You are not reading this! THE WORLD ENDED!!
Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 2:47 am
IT ENDED YESTERDAY!
SO STOP PRETENDING TO READ THIS!
You are, in fact, dead, have been since yesterday!
Don't give me that "I didn't notice not end of the world yesterday" or anything!!
The Mayas predicted it, their long-count-calendar ended yesterday!! If the world hadn't ended, we'd have the 14th b'ak'tun, but they only ever talked about 13 of these!! So the end of the 13th must have meant the end of the world, cannot have meant anything else! This isn't some sort of pre-columbian millenium bug, these people were ancient and noble and knew everything we didn't, they couldn't have made some silly mistake like a mere computer programmer!!
Millions of people believed this, it must be true!
Okay, for anyone who didn't notice, December 21 2012 marked the end of the 13th of the big cycles (b'ak'tun) of the Mayan long-count calendar. Since it fell on the auspicious date of 12/21/2012 or however you 'mericans write that down, a lot of people were ever so sure the world must end. They even made a film a few years back.
If you consider how the Mayan's counted time, the number of days since creation of mankind, and had they indeed limited their calendar to 13 b'ak'tun (which I cannot establish as such, 13 was the number of b'ak'tun that came before the current one started, apparently, but that the current one would only have b'ak'tun, can't find a proper citation), it would actually be pretty similar not to the millenium bug but to the Unix 2038 problem (Unix tells time by counting the seconds since midnight, January 1st 1970, and this will roll over to 0 in 2038, which might cause some actual problems). But the long count calendar actually has even bigger cycles than the b'ak'tun, the longest one is 65 thousand years long, so as primitive as their culture was, they were a little bit smarter than computer programmers of the time when our civilization made it as far as the moon.
SO STOP PRETENDING TO READ THIS!
You are, in fact, dead, have been since yesterday!
Don't give me that "I didn't notice not end of the world yesterday" or anything!!
The Mayas predicted it, their long-count-calendar ended yesterday!! If the world hadn't ended, we'd have the 14th b'ak'tun, but they only ever talked about 13 of these!! So the end of the 13th must have meant the end of the world, cannot have meant anything else! This isn't some sort of pre-columbian millenium bug, these people were ancient and noble and knew everything we didn't, they couldn't have made some silly mistake like a mere computer programmer!!
Millions of people believed this, it must be true!
Okay, for anyone who didn't notice, December 21 2012 marked the end of the 13th of the big cycles (b'ak'tun) of the Mayan long-count calendar. Since it fell on the auspicious date of 12/21/2012 or however you 'mericans write that down, a lot of people were ever so sure the world must end. They even made a film a few years back.
If you consider how the Mayan's counted time, the number of days since creation of mankind, and had they indeed limited their calendar to 13 b'ak'tun (which I cannot establish as such, 13 was the number of b'ak'tun that came before the current one started, apparently, but that the current one would only have b'ak'tun, can't find a proper citation), it would actually be pretty similar not to the millenium bug but to the Unix 2038 problem (Unix tells time by counting the seconds since midnight, January 1st 1970, and this will roll over to 0 in 2038, which might cause some actual problems). But the long count calendar actually has even bigger cycles than the b'ak'tun, the longest one is 65 thousand years long, so as primitive as their culture was, they were a little bit smarter than computer programmers of the time when our civilization made it as far as the moon.