4 ms·
For the last few hundred years, huge numbers of European-descended men took up tobacco. Moreover, cities were grossly polluted. I wonder if that affected the in
by neilk 4y ago
For the last few hundred years, huge numbers of European-descended men took up tobacco. Moreover, cities were grossly polluted. I wonder if that affected the intuitions of scientists, who were mostly from such places. Maybe they really couldn’t smell very much.
- bobthepanda 4y agoAlso, horse powered transport overwhelmed the senses by producing a lot of horse poop and dead horses. A million kg of horse poop was shoveled out of New York City every day.
- netrus 4y agoMy brain-teaser back-of-the-napkin skills tell me that's also the order of magnitude of human poop produced in NYC every day (I'd think its closer to 2-3 million kg)!
- aflag 4y agoThough at least 50% of it doesn't happen on the streets.
- Viliam1234 4y agoNow let's do the estimate for San Francisco.
- kqr 4y agoAlso known as a Fermi estimation, in case you (or someone else) didn't know.
- geoduck14 4y agoIn school, I was preparing for a presentation about some electrical component we created. One of the questions was "how did you arrive at the proper input voltage". My buddy wrote down "guess and check?" - which I replaced with "Newton Iteration". That was one of my prouder moments
- kqr 4y agoDid you actually use the derivative/first-order Taylor approximation to improve search speed though? My experience is that people instinctually default to some sort of binary search.
- goodpoint 4y agoAlso poor hygiene.
- bobthepanda 4y agoFun fact: New York brownstones have raised levels because they were homes for the rich, who did not want to be at horse poop level.