6:57 AM
> I still haven't read the original Conan
I assume that it is a bit more subtle
The original books were by Robert E. Howard, and his Conan is just a thug whose approach to any problem is to hit it with something hard and heavy.
I have to concede there is a certain appeal to this philosophy :-)
But dozens of authors have picked up the Conan stories since, and their Conan tends to be more sophisticated. I find the original stories get a bit wearing - there are only so many variants of hitting things with large, heavy objects.

3 hours later…
10:21 AM
If you've got a metric like $ds^2=adx^2+bdy^2$ and you need to calculate the volume of the manifold, you'd use $\sqrt{|g|}dx\wedge dy=\sqrt{|ab|}dx\wedge dy$, which you would just integrate as $\int_V \sqrt{|ab|}dxdy$ right? I.e. the wedge product is "hidden" in the integral and you just calculate the volume like this?

Well the definition of the integral on a manifold is $$\int_U dx^1 \wedge \ldots \wedge dx^n = \int_{\phi(U)} dx^1 \ldots dx^n$$
there is a correspondance between the integral on a form and the integral on the Lebesgue measure

with the metric determinant thingy in there too right?

it's not "hidden"
sure yes

ah yeah i meant that in a very loose sense :P
ty

2 hours later…
12:27 PM
There's apparently something called a "Taub-Bolt space"
Physicists are having too much fun naming stuff