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"2012" a Miscalculation; Actual Calendar Ends 2220
boombaard writes "News is spreading quickly here that scientists writing in a popular science periodical (Dutch) have debunked the 2012 date (google translation linked) featuring so prominently in doomsday predictions/speculation across the web.
On 2012-12-21, the sun will appear where you would normally be able to see the 'galactic equator' of the Milky Way; an occurrence deemed special because it happens 'only' once every 25.800 years, on the winter solstice. However, even if you ignore the fact that there is no actual galactic equator, just an observed one, and that the visual effect is pretty much the same for an entire decade surrounding that date, there are major problems with the way the Maya Calendar is being read by doomsday prophets." I wonder what Amazon's return policy on a box full of 3 doomsday wolves shirts is?
It's not another link to the original site, but in the NYT recently Errol Morris was researching an unrelated Civil War story, and one of the sources was David H. Kelly, who did major work deciphering the Mayan script. In passing Errol asked about the 2012 thing: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/whose-father-was-he-part-four/
Relax. Have a muffin. Enjoy the show. --Slick, Sept 13th, 2007.
has run a lot of dubious programming. This was one of the things they were actually pushing.
Precisely. Hell, the *Mayans* didn't envision any doomsday scenarios. We don't even know for certain if the long count calendar cycles at 13 or 20 k'atuns (Mayan counting was base-20, though many scholars believe the calendar cycles after 13). Assuming 13, in Mayan culture the end of a cycle would be a major event, a time of celebration. Nothing in the archaeological record suggests they thought this world would end precisely 1 cycle after it began.
All this nonsense is just another way to scam the gullible. These doomsday criers are worse than the Y2K nuts. At least Y2K had a grain of truth to it (the rollover *could* have caused problems if it hadn't been patched in time).
...was that I got halfway through the article before I realized I was viewing it through Google Translate. Yeah, I wasn't paying much attention. And yeah, I had noticed some errors -- but my mind just dismissed them as poor proofreading before publishing. I'm still impressed by how far online translation services have come from the early days of AltaVista Babelfish.
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.
I, being the information junkie I am, have read fairly extensively into this whole thing and have found some interesting information. The key thing is that all the really crazies seem to latch on to things like this and give it a bad name. The Mayans did not predict the end of the world, only the end of an age. In their thinking, there are basically cosmic seasons in the form of every 25k years. Also in their viewpoint, all previous transitions of ages were relatively catastrophic, but by no means end of the world. On top of all this, there happen to be a lot of coincidences scientifically with the date. The primary ones I have seen are the alignment of the planets on the galactic plane, and the best theory I read was that the potential for magnetic changes on the sun could make it a flurry of activity or the opposite. Im no scientist, but I gleaned past the hype and saw some good facts that at the least are interesting. Regardless, its not the end of the world, but it is also not the completely ridiculous y2k idea either (y2k = no scientific basis).
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Actually, I'd like to explain a bit more in depth on that. It's an interesting story.
The Passover matzah is unleavened. It represents the bread which the Israelites took with them when they fled Egypt; in their haste they had no time to wait for bread to rise. Thus, unleavened bread.
The wine is an icon of the blood which was sprinkled on the doorposts of Israelite homes so that the angel of death would pass over their homes and spare their first-born sons when the sons of the Egyptians were killed. It was sprinkled in three places, on either side and above the doorframe.
The custom was for the youngest at the meal to sit next to the teacher or elder (who would be at the head of the table, wherever that was). The youngest would ask what each symbol meant, and the elder would explain it. This was to commemorate the Jews' escape from Egypt.
Instead of following the standard script, Jesus said the bread was his body and the wine his blood. Then he completely changed the focus by saying they were to do it in remembrance of him – not the escape from Egypt! No doubt this caused a good deal of puzzlement in everyone present...
Then Jesus was eventually crucified, and the blood on the cross matched up with blood on either side and above the doorway in the original plague in Egypt – tying the whole thing together and showing that it was a prophetic sign of Christ from the beginning.
Even if you don't believe it, and I have no doubt you don't (and I'm not trying to convince anyone), it's a fascinating marriage between Judaism and Christianity. All the original Christians were Jews, remember.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I think I know who has proven to be worthy of their geek card and who has to hand theirs in.
Yup. It's the Mayan Y2K bug. Good thing their calendar is based on mechanical circles. People discussing a 2012 apocalypse are discussing where a circle begins and ends.
Pretty much. And it's even stupider than that.
The 2012 date is when the Mayan base-20 calendar overflows from (as the common translation to decimal notation would say) 12.19.19.18.4 to 13.0.0.0.0. The 5-digit date is actually 3 years plus a 2-digit day withing the year; that's why that funny 18.4 is the end of a year. 18*20+4=364, which is the last day of the year if you start counting at zero as the Mayan calendar does. (They ignore the extra .24 day in the solar year, so their New Year day slowly drifts over the centuries.)
Overflowing to 13.0.0.0.0 is sorta like our year overflowing to 2000/1/1, of course. But it's obviously not the end of the calendar; that will be at 19.19.19.18.4, some 2400 years later. And even then, the Mayan calendar doesn't really end. There are some old inscriptions implying that the 5-digit date was considered a truncation, and it should have 2 or more likely 3 more high-order digits. So people using the Mayan calendar will just have to stop dropping 3 digits, and use at least one more. So 19.19.19.18.4 will be followed by 1.0.0.0.0.0, which will look sorta cool on the stelae that will no doubt be erected to celebrate the occasion.
Anyway, even with 5 digits for the year instead of 3, we have a few million years until the calendar runs out, and if 6 digits is the correct length, the Mayan calendar will probably outlive our species.
Base 20 numbers do use a lot fewer digits than base 10, especially when you get to big numbers.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.