes.