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Symbols on the Wall Push Maya Writing Back by Years
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, January 10, 2006
A vertical column of 10 glyphic words, uncovered last year in ruins in Guatemala, is unreadable even by the most expert scholars, but they know what it means - that Maya writing is older than they once thought.
Archaeologists reported last week that the script sample, discovered at San Bartolo, in northeastern Guatemala, is clear evidence that the Maya were writing more than 2,300 years ago. This is a few centuries earlier than previous well-dated Maya writing and 600 years before the civilization's classic period, when a decipherable writing system became widespread.
Scholars of Maya culture and other pre-Columbian societies said the discovery deepened the chronology of literacy's origins in the Americas. But they were not sure whether it brought them any closer to learning exactly when, where and how early American cultures first put words into graphic form.
"This early Maya writing," the discovery team concluded in the current issue of the journal Science, "implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica."
William A. Saturno, the team leader who is a Maya archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire and Harvard, said the study of the origins of writing in Mesoamerica, the ancient region of Mexico and parts of Central America, was now "likely to get more complicated in the near future as more early texts come to light."
Joyce Marcus, a professor at the University of Michigan and an authority on Mesoamerican cultures, said the Maya discovery "is terrific and does constitute some of the earliest Maya writing."
"Every piece of early writing enriches our knowledge of the ancient Maya," Dr. Marcus said.
As matters stand, the Zapotec, who lived around Oaxaca, Mexico, appear to have led the way to literacy, at least by 400 B.C., perhaps as early as 600 B.C. Clear evidence for Maya writing has been more recent.
A few scholars contend that the Olmec, living along the Gulf of Mexico near Veracruz, developed a script even earlier.
Some of the confusion stems from differing definitions of writing, whether a few symbols strung together suffice or fuller texts are required.
But it is generally agreed that the primal writing by contemporary groups in Mesoamerica was one of just four scripts - Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese are the others - to be invented independent of outside influences.
What may be the earliest Maya words turned up in the same ruins where the same archaeologists reported last month finding a richly colored mural depicting the culture's mythology of creation and kingship. The mural is one of the earliest examples of Maya art, dated about 100 B.C.
Boris Beltrán, an archaeologist at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, was exploring deeper in the ruins of a pyramid, down several layers of debris and time below the mural chamber. There he came on the Maya glyphs painted in black on white plaster.
A scribe apparently drew the characters along a subtle pinkish-orange stripe as a guideline.
Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal associated with the inscription dated the written words to as early as 300 B.C. The column, Dr. Saturno said, was presumably part of a text associated with a nearby work of art that included a painted image of the maize god.
The style of the painting was distinct from later Maya art, and the glyphs were more archaic and abstract than later Maya writing.
This has been frustrating for David Stuart, a professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas, a member of the discovery team.
Dr. Stuart said the glyphs had distinctive Maya characteristics and were "the earliest firmly dated Maya writing." But he and others were able to decipher just one symbol, the one meaning "ruler" or "lord" or possibly anyone of noble status.
"It's the same script," Dr. Stuart said. "But it was written several centuries before the full Maya script that we can read. It makes it tough. I don't think we will be able to read this anytime soon."
The exact meaning of the other nine glyphs will probably remain obscure, he said, until additional and longer texts are found from the same time in Maya history. Then there may be enough specimens, he continued, to compare with later decipherable glyphs and "make some tentative connections with things we are familiar with."
The discovery at San Bartolo is expected to inspire archaeologists to search for other examples of Mesoamerican writing from this period or earlier. Previous ideas about the relationships of Olmec, Zapotec and Maya writing are giving way to new thinking.
"Now it is looking like a lot of Mesoamerican cultures came up with writing at about the same period," Dr. Stuart said. "They all were in contact with each other, building cities, trading, telling their history and ideology through script and art."
Dr. Marcus cited recent excavations that produced monuments with Zapotec writing as early as 600 B.C., and even though the Mesoamerican cultures were in frequent contact with one another, she pointed out the individuality of their writing systems.
"What is of great interest," she said, "is that Zapotec writing is distinctive and Maya writing is distinctive, and each has its own genesis."
A Conversation with Kerry Emanuel: With Findings on Storms, Centrist Recasts Warming Debate
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, January 10, 2006
For decades, Kerry Emanuel, the meteorologist and hurricane specialist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was known as a cautious centrist on questions of global warming and hurricane ferocity.
Professor Emanuel asserted often that no firm link had been established between warming and the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
But in August, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Professor Emanuel wrote in the journal Nature that he had discovered statistical evidence that hurricanes were indeed affected by global warming. He linked the increased intensity of storms to the heating of the oceans.
"His paper has had a fantastic impact on the policy debate," said Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford. "Emanuel's this conservative, apolitical guy, and he's saying, 'Global warming is real.' "
On a recent visit to New York, Professor Emanuel, who is 50, said, "It's been quite a ride since the Nature article." He added, "But it's a really bad thing for a scientist to have an immovable, intractable position."
Q. Let's go back to late August. What were your feelings as you watched television and saw Hurricane Katrina heading toward New Orleans?
A. I'll go back to a few days before that. As Katrina was making up off the coast of Florida, it was already an interesting storm. Though she was weak, the prediction was she was going to hit Florida.
But when Katrina came off the west coast of Florida, there were new predictions taking it into the central gulf and then up toward New Orleans, and I became concerned.
Many people in my profession had been worried about New Orleans for a very long time. And we had always envisioned these worst-case scenarios, and this was beginning to look like one of those. And so I plotted out the position of the "loop current," which is this warm current of water in the Gulf of Mexico, and the forecast had the hurricane going right up the axis of this loop current.
I remember looking at that, and alarms went off. I had this terrible feeling of dread, which deepened when the hurricane was elevated to a Category 5. We all knew that the pumps that kept New Orleans dry wouldn't be able to handle more than about a Category 3.
My mother has an elderly friend in New Orleans, and I did something I never do. I sent her a message: "You ought to get out, now!" In retrospect, I will say that had Katrina been 30 miles further west, the death toll could have been much worse. New Orleans would have flooded more rapidly and to deeper levels.
Q. Because last year's hurricane season was so intense, many people declared: "Ah, ha! Global warming!" Were they right?
A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global warming.
There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about.
We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5 percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature increase of only one-half degree Centigrade.
Q. So what are the implications of increased ocean temperatures?
A. Not much for storms at the time of landfall. But if you look at the whole life of storms in large ocean basins, we are seeing changes. And even if that doesn't have an immediate effect, people ought to be concerned about this because it is a large change in a natural phenomenon.
Q. There are scientists who say of fossil fuel consumption and global warming, We may not have all the evidence yet, but we ought to be acting as if the worst could happen. Do you agree?
A. It's always struck me as odd that this country hasn't put far more resources into research on alternative energy. Europeans are. France has managed to go 85 percent nuclear in its electrical generation. And the Europeans have gotten together to fund a major nuclear fusion project. It almost offends my pride as a U.S. scientist that we've fallen down so badly in this competition.
Q. How did hurricanes become your specialty?
A. When I was a child, we lived in Florida for three years, and I went through of a couple of hurricanes and was very impressed by them. Later, at M.I.T., I was asked to teach a course in tropical meteorology, which included hurricanes.
As I started preparing, I realized I didn't understand what I'd been taught on the subject. As with many things, you think you understand something until you try to teach it. After some reading, I realized that the reigning theory had to be wrong.
This theory held that the main thing that drives a hurricane is just ingestion of enormous quantities of water vapor from the atmospheric environment. It made predictions that weren't true. So it became a very big intellectual challenge to me. The more I got into it, the more interesting it became.
Q. Given what you know about hurricanes, should we be building beachfront housing on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts?
A. Disaster specialists will tell you that part of the increasing lethality of land-falling hurricanes isn't related to nature. A lot of it has to do with human activity. We're moving to the coasts in droves, like lemmings.
We're building waterfront structures there that aren't necessarily strong. We're taxing the infrastructure and paying a big price for doing that.
Q. Would you ever buy a house on the beach?
A. I'd love to! But if I could do that, I'd insist on paying for my risk. And I'd do what is now being called "the Fire Island option," which involves putting up flimsy houses that you don't mind losing to a storm. You don't insure them.
Q. Almost concurrent to Hurricane Katrina, you published a beautifully packaged book, "Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes." How did you feel about the timing of its publication?
A. Not terribly good. If one is just interested in sales, I suppose it was fortuitous. But I was trying to convey a sense of hurricanes as not just things of scientific interest, but as beautiful. A leopard is a very beautiful animal. But if you took it out of its cage, it would go for your jugular. Anyone can understand that neither a leopard nor a hurricane is a willful killer.
Q & A: Baby Boom
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, January 10, 2006
Q. What time of year are most babies born in America? Why?
A. July and August recently traded first and second places among the most common birth months, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But statisticians would probably caution against finding a strong trend, because the variation between months is not wide and because links between seasonal timing and possible causes are not clear.
In 2002, there were about 359,000 births in August and 358,000 in July. In 2003, there were 364,226 births in July and 360,103 in August. The totals for the rest of the months of 2003 varied only moderately, from 307,248 in February, with just 28 days, to 359,644 in September. The Center for Health Statistics noted that all the months showed narrowly distributed average birthrates, from 14.5 to 14.7 live births per 1,000 women from 15 to 44.
A much stronger trend can be found for days of the week: Sundays averaged just 7,563 births in 2003; Mondays climbed to 11,733; Tuesdays surged to 13,001; Wednesdays, 12,598; Thursdays, 12,514; Fridays, 12,396; and Saturdays fell back to 8,605.
A strong argument can be made for a preference for weekday births in a modern health care system, with the possibility of inducing labor ahead of weekends and holidays.
However, in an industrialized society, as opposed to an agrarian one, the season of the year is not an important factor in the timing of childbirth or conception.
The Consumer: When the Pill Arouses That Urge for Abstinence
By MARY DUENWALD, The New York Times, January 10, 2006
It is no secret that some women who take birth control pills lose interest in sex. They have been reporting this side effect to their doctors since oral contraceptives came into wide use 40 years ago.
"Little by little, my boyfriend and I started noticing that I was just never in the mood. Never," said Cody, a 27-year-old San Francisco woman, who asked that her last name not be used for reasons of privacy.
Some studies have also indicated that the pill can decrease the frequency of some women's sexual thoughts, make becoming aroused more difficult, or decrease lubrication, making sex painful.
Yet the possibility that there may be a link between oral contraceptives and desire will surprise many women. Few doctors bring it up when they prescribe the pill, and package inserts do not mention it.
Doctors say this is not necessarily an oversight. Giving any clear warning about sexual side effects is difficult, they say, because birth control pills affect women in different ways.
"Some women will have a decrease in sex drive while they're on the birth control pill, and some will have an increase," said Dr. Paul Stumpf, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Now a controversial new study suggests that the pill not only suppresses desire, but can also do so for months after a woman stops taking it, by raising levels of a certain protein. According to Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a co-author of the study and the editor in chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which published the report, the findings may explain what he has long observed in women on oral contraceptives.
"When they stopped taking the pill, we fully expected their sexual function to recover," said Dr. Goldstein, a urologist in Boston. "But we weren't seeing that."
Other experts question the idea that a single protein could have such a central role in women's sexual desire, and they remain doubtful that the pill could have a lasting effect. They say more research is needed.
"There's been limited attention paid to this area," said Dr. David F. Archer, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.
Some 11.6 million women in the United States - 19 percent of those 15 to 44 years old - take birth control pills, according to a survey in 2002 by the National Center for Health Statistics. Eighty-two percent have used the pills at some time.
Some specialists in sexual medicine say doctors should not prescribe a drug to prevent pregnancy without letting women know that it may decrease their interest in sex.
"I think there's been a serious neglect on the part of the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry," said Dr. John Bancroft, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, who lives near Oxford, England. "We've been trying to bang this drum for quite some time." But some doctors who prescribe oral contraceptives said that if they were to discuss sexual dysfunction, they might influence patients' expectations, setting off the problem.
Dr. Bancroft's research indicates that at least one user of oral contraceptives in four has sexual side effects.
Dr. Archer estimates, based on what he calls the "very sparse literature," that 5 percent of women quit the pill because of side effects. A larger percentage may notice lowered libido, but keep taking the pill anyway, he said.
Sometimes it helps if a woman switches to a different pill, doctors say.
The effects on sexual function may stem from the effects of the pill on testosterone, which is thought to help drive women's sexual desire. Oral contraceptives block testosterone production in the ovaries and increase the production in the liver of sex hormone binding globulin, a protein that attaches to much of the free testosterone in the blood, rendering it inactive.
That protein is the one that Dr. Goldstein and his colleagues found elevated in women who quit birth control pills. The researchers looked at the records of 124 women who had visited Dr. Goldstein's clinic complaining of sexual dysfunction.
Some were taking the pill, some had stopped, and some had never used it. Those taking the pill had levels of sex hormone binding globulin four times as high as those who never used it. The levels fell in 26 women who had quit, but for at least four months their levels remained roughly twice as high as in women who had never used the pill.
Dr. Bancroft has found contradictory evidence. In a study that is under way, he has measured sex hormone binding globulin in women who have taken the pill in the past and has found their levels to be normal.
Dr. Bancroft plans to measure testosterone levels before and after subjects start taking contraceptives. In past research, measuring testosterone levels in the blood has not shown a direct correlation with sexual interest. "Women who have said, 'I have no interest in sex,' can have a serum testosterone level in the high normal range," Dr. Archer said.
Perhaps, he added, something besides testosterone is at work. Evidence suggests, for example, that the progesterone in birth control pills may alter libido. Emotions and personal circumstances also matter. A woman may lose interest in sex because she is under stress or because she is not attracted to her partner.
Dr. Stumpf compared sexual side effects to weight gain. Women on birth control pills often add a few pounds over the years. Yet many women who do not take contraceptives gain weight as they age, too.
It is the same with libido, he said, adding, "Sex drive has dozens of dials and switches and connections."
New Uses for Glut of Small Logs From Thinning of Forests
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, January 10, 2006
DARBY, Mont. - Five years ago, intense forest fires around this logging and tourist town burned more than 350,000 acres of forest. Today huge swaths of charred trees cover the mountainsides.
Partly in response to these fires and others on national forest land elsewhere in the West, President Bush introduced the Healthy Forest Initiative in 2002 to reduce the wildfire threat to towns surrounded by publicly owned forests. As work crews thin stands of trees, as called for in the initiative, one result has been a glut of logs smaller than eight inches in diameter.
Until recently, most small trees were collected in piles and burned, but now businesses and the Forest Service have begun looking for uses for the tiny trees.
"It's high cost, low value and a lot of pieces to handle, which takes time and effort," said Dave Atkins, head of the Forest Service's Fuels for Schools program for several Western states.
Although loggers might receive $90 a ton for house logs, Mr. Atkins said, they are paid less than half that for smaller trees.
Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams.
Peter Stark of Missoula, a freelance writer, wanted to thin his 80 acres of forest clogged with downed timber and crowded trees to prevent a fire but could not afford to do it, since clearing usually costs $300 to $1,000 an acre.
He eventually found someone to remove the trees, most six or seven inches across, and the money he was paid for them covered the cost of thinning.
At the same time, he was building a dance floor for his wife, Amy Ragsdale, who teaches dance at the University of Montana. Shocked at the cost of hardwood, Mr. Stark realized that he might be able to turn the waste trees into flooring.
Mr. Stark bought back 25 tons of the larch trees and found a custom sawmill that could handle small diameters to turn them into tongue-and-groove flooring. The floor turned out so well that Mr. Stark formed a company, North Slope Sustainable Wood, with two partners, to market small diameter larch, the hardest of the soft woods, from forests being thinned.
He sees such activity as a solution to the controversy over logging in Western forests.
"I'm a tree hugger," he said. "If we can take the small trees and leave the big ones, the loggers and environmentalists are both happy."
Significant numbers of Westerners see small trees as the future of the timber industry, simply because there are so few big trees left.
"Years ago, we utilized logs that were mostly over 50 inches in diameter," said Gordy Sanders, resource manager for Pyramid Lumber in Seeley Lake, which has retooled to use small-diameter timber. "Now, if we see one of those a year we're amazed."
Another project, at the Forest Service's laboratory at the State and Private Technology Marketing Unit in Madison, Wis., used small-diameter trees in a new library here, in the town that bore the brunt of the fires.
"This library was a response to the fires," Veryl Kosteczko, chairwoman of the library board, said as she pointed out the roof beams that are all six inches or so in diameter. "We utilized underutilized wood that used to be left as trash."
Another use of small logs is as biomass to be turned into fuel. Under its Fuels for Schools program, the Forest Service is giving grants up to $400,000 for schools and other public buildings to build furnaces that burn biomass.
The three public schools in Darby are heated by a large $800,000 furnace that burns a steady stream of tiny branches and wood chips arriving by conveyor. Rick Scheele, the maintenance supervisor for the schools and the mayor of Darby, estimates that heating the school with diesel this year would have cost $125,000 and that using biomass will cost $28,000.
"It's allowed a few extra teachers to stick around," Mr. Scheele said. "It's been pretty tight around here."
For the moment, environmentalists are watching the small-diameter movement warily.
"We support hazardous-fuels reduction," said Bob Ekey, Northern Rockies regional director for the Wilderness Society. "But we want to make sure it's done well, and done right, so we don't create more demand than the land can sustain."
Pataki Wants Drivers to Fill Up With Ethanol or Biodiesel
By DANNY HAKIM, The New York Times, January 7, 2006
ALBANY, Jan. 6 - Some 200,000 New Yorkers own vehicles that can run on corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline. But many have no idea that their Ford Explorers, Chevy Impalas or Nissan Titans can use this type of fuel, which some view as a way to liberate Americans from Middle Eastern oil.
In any case, the closest station carrying ethanol is in Ottawa, as the Northeast is the one region of the United States that uniformly does not offer ethanol to the public.
But Gov. George E. Pataki wants to change that and make ethanol and biodiesel, two controversial alternative fuels, available in the 27 service areas on the New York State Thruway and in 100 more stations throughout the state as early as this year, in a first small step toward reducing the state's petroleum consumption. The governor is also proposing incentives to bring refineries that produce ethanol into the state.
Costs and further details of the plan, which Mr. Pataki first sketched out in his State of the State address on Wednesday, will not be disclosed until he makes his budget proposal later this month. If the plan is approved by the Legislature, it will give New Yorkers one of the nation's most diverse ranges of fuel choices. Only Minnesota offers an ethanol-rich blend known as E85 at more than 100 stations. Likewise, biodiesel is offered at only a few hundred of the nation's roughly 180,000 stations.
Both fuels can be made from a variety of crops, trees and plant material, and even used grease from fast-food outlets in the case of biodiesel. Ethanol, or grain alcohol, is already mixed with gasoline sold in the New York metropolitan area, but in amounts of about 10 percent. By contrast, E85, as its name suggests, is 85 percent ethanol.
Using it is not far-fetched. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has become a formidable competitor to gasoline.
Biodiesel is more commonly sold as B20, a blend of 20 percent biodiesel, with the rest conventional diesel fuel. While ethanol smells like moonshine, a car with biodiesel can smell like cooking French fries through a tailpipe. Both fuels have their share of skeptics and believers. Willie Nelson, for instance, sells his own brand of B20 known as BioWillie and pitches it as an alternative to consuming fuel from the Middle East.
