Heh, I suspect you are correct—agriculture would have been much easier for me to comprehend. I'm also reminded[0] of Slartibarfast's 'Starship Bistromath'; from

Heh, I suspect you are correct—agriculture would have been much easier for me to comprehend. I'm also reminded[0] of Slartibarfast's 'Starship Bistromath'; from Wikipedia: The ship is said to work by abusing the laws of 'bistromathics', which is the specific mathematics of values of various factors in restaurants, such as the bill, number of people attending, number of people said to be attending, number of people who leave and the time they all arrive. In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, bistromathics is explained that "Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space [...], so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants." [0] Actually it was my sister who reminded me about Starship Bistromath after I told her about this, not my own recollection.