The post mentioning arithmetic using Roman numerals made me think of a story which may or may not be true.

In ancient (and perhaps medieval) times they had counting houses. Slaves did addition and multiplication by counting huge numbers of pebbles or small rocks or something. This much is true.

The story I wonder about deals with slaves who just made up results without doing the work. After all, how much fun is it to count out 42 piles of rocks with 29 rocks per pile? Then you have to count up to 1218 to determine the product.

The story is that some slaves realized that nobody knew the correct results for the arithmetic, so why not play gin rummy and then make a credible guess? When the plot was discovered or suspected, the masters started using groups of three slaves who were isolated from each other. If all three disagreed, all got beaten. If two agreed, the third got beaten.

Does anybody know how much of the above is true. My father had a sense of humor and often made up strange stories which I often accepted as true. The above might have been one of them. I remember the following are two that I believed until I was 7-10 years old.

I once asked my father why dogs lifted their legs to urinate. He told me that in times long past, people constructed flimsy buildings that easy fell over. The dogs learned to put one leg up to support the wall because they could not run from a falling wall while relieving themselves. Modern dogs were too dumb to know that people no longer made flimsy buildings.

Another about dogs relates to the reason why dogs sniff each other. In this story, a beloved prince from the kingdom of dogs was lost or kidnaped. There was a huge reward for his recovery, like maybe a lifetime supply of all the steak a dog could eat. The missing dog could be recognized due to his s**t smelling like perfume. Hence dogs were always checking for the missing prince of dogs by sniffing.