The governor's plan comes after the oil price shocks of the last year and frustration with automakers for suing New York for adopting California's greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars.
The plan also includes incentives to help the state modify its hybrid-electric vehicles so that the cars can be plugged into stationary outlets to enable them to use even more electricity than fuel, a practice discouraged by the auto industry.
"Are we supposed to sit around and wait for Detroit to do these things?" said Charles G. Fox, a deputy secretary to Mr. Pataki who oversees energy issues, in an interview on Friday. Part of the plan, he said, was aimed at promoting the use of alternative fuels that can be used right away, as opposed to more futuristic fuels like hydrogen. Biodiesel can run in any diesel engine, and several million cars and trucks on the road nationwide can use E85.
Criticism of the governor has come from several sides.
Peter Iwanowicz, a director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York, said the environmental benefits of the two fuels were mixed.
"Ethanol increases ozone formation, which is obviously harmful for people with lung disease, and biodiesel increases emissions of nitrogen oxide," he said.
But a variety of research suggests that the fuels can be environmentally beneficial, depending on how they are produced.
Mr. Pataki has been criticized for promoting ethanol because it is made from corn grown in states that include Iowa, which he has been visiting recently to gauge support for a possible presidential run.
But even the governor's advisers say that making ethanol from corn is a bad idea and that they prefer using wood or certain kinds of grass.
Environmentalists have largely denounced making ethanol-capable vehicles, calling that a boondoggle intended for the agriculture lobby and Detroit. When automakers build cars and trucks that can use ethanol, called flex-fuel vehicles, they earn credits that make it easier to meet fuel-economy regulations, in turn giving them leeway to build more gas-guzzlers.
Automakers have also not even told many customers that they own vehicles with such a capability, but Mr. Fox said New York might do so by consulting state records. Consumers can learn if they own one by examining their vehicle identification number as described at www.e85fuel.com.
Only about 400 stations nationwide sell E85, and none of them are in the Northeast. On Friday, a gallon of E85 was selling for $1.73 - in part because of subsidies - at a station in Akron, Iowa, compared with $2.19 for a gallon of unleaded regular.
That does not represent a discount, in real terms, because ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline, and a driver cannot go as far on a gallon.
Some studies, particularly a recent one by Cornell University, have suggested that producing ethanol from corn costs more energy than it creates, when the diesel fuel used by tractors and the production of fertilizer and other factors are considered.
"Some people think it's an environmental messiah, and other people think it's alchemy," said Ryan S. Karben, a Democratic assemblyman who is the chairman of a subcommittee on renewable fuels. "The question is why put such a controversial technology at the forefront of the state's energy strategy?"
Mr. Fox, Mr. Pataki's deputy, says the administration is far more interested in fostering research and development of new processes to create ethanol. With corn, he said, "it takes too much energy to make a gallon of ethanol."
Mr. Pataki has the use of a Chevrolet Suburban that can run on ethanol from stations available to government vehicles. If nothing else, his plan would allow him to keep using ethanol after he leaves office.
Stewart Hancock, a spokesman for Northeast Biofuels, a company that is refitting a brewery in Fulton, N.Y., as an ethanol plant, said he hoped to start production within a year.
"I told the governor we'd have some to put in his black Suburban before he leaves office," he said, "so the clock is ticking."
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Date: 2006-01-10 02:45 pm (UTC)and I am getting so frustrated at all of this 'science reporting' that doesn't actually report facts, but just these guys from the lung association who are relying on really old data that may or may not be true any more. and after that they throw in a bone like "But a variety of research suggests that the fuels can be environmentally beneficial.."? it's so damning to allow the naysayers the use of specific scientific terms and to make the proponents this vague research group without any real information.
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Date: 2006-01-10 06:14 pm (UTC)That's a great story, thanks for the link. I've been thinking of getting some Mayan glyphs for a tattoo at some point.