The next slot to the left (tun, or roughly a year) again counted up to 20. So 0.0.1.0.0 was one tun (a single 360-day year), while 0.0.19.0.0 was 19 tuns.
The second-last slot (katun) again counted up to 20. So 0.1.0.0.0 was about 20 years, while 0.19.19.17.19 was about 400 years.
The last slot of all (on the extreme left) was called the baktun.
There was the possibility of having a few more slots to the left. They were actually given names, but were never really used much.
The Long Count Calendar
Truth or Untruth
The New Age recyclers of ‘ancient wisdom’ misquote all kinds of pseudoscientific jargon, mixing astronomy and Quantum Mechanics to try to give a ‘scientific’ sound to their outrageous claims. They are more than a little creative with the truth.
Back in 1971, Maurice Chatelain wrote Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space, in which he discussed Atlantis and the Mayan calendar. He claimed that he was a former ‘NASA Chief of Communications’. In fact, he was a lowlevel engineer who was never employed by NASA, but by a subcontractor who had once done some work for NASA.
The Conspiracy Theory…
The time period between 0.0.0.0.0 and 13.0.0.0.0 is about 5,126 years. Some Mayan archeo-astronomers reckon that the calendar should run up to 13, but others say that it should continue to 20. We don’t have enough information to know who is correct—but if it does go up to 20, then this completely destroys the ‘End of Days Conspiracy Theory’, as far as the year 2012 is concerned. But let’s stick to the ‘13 Conspiracy Theory’ for the time being.
The epic claims of the upheavals coming on 21 December 2012 cover a lot of ground. They range from ‘nuclear holocaust’ to ‘Harmonic convergence of cosmic energy flowing through the earth, cleansing it and raising it to a higher level of vibration’, and along the way they include ‘the death of two-thirds of humanity’ and ‘the north and south poles will split’—you get the picture. A Doonesbury cartoon reckons that the possibilities are a ‘New Age of insight and understanding of mass unification of Divine and Earth-Plane selves’ or a ‘nuclear annihilation’—but either way, someone will run a ‘crafts fair’. Other predictions state that ‘a door into the heart of time and space will open’, or that we will have ‘a moment of collective spiritual birth’.
Mark Twain
In the late 19th century, one Big Problem for those studying the Mayans was the starting date of the Long Count. This is called the Correlation Question—how do you correlate the Mayan Long Count with the Gregorian calendar?
One of the people who solved this problem gave Mark Twain his first writing job. He was the newspaper man Joseph Goodman. In 1897 he proposed that the start date for the Mayan Long Count was in 3114 BC. His work was followed up by Juan Hernandez Martinez and later by Sir John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1927. So in some circles, the Correlation is known as the Goodman Martinez Thompson Correlation or GMT. The so-called GMT Correlation places the Mayan Long Count starting date of 0.0.0.0.0 in 3114 BC.
Of course, this GMT confused the heck out of me when I first came across it, until I realised that it had nothing to do with Greenwich Mean Time.
The Big Finish
However, these scenarios are all very unlikely.
First, the Universe didn’t begin on 11 August 3114 BC, but about 13.7 billion years earlier.
Second, when a calendar comes to the end of a cycle, it just rolls over into the next cycle. In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1—or Good Ole 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas.
Third, there are a few Mayan stela that show dates beyond 21 December 2012.
And, finally, it is always remarkably difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, and things that haven’t happened yet.
References
Finley, Michael, ‘The real Maya prophecies: Astronomy in the inscriptions and codices’, http://members.shaw.ca/mjfinley/mainmaya.html.
Jenkins, John Major, ‘The how and why of the Mayan end date in 2012 AD’, Mountain Astrologer, Dec 1994–Jan 1995.
Jenkins, John Major, ‘The Maya calendar and 2012: Why should we care?’, New Dawn, Special Issue No 4.
Sweat Like a Pig
In the past, pigs haven’t had very good PR. In the Bible, Leviticus writes, ‘And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you.’ And both the Jewish and Islamic faiths prohibit the consumption of pork. Today, pigs get even more bad press with regard to their personal hygiene, people disparagingly claiming to ‘…sweat like a pig’.
Pigs 101
Pigs have a stout body, short legs, a small tail and a thick skin, usually with sparse short bristles. They are also hardy, swift and omnivorous. Their life span can reach 25 years in the wild.
We have been domesticating pigs for thousands of years. Smaller pigs (less than 75 kg) are usually turned into pork, while heavier pigs (100 kg and up) are turned into bacon. In each case, about 75% of the weight of the animal is turned into useable meat.
Domesticated female pigs have a gestation period of just three months, three weeks and three days—and with 10 piglets per litter and two litters per year, can breed very rapidly indeed. The most popular breed of pig is the Yorkshire, or Large White, which emerged in the UK in the 18th century. Today there are about a billion pigs on the planet—about half of them in China, some 60 million in the USA and 30 million in Brazil. Pigs are not native to North America. They were introduced to the Caribbean islands of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, on his second journey in 1493, and then taken to the mainland in the early 1500s.
Pigs are easy to feed, breed quickly and (for some of us) are delicious to eat.
