So Whats This 2012 Shit Anyway?

Evidence of what? It's kind of a widely-accepted fact that 2012 is just the end of a cycle in the Maya calendar. The only people who interpret it as the end of the world are readers of esoteric magazines.

How ya doing, buddy?

Strictly speaking talking about "facts" as applied to anything Mayan is a little flibbertygibbet

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Pangalin

Strictly speaking talking about "facts" as applied to anything Mayan is a little flibbertygibbet

Is that a fact?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

No.

It's flibbertygibbet.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Crash Landon

Would you care to back that up with, you know, evidence, oh weary time-traveller?

This site says a lot of the same things as others I've seen

About half way down, it explains that per some interpretations of when the Mayan long-count date started, it resets to 13.0.0.0.0 on either the 21st or 23rd of December 2012. The Mayan long-count system is days on the far right, then uinals, 20 days each, then tuns, 18 uinals or 360 days, more or less a year, then katuns which are 20 tuns or 20 years, then baktuns which are 20 katuns or 400 odd years. There are 13 Katuns in the long-count so assuming archaeologists are right and they started counting in 3,114 BC, it's almost time for a reset.

Why the Mayans chose a 13 Katun cycle I couldn't tell you. They used 20's as a basis for most of their time divisions (Fingers and toes probably). The Aztec calendar had years split into 13 months of 28 days each with an extra day at the end called the day out of time. This suggests mathematical reasons as you get a whole number of days in each month with one remainder but also suggests that the number 13 was significant, otherwise why not have 14 months of 26 days? I've not read enough about the subject to know any more than that but idle speculation would suggest a connection to the zodiac of Western culture, possibly with an extra constellation you can only see from the southern hemisphere.

People are clearly putting far too much store in an ancient calendar system predicting the end of the world, especially as the Mayans had words for much longer periods of time. An alautun for example is 63 million years. The idea of the world ending has probably evolved from the Mayan use of two calendar systems to keep track of months. One was a 365 day cycle, the other a 260 day one which meant that they came into synch every 18,980 days. Mayans all shit themselves thinking the world would end every 52 years when this date rolled around so the tradition of resetting dates leading to armageddon probably springs from this. It's a little arrogant to believe that an arbitrary numbering system to record the passage of time could have any bearing whatsoever on actual global events. That's the kind of crap people get into their heads if you let priests get too much power...

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Shin

Why the Mