logarithm

You can extract the logarithm from these, but you can't go the other way around. To someone making 125k, it's more useful to know the distribution of the 25k above than to see them all in a single bucket.

Import a csv, then take the logarithm of one column and plot that against some transformation of another column? No problem - two lines in R, and still highly readable.

Saying it's a result of a flaw in the Mercator projection is like saying zero being undefined is a flaw of the logarithm scale: it's not a flaw, it's a property. If the projection doesn't work for your usecase, don't use it.

It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive. I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle.

A variant of this is to publicly display the logarithm of the score rounded up to an integer, maybe even as a number of stars. If the base-3 logarithm was used, the displayed scores would be: -infinity to 0: bad comment, should be dimmed\n 1: \n 2-3: ★\n 4-9: ★★\n 9-27: ★★★\n 27-81: ★★★★\n 81-243: ★★★★★\n\netc.

Interestingly, there also aren't enough bits to encode the number of times you'll have to repeat taking the base-10 logarithm to get back to a universal scale. Which goes to show that not only your mind, but no entity in the universe can accomplish the feat of representing an arbitrary number in decimal notation, mathematician or otherwise.

Calculus is actually important for Computer Science, it's actually important for everything, it's where you learn how to handle the exponential function and the natural logarithm, how to do approximations and bounds, how to handle infinite series, etc. , and those things then appear all over the place, unlike most things listed it's something that you can expect to encounter almost regardless of what domain you are interested in.