Gonna make you sweat!
A cross-section of human flesh
Wild pigs have to wallow in mud because they cannot sweat—contrary to popular belief.
Sweat 101
We humans (and the other primates, horses and bears) have lots of sweat glands. In fact, horses are the Kings of Sweat.
Sweat is our personal air-conditioning machine. The operating temperature of human beings is ‘set’ by the hypothalamus in the brain at about 37°C. You can survive if your temperature drops down to about 25°C—a drop of 12°C. But you cannot survive overheating to the same degree. Once you increase your temperature to about 43°C (6°C above normal), you almost certainly won’t survive.
Men and women have roughly the same number of sweat glands—about 2–5 million over the whole body, or about 150–350 per square centimetre. When the outside temperature rises, a liquid that is 99% water oozes out of these sweat glands onto the surface of the skin. The remaining 1% of liquid sweat is sodium chloride, other salts, amino acids and a smattering of other chemicals. The sweat then evaporates—cooling your skin.
When you get hot, the temperature sensors in your skin send this ‘heat’ information to the hypothalamus. It then sends signals down through the spinal cord and into the sympathetic ganglia. In turn, these send signals to the eccrine sweat glands. A few more steps, and cooling sweat starts oozing out of your sweat glands.
All human beings sweat, but there are some differences. Women sweat at a higher temperature than men do, and women also generate less sweat.
Sweat and Emotion
There are two main types of sweat glands. The eccrine sweat glands mainly produce sweat for cooling. However, the apocrine sweat glands produce sweat with added ‘special’ chemicals. (I remember which gland is which because ‘eccrine’ starts with the letter ‘e’, which is also in ‘sweat’.)
These special chemicals can have strange effects on other animals of the same species. For example, it has been long known that armpit sweat helps women to synchronise their menstrual cycles. In 2007, it was discovered that just a few whiffs of male human sweat was enough to increase levels of cortisol (a stress hormon
e) in the blood of women who smelled this male sweat.
Sweat and Exercise
Comparing fit people to unfit people, the fit person will sweat sooner during exertion and at a point when their body temperature is lower.
If you are fit (‘fit’ in this case means ‘acclimatised’ to the local temperature as well as having more cardiovascular training), your sweat reflex kicks in sooner (than if you are unfit). Therefore, your core temperature will be at a lower temperature when you start to sweat. This means that you can potentially continue your exertion for a longer period of time before you begin to overheat. So you can run down an antelope, which is a good sprinter but a lousy marathon runner. Indeed, marathon runners can perform better if they are ‘pre-cooled’ immediately before the race by wearing a special ‘cooling’ jacket.
However, if you are ‘unfit’ you will start to sweat at a higher temperature. You will activate your cooling mechanism later—and miss out on the antelope.
People can train to sweat more. The Australian triathlete, Ali Fitch, moved from the cool climate of Sydney to the tropical Northern Territory specifically for ‘acclimatisation training’. She increased her rate of sweating from 300 ml/hr to 1,500 ml/hr.
Fatter people sweat more than skinny people. The extra fat acts as an insulator, forcing them to sweat more to lose excess heat.
You can generate several litres of sweat per hour, while working strenuously in a very hot environment. Sweating is good, enabling us to survive in very hot climates.
When It’s Too Hot…
Animals have a few tricks that they can use to cool down.
Panting is the process of breathing more rapidly, and running outside air over the dense network of blood vessels inside the nose. The air becomes saturated with water vapour. This evaporation effect then cools the blood, which enters the general circulation and helps bring the overall temperature down. Panting is more important in smaller animals, such as dogs.
Sweating works well in those animals that have the right sort of sweat glands (water-producing rather than odourproducing). But some animals, such as our friend the pig, simply don’t have the right kind of sweat glands. Sweating is more common in larger animals, such as horses.
Wallowing in something wet is quite effective in bringing down the temperature. Pigs and elephants use this method.
Spreading saliva on the fur is used by some rodents and macropod marsupials to cool down.
Thermo-Neutral Zone
Pigs, on the other hand, don’t like very high temperatures—because they have very few functional sweat glands and can generate hardly any sweat at all. And they are not very good at dumping heat from their wet mucous membranes in the mouth by panting, which dogs can do quite well. In short, pigs are not very good at handling heat stress. In the wild, pigs tend to feed at night or in the cooler part of the day and rest in the hot part of the day.
Their so-called Thermo-Neutral Zone, where they are very comfortable, runs from 16°C to 22°C. It’s also called the ‘Zone of Minimal Thermoregulatory Effort’. When an animal is placed in this temperature zone, it can adjust its temperature very easily. To lose or conserve heat, it can open or close blood vessels in its skin. It can spread out all of its limbs or curl up into a ball to adjust its surface area (it is from here that it loses a lot of heat). If the animal has fur, it can lay the individual hairs down flat against the skin or erect them to turn them into a better insulator.
In commercial piggeries, when the temperature rises above this narrow band of 16–22°C, water is dripped, sprayed or misted onto them and fans are activated to cool them down.
