2008: April 4th Good News (Australian Saves Wife from Crocodile, Two Men Survive 20 days Adrift in Atlantic, more...)

Good Evening everyone,

I apologise for the tardiness of this post; however, due to having to go to the emergency room yesterday, and being told to "rest, rest, rest", I was not able to post anything yesterday, and am only just now getting to the posts for today.

Today I want to draw your attention to two articles that I found particularly interesting.
First is an article about Aztec Math. Scentists have been wondering how it worked for centuries, and have finally figured out their system, which includes computing with hearts, bones and arms. Second is an article about a find of arabic coins in Sweden. Found on 1 April, the coins date from aproximately 850 CE.

Anyway, today is the day I move to my new apartment here in Seoul. Wish me luck! I hope all of you enjoy the articles today, and see you tomorrow. :)



Today's Top 5:
1. 2 Men Survive 20 Days Adrift in Atlantic (Staten Island Live)
2. Australian Saves Wife From Jaws of Crocodile (Independent IE)
3. Aztec Math Finally Adds Up (LA times)
4. Swedes Find Viking-era Arab Coins (BBC)
5. Maya Angelou: 80 Years Young and Her Hopes for the Future (The Scotsman)


Honorable Mention:
1. President Michelle Bachelet: Women are More Rational (Times Online UK)
2. Horses Can Count as Well as a (small) Child (Independent IE)
3. 'Skeletal And Blind' Moon Bears Rescued (Sky News)



1. 2 Men Survive 20 Days Adrift in Atlantic
http://www.silive.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/international-27/1207339152123590.xml&storylist=topstories
4/4/2008, 3:52 p.m. EDT
By JUAN MANUEL PARDELLAS
The Associated Press

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Canary Islands (AP) — A ship rescued two men whose boat had been adrift for 20 days in the Atlantic Ocean south of Spain's Canary Islands, officials said.
The men, who were on a recreational fishing trip, were spotted Friday while drifting without power 160 miles south of the island of Tenerife by a Cypriot merchant ship, which took them aboard.
Rescue officials said they ran out of drinking water eight days ago, but could not immediately explain how they survived.
A Spanish helicopter was scrambled from Tenerife to pick the men up and fly them to a hospital, a Canary Island rescue service spokesman said on condition of anonymity in keeping with the service's rules.
The air crew reported the two men, Cristo Rey Herrera, 64, and Jose Quevedo, 61, were in good physical condition despite their ordeal.
They had no radio aboard and had not filed proper paperwork for the trip, the spokesman said.
Their boat, the 33-foot Saulo, was reported missing March 15 by relatives, the spokesman said.




2. Australian Saves Wife From Jaws of Crocodile
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/australian-saves-wife-from-jaws-of-crocodile-1337397.html?r=RSS
By Kathy Marks in SydneyFriday April 04 2008

A woman grabbed by a crocodile as she stood on a riverbank in Australia's Northern Territory was rescued by her husband, who wrestled with the reptile and poked its eyes, forcing it to release her from its jaws.
The attack by the eight-foot saltwater crocodile was the first ever in Litchfield National Park, south-west of Darwin, where the man-eating 'salties' rarely venture. Wendy Petherick (36) escaped with puncture wounds to both thighs and a severe cut to one finger, thanks to the prompt action of her husband, Norm Moreen.
Ms Petherick was washing her face in shallow water when the crocodile lunged, seizing her by both legs and pulling her into the river.
She tried to prise open its jaws as she shouted for her husband to help her.
"Next thing, Norm is in the water, he jumped in and jumped on the croc's head and was feeling for his eyes," she said as she recovered in hospital. (© The Independent, London)




3. Aztec Math Finally Adds Up
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-aztecmath4apr04,1,3276041.story?track=rss
By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 4, 2008

