I've been considering reading this book - can you tell me what I might get from it in addition to what I learned in undergraduate maths/physics courses?
I found these courses allowed me to do calculations (e.g. contour integrals, conformal transformations) that were useful but always felt like black magic. I don't have an intuitive feel for the subject. I am wondering if this book will help me with that?
None of our animals' waste is any hazard to you, unless you slip on it!
You are right that it can be done badly, as can many other things. I'd say you are actually arguing against badly regulated animal farming (especially since you mention the US), rather than animal farming per se.
I have learned something new today (re manure from dovecotes).
However, I think this is another example of something that is 'just too small to matter' in terms of feeding the world's population today. Often I see 'nice' stories about e.g. using human waste to fertilise fields, that quite frankly do not (usually) scale at all well. We (UK) use tractors to shovel and spread manure - 10s, 100s of tons of the stuff - a dovecote or 10 really isn't going to help, and certainly won't be economic.
It seems a bit like someone telling me I should use an abacus to increase my compute power - 'they were a good idea in the past, why aren't you using them now?'
Thanks. I see it for sale for £4 second hand, so maybe I should buy it for the novelty value alone. I presume I shouldn't try to refresh my java from it though.
If we knew that this pandemic came from a lab, that would have massive implications for how tightly we control this type of lab research - both in terms of whether we do the gof research, and also in how we run and regulate the labs. Surely you can imagine the reaction if, hypothetically, the world knew that this coronavirus was made in a lab and then escaped?
I'm amazed that you think otherwise - it's one of the nice things about hn that I occasionally encounter views that are so different from my own.
I found these courses allowed me to do calculations (e.g. contour integrals, conformal transformations) that were useful but always felt like black magic. I don't have an intuitive feel for the subject. I am wondering if this book will help me with that?