Female pigs that are feeding their little newborn piglets in a piggery have extra problems. Because the piglets have a Thermo-Neutral Zone slightly above 35°C, they need to be kept warm with heat lamps. (So even on a hot day, the piglet has to burn energy to keep warm!) The lactating sow needs to eat more to be able to make milk, but the presence of heat lamps means that she eats less. Therefore, she loses more weight than normal during lactation and comes out of lactation with a reduced weight. As a result, she is later to come on heat again, which means that she has both a reduced litter size and an increased chance of spontaneous abortion.
Panting Myth
Dogs do not pant to cool down, by breathing rapidly in and out of their mouth. No, they breathe in through the nose and then out of the mouth. This gives a wonderfully efficient one-way flow of air. They can then increase the surface area exposed to the moving air by dribbling their long tongues out of their mouths.
Pigs Can’t Sweat
Pigs like to wallow in seeps, springs, ponds, lakes, creeks and, yes, mud. They do this, not because they enjoy being dirty, but because they like to cool down. Because pigs can get sunburnt the mud also acts as a sunblock. Unfortunately, all this wallowing can cause environmental problems—local soil erosion, degradation of their natural habitats and increased sedimentation in local waterways.
Pigs—Good Press
People who don’t like pigs are usually those who don’t eat pork.
The Chinese, who eat pork, have the pig as one of the signs of their zodiac. In Greek mythology Demeter is the Goddess of farm animals, including the pig. And Winston Churchill said, ‘Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.’
And to find the highest affection for pigs, look to the owners of Harley Davidson motorbikes. They call their machines ‘hogs’.
Despite these problems pigs have to wallow because they cannot sweat—contrary to popular belief.
Which brings us back to the ‘sweaty pigs’ belief, which is widely held in our culture. In 1979, when Bette Midler was being transformed from a stage performer adored mainly by gay audiences to a mainstream actor, she was playing the role of a self-destructive rock star (modelled on Janis Joplin) in the big-budget movie The Rose. She preferred being a movie star, saying, in a Women’s Weekly interview, ‘It’s soooo easy. You don’t have to get up there for four hours every night and sweat like a pig.’
Widely misunderstood—that’s the pig. In fact, even cartoon characters such as Homer Simpson misunderstand them. In ‘Lisa the Vegetarian’ in The Simpsons (Season 7, Episode 5), Homer asks his daughter, Lisa, if she’ll ever eat bacon again, and she says ‘no’. He then asks if she’ll consider eating ham or pork chops, not realising that all these meats come from the same animal, the pig. When Lisa tells him that they do, he does not believe her, and sceptically mocks the pig as a ‘wonderful, magical animal’. Doh!
Hot Pigs
Female pigs have a hard time when the weather is too hot. They have a delayed puberty and, overall, a lower reproductive performance. They have a lower conception rate, an increased rate of spontaneous abortion and a reduced litter size.
References
Currie, W. Bruce, Structure and Function of Domestic Animals, CRC Press, 1995, pp 321–323.
Hope, Warren, ‘Bette Midler goes to Hollywood’, Women’s Weekly, 7 March 1979.
Reece, William O. (Editor), Dukes’ Physiology of Domestic Animals, Cornell University Press, 12th Revised Edition, 2004, pp 965–969.
Tummaruk, Padet, et al., ‘Seasonal effects on the reproductive performance of gilts and sows’, Thai Journal of Veterinary Medicine, 30 September 2002, pp 19–31.
Wyart, Claire, et al., ‘Smelling a single component of male sweat alters levels of cortisol in women’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 7 February 2007, pp 1261–1265.
Zuger, Abigail, ‘More than skin deep’, Sydney Morning Herald (Health & Science), 14 February 2008, p 22.
Greenhouse Consensus
It doesn’t matter whether you call it the Greenhouse Effect, or Global Warming or Climate Change, it’s a topic that generates much heat and controversy. And there are many claims and counterclaims.
If your only sources of information were daily newspapers and commercial TV, you would probably think that climatologists (climate scientists) could not agree on anything about the Greenhouse Effect. In other
words, you would be led to believe that there was a lot of internal debate amongst these scientists as to whether Global Warming is actually happening.
But this is a nasty little lie. In truth, climatologists almost universally agree that Climate Change is not only real but that we humans are also causing it.
Here Comes the Sun
Practically everything on Earth relies on the Sun. Each second, the Sun burns about 600 million tonnes of hydrogen, turning it into 596 million tonnes of helium. The shortfall of four million tonnes gets turned into energy. Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation tells you how much energy (E) you get if you turn a certain mass (m) into energy. The letter ‘c’ stands for the speed of light, a very big number—300,000 km/sec. When you square ‘c’, you get an absolutely huge number.
The Sun produces about 30 billion billion MW (megawatts) of power. The power density is very intense close to the Sun. Imagine this power appearing on the surface of a virtual sphere that is continually expanding as it travels away from the Sun at 300,000 km/sec. As this radiated power travels, it spreads out and becomes diluted. The Sun is about 149.6 million km from the Earth, so the power that the Sun delivers to the surface of our planet is about one kilowatt in each square metre of radiation.
Science is Golden Page 3