A steady tap adds the same amount every day — a straight line. A culture that doubles multiplies by the same factor every day — a curve that bends ever upward.
At first the fast tap runs away and the tiny culture looks hopeless. But multiplying always wins in the end: no matter how absurdly you crank the tap, the crossover day just slides a little to the right — it never disappears. Each doubling of the flow buys you only a few extra days.
This is why compound interest beats saving a fixed sum, why a rumor outruns a newspaper, and why the old story of a grain of rice doubled on each of 64 chessboard squares ends with more rice than the world has ever grown.
Pull the log-scale lever and the ruler itself changes: on a logarithmic axis, steady multiplication becomes a perfectly straight line — the honest signature of exponential growth.
Something in the simulation stopped unexpectedly — the lesson continues without it. Nothing you did was wrong; you can move on.