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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Also, 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.

My 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)!

Though at least 50% of it doesn't happen on the streets.

Now let's do the estimate for San Francisco.

Also known as a Fermi estimation, in case you (or someone else) didn't know.

In 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

Did 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.

Also poor hygiene.

Fun fact: New York brownstones have raised levels because they were homes for the rich, who did not want to be at horse poop level.

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