Cousin Mat was on ESPN over the weekend in a bodybuilding competition in Los Angeles. Cousin Bruce said that he did pretty well, but he wasn't sure if he won first place. I am not exactly sure how you win first place; maybe if he looks more curvy than everyone else and if you lift the most weight. Of course, I am just guessing and maybe someday I'll get to ask Cousin Mat all about it. Although, I am not as interested in that than I am with my Mayan history project, which has been my favorite project besides my own family history project for this tri-mester.

I learned recently that the Mayans had developed a few different calenders or ways to measure time and cycles of nature. They were a highly accurate 365-day solar year, a 260-day ritual year, and a world-time calendar of 5,128 years. The world-time calendar provides a point in time when the world began (3,114 B.C.) as well as an ending date of Dec. 21, 2012. Some people think that the 2012 date is when the world will actually end, but some historians think that it is just when a new cycle will begin. My history teacher thinks that the world probably won't end anytime soon. Whew!
The Mayans (or Maya in some books) also developed a number system based on dots and bars with the earliest known number representing zero - it looks like a shell. With this system any number could be written, even really big ones. The priests, who were important in mayan society, relied on their knowledge of "astronomy, mathematics and numerology" to plan and make big decisions regarding when and where to grow food or where to build new structures. Unlike the later Aztecs, the Mayans had no central king or president which controlled a big empire. Instead, there were as many as "20 politically sovereign polities", similar to ancient Greece city-states. "Polities" or a "polity" is "a form or process of civil government or constitution; an organized society; a state as a political entity". Ok, thats now three semicolons that I have used in this entry in case you are keeping track at home.
So, that is some of what I have learned lately about Mayan culture, but I don't want to tell everything because this blog is supposed to be about the Bigsky family and its history. I do think that it is interesting when I read about how the Mayans mysteriously declined hundreds of years ago and how scientists believe that it had something to do with over-population and the "resulting exhaustion of land resources". It also said that the rain forest doesn't have the best soil because it gets "exhausted" or tired quickly. I mentioned this to Dad and he said that to his knowledge, many civilizations have declined because they abused the land and it stopped producing enough "for ever-growing populations". "Is that why many people are starving in Africa?" I said and Dad said that "not just in Africa but all over".
So, I looked on the internet and found that actually there are almost 5 billion people living in places that are considered "developing" and that 17% of those people are "undernourished" or over 800 million people!! That includes places like Africa, China, Korea, Mexico, and Haiti (which has 47% of their people that are undernourished). This information is from the "Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations". "Undernourishment" means "the condition of people whose dietary energy consumption is continuously below a minimum dietary energy requirement for maintaining a healthy life and carrying out a light physical activity".
I wonder how much energy Cousin Mat needs to "carry out" his daily physical activity.