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.