It has long been a mystery of Aztec arithmetic: What is three arms plus five bones?
Now researchers know: five hearts.
The odd symbols had been noted for centuries -- thousands of them appear in Aztec property registries that were created around 1540. But no one knew the value of the symbols or how they were used to represent the size of land plots for tax assessment and other purposes.
After three decades of work, geographer Barbara Williams and mathematician Maria del Carmen Jorge y Jorge have found a solution that reveals a complex surveying system with a rudimentary ability to calculate the area of irregular shapes and manipulate fractional amounts.
"It cracks the code," said Williams, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin.
The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Science, based their analysis on two books, called the Codex Vergara and the Codice de Santa Maria Asuncion. The manuscripts were written on paper brought by Spanish conquistadors, who had arrived in Mexico two decades earlier.
The researchers said the property drawings in the books were probably transcribed from even older documents written on tree bark or cotton cloth.
The pages of the books are filled with tiny property maps. For each plot, there are two drawings -- one showing the lengths of the sides and another showing the area. The measurements are represented by seven symbols: lines, dots, arrows, hearts, hands, arms and bones. Each map also includes the name of the property owner and the soil type.
Researchers already knew what each map represented and the value of some of the measurements. A line, for example, was the standard unit of length, which was known as a tlalquahuitl, or rod, and in modern units would measure a little more than 8 feet.
When the researchers knew the values of the units in roughly rectangular plots, they could easily follow the logic of the Aztecs and reproduce their calculations by multiplying lengths and widths.
But they were stymied in calculating many plots because they didn't know the value of the units. The breakthrough came when Jorge y Jorge, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, found that the values of some areas were prime numbers.
That meant that some of the unknown symbols had to represent fractions of a rod, she said.
By trial and error, she decoded the system.
A hand equaled 3/5 of a rod, an arrow was 1/2 , a heart was 2/5 , an arm was 1/3 , and a bone was 1/5 .
A set of at least five formulas emerged showing how the Aztec surveyors determined the areas of irregular shapes. In some cases, the Aztecs averaged opposite sides and then multiplied. In others, they bisected the fields into triangles.
Of the 369 plots the researchers examined, they could accurately reproduce the Aztec math in 287 cases, according to the study.
Still, Williams and Jorge y Jorge don't understand how the Aztec surveyors decided which formula to use for each area calculation.
In addition, it is unclear whether the same system was used in other city-states and if it applied to measurements besides land dimensions.
alan.zarembo@latimes.com




4. Swedes Find Viking-era Arab Coins http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7330540.stm
Page last updated Friday, 4 April 2008 13:35

The Arab coins reveal where they were minted and the date Swedish archaeologists have discovered a rare hoard of Viking-age silver Arab coins near Stockholm's Arlanda airport.
About 470 coins were found on 1 April at an early Iron Age burial site. They date from the 7th to 9th Century, when Viking traders travelled widely.
There has been no similar find in that part of Sweden since the 1880s.
Most of the coins were minted in Baghdad and Damascus, but some came from Persia and North Africa, said archaeologist Karin Beckman-Thoor.
The team from the Swedish National Heritage Board had just started removing a stone cairn at the site "when we suddenly found one coin and couldn't understand why it was there", she told the BBC News website.
"We continued digging and found more coins and realised it was a Viking-age hoard." The coins were left there in about AD850, she said.
Such Viking hoards usually come from Gotland - a large Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, she explained.
"No Viking was buried at this site - the grave is older. Maybe the Vikings thought the hoard would be protected by ancestors," Ms Beckman-Thoor added. Vikings had settled in a village nearby.
The Vikings travelled widely in their longships in the Baltic region and Russia from the late 8th to the 11th Century. They are known to have travelled as far as North Africa and Constantinople (now Istanbul).




5. Maya Angelou: 80 Years Young and Her Hopes for the Future
http://news.scotsman.com/world/Maya-Angelou-80-years-young.3947612.jp
Published Date: 04 April 2008

It's more than a little disconcerting to hear Dr Maya Angelou, the legendary black American author, feminist and civil rights activist, quote Robert Burns to me in a flawless Scottish accent that rivals my own. The woman who is also an accomplished poet, orator, dancer and singer is fondly recalling for my benefit one of her favourite Burns poems, A Man's a Man for A' That, her famously warm, rich and rhythmic Southern accent dissolving seamlessly into a broad Scottish burr:
"Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that.
"Oh yes, I do love that bit," she chuckles, her laugh deep, long and very merry.
She is talking to me from her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on the eve of her 80th birthday, and she assures me she still has plenty to laugh about. "My bones will not let me forget my age, but my spirit is young," she says. "I'm really just a teenager at heart. I have everything to be thankful for."
Born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis, Missouri, 80 years ago today on 4 April 1928, Angelou has had a colourful and at times arduous life, which has been depicted in detail in six volumes of memoirs. Most famous is the first book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings: published in 1969, this frank and moving account of her childhood catapulted her to literary stardom. Raised by her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of seven, after which the young girl did not speak a word for nearly six years, rendered mute by this appalling trauma.
It was as a child that she discovered Burns, along with countless other poets and writers, and eventually – thanks to an inspirational schoolteacher who insisted that to truly enjoy poetry, one must read it aloud – began to talk again.
"When I was a little girl in Arkansas, I began to read Burns and I couldn't figure out the language he was using," she says. "I've always loved puzzles, though, and I got a dictionary. I did my best, and eventually I did work out what he was saying and I loved it. His spirit was a humanitarian spirit, he was able to love human beings, and his imagination was vast."
By 17, she was a single mother. While she raised her young son, Guy, she earned money to keep them both by dancing at a strip joint and running a brothel. In her early twenties she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos, but was divorced within two years (she has married again more than once, but refuses to dwell on the number of times). She has worked as a cook and a streetcar (tram] conductor, worked in a mechanic's workshop stripping paint from cars, as an editor for an English-language newspaper in Egypt, been an Emmy-nominated actress, a producer, a playwright and a director, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also, of course, a renowned and seemingly tireless civil rights activist.
Now entering her ninth decade Angelou remains stubborn in her refusal to retire, writing from home, teaching American studies at Wake Forest University and travelling the country in her role as a speaker. She is a great-grandmother, speaks several languages and has published numerous volumes of poems and children's stories.
Her achievements and accolades are too extensive to list in full here, but she insists that there is still more she wishes to do. "I need to be a better human being," she says. "Kinder, truer, more patient, more supportive, analytical but not critical. I'm trying to be a Christian, but it's not something you achieve (then] sit back and rub your hands together gleefully and say, 'I've got it.'"
Asked about the hardships she has faced and whether there is anything about her astonishing life she would choose to change, Angelou responds by singing an old African-American gospel song to me, her voice low, husky and sweet;
"Now Lord don't move my mountain,
But give me the strength to climb,
And Lord, don't take away my stumbling blocks,
But lead me all around."
"That's the way I see it. There are things I wish I had known better," she explains. "I wouldn't have done certain things maybe, but who I'm trying to be today and even where I've arrived so far, I'm grateful for it. I've come through some harrowing times and some very painful times, but I've come through."
Tomorrow she will celebrate her birthday with a party in Florida, thrown by her close friend the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. "It's going to be a surprise, but I love surprises," she says. "We all have that child in us, the one who wants to be a little afraid, but delighted. That's what a surprise is. You look forward to it with just a little trepidation." The day will have particularly poignancy for her, however, it also being the 40th anniversary of the death of her great friend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. For years after his assassination, she refused to celebrate her birthday, preferring instead to take the time to remember Dr King with his wife, Coretta. Until Coretta's death in 2006, each year on Angelou's birthday the two friends would talk on the telephone and send each other flowers.
"He, his dreams and my country will be in my thoughts tomorrow. And so will Coretta," she says. Were Dr King alive today, how does she think he might reflect on the progress made in terms of civil rights?
"I don't think he was impatient. I think he knew he had to do what he had to do while he was here," she says. "But you see, the idea of freedom, the thought of liberation, the concept of justice is so vast that I don't believe he thought it could have been achieved in ten years, or in 40 for that matter.
"I think he would hope that there would be some people carrying on and that we would be becoming better and better, and I think we are. Not as fast as we'd like to, not as fast as we need to, not as comprehensively as we must, but we are becoming better. The two front-runners to become president of this United States in the Democratic party are a white woman and a black man. You know that we've come a long way for each of them to be seriously considered."
Angelou has chosen to publicly voice her support for Hillary Clinton, a fact that she has joked about with Winfrey, who has chosen to back Barack Obama. She wasn't torn between supporting a woman and supporting a black man, she says, but rather has admired Clinton for years.
"While I respect Senator Obama, I've been watching Hillary Clinton for over 20 years, since she was the wife of the Governor of Arkansas," she says. "I saw how she carried herself. I said to myself then that if she ever runs for anything, I'm going to support her. I think Hillary Clinton would be the best president we could possibly have."
Angelou speaks with as much measured passion on the topic as when she recites Burns, discusses her students, laments human rights failures ("we have so many brutalities on this planet that, if you had a globe, you could spin it around and put your finger anywhere, whether it's Tibet or Londonderry, and we just have so many civil rights denied") or simply cracks a joke, attempting a broad Glaswegian accent with a rendition of I Belong to Glasgow, pronouncing the Scottish city "Glas-gee" before erupting with laughter.
However, she insists that, despite her experiences and observations, she believes she still has much to learn and that at 80, life still presents very few answers. "I believe we sit around and preen and pretend to know something, but to tell you the truth I think we know very little," she says.
"We take on some answers and wear them and disclaim them and orate and carry on and let our voices rise and fall on some superficial wisdom. Or maybe, we know that love heals, but some people pretend they don't even know that. But the older I become, the less I know. I'll think I have an answer and then it flitters away on the morning breeze."





