"Reg Edwards" wrote in message
...

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.

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.

Or much more likely, a "culling" by customers / compettiors.

So why would you expect this particular geographic environment to provide
unique educational stimulus, above and beyond the crystal meth dealers of LA
or the rock cocaine vendors of Chicago?


There has evolved in the sewers of Rio an arithmetical method of addition,
subtraction, multiplication and division, altogether different from the
Arabic procedures 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.

After they sobered up, they realized that the Brazilian Renaissance only
changed the course of world thinking for 12 minutes.

Ed
wb6wsn