Kids considered by the City Authorities to be a nuisance, living with rats
in the sewers of Rio are ocasionally culled, perhaps not explicitly by the
Authorities, to reduce their nunbers by police armed with guns.

Amongst other ways of making a living they survive be selling home-brewed
cigarettes, loaded with cannobis and more powerful drugs on the city
streets. It is not surprising why the Authorities consider them to be a
nuisance - it has a bad effect on the wealthy tourist trade.

Now selling cigarettes involves monetary and arithmetical transactions.
Accepting bank notes and coins and giving correct change. Mental
calculations involve percent of drugs per inch of cigarette length, the
number of cigarettes in the pack, wastage etc. All must be done very fast
before an armed policeman appears. And must be done accurately and honestly
to avoid upsetting customers with the consequent longer-term bad effect of
loss in trade.

There has evolved in the sewers of Rio an arithmetical method of addition,
subtraction, multiplication and division, altogether different from the
Arabic procedures (Baghdad, Basrah, Mosul, before foreign weapons of mass
destruction were introduced) now adopted by the rest of the educated world.

Not so very long ago a small party of professors, Phd's, students etc., from
an English univerity made an expedition to Rio specifically to investigate
this apparent revolution in the very foundation of Mathematics.

They returned with a new insight into how the human brain works with numbers
and retired to study and then present their findings.

Since then all has been silence. I have not spent much time with Google. But
there is no doubt that the self-taught sewer kids of Rio are better educated
at arithmetic than the so-called engineers who argue amongst themselves in
words on this newsgroup without any use of numbers and relative quantities.
---
Reg.