Honorable Mentions:

1. President Michelle Bachelet: Women are More Rational
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3684993.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
April 4, 2008
Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor

Chile’s first woman president has claimed that at times of crisis she and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, the only other woman leader in Latin America, are less likely to panic than their famously macho male counterparts.
Speaking during a visit to London, President Michelle Bachelet bemoaned the sexism in her region, which she said continued to hamper the advancement of women.
She is in London to attend a conference hosted by Gordon Brown for centre left leaders, including Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister and Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister.
“Yes I think women still have to prove themselves and have requirements put on them that men do not,” said Ms Bachelet, who visited the Queen at Windsor and will spend the weekend with the Prime Minister at Chequers.
Ms Bachelet, 56, has had an extraordinary political career. She was arrested and tortured, along with her parents, during the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and then fled into exile where she qualified as a doctor. She returned home in 1979 and was elected president in 2006, after serving as defence minister.
She insisted that she was not “whining” about the problems of being a woman leader, simply observing a truth that applied to her region and beyond.
She said that “a strong woman” was invariably called “a woman of steel”, where as “a soft woman” was usually dismissed for “lack of leadership”.
“I remember (former Chilean) President Lagos once was so touched by something his eyes were teary and the press said ‘oh, what a sensitive man’. When I do it, I am called hysterical,” she said.
She added, however, that female leadership had a lot to offer the region, once dominated by strong men.
When Colombia and Ecuador nearly went to war last month in a dispute over a cross-border attack on rebels by Colombian forces, Ms Bachelet and Mrs Kircher were involved in trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the dispute. In the event the situation was defused after repeated diplomatic interventions.
Mrs Bachelet said that she and Mrs Kirchner laughed about it afterwards. “Christina (Kirchner) said they usually think that women are hysterical,” but this time the two South American leaders found the opposite was true.
“It was very funny,” she said. “We were the ones who called on everybody to be cool. It is a paradox that women are pretty rational.”




2. Horses Can Count as Well as a (small) Child
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/horses-can-count-as-well-as-a-child-1337396.html?r=RSS
Friday April 04 2008

Horses have the same ability to count as human infants, a study has shown.
In tests, the animals watched plastic apples being placed out of sight in buckets and then chose the one containing the larger number.
Fake apples were used to ensure they were not relying on their sense of smell to make the selection.




3. 'Skeletal And Blind' Moon Bears Rescued
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1311819,00.html?f=rss
Eve Johnson
In China
Updated:15:15, Friday April 04, 2008

Twenty-eight moon bears stuffed in tiny cages were rescued from a bile farm in western China after suffering a life of torture, an animal rights activist has said. Moon bears' bile is used for medicineJill Robinson, Animals Asia Foundation founder, said she was horrified by the physical condition of the animals.
"All were in impossibly small cages, all skeletal, wounded in various ways and terrified of what would happen in this next stage of their lives," she said.
Some of the bears were blind, had ulcerated gums and necrotic wounds, with "their flesh literally rotting down to the bones", said Ms Robinson.
On arrival at the rescue centre in Chengdu, the AAF team set to work giving each of the animals a physical evaluation.
Some of the bears did not survive the process - one died on the operating table and five had to be euthanised.
In China, bile is farmed through what is called the "free-drip" method - a catheter extracts the liquid from deep inside the animal's gall bladder through a gaping hole which is kept open.
It is an excruciating process that, for many of the bears, is a daily ordeal.
Bear bile is a prized ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine - it is believed to be able to bring down high temperatures and treat liver and eye maladies.
Although China is legally banned from exporting the bile, there is still domestic demand and a thriving black market trade across Asia, as well as the United States and Canada, the AAF said.
Bears on bile farms will spend their lifetimes in cages and rarely live beyond 20 years.
AAF is working with local ministries to rescue 500 bile farm bears. The organisation has already freed 247.
They say there are still around 7,000 left in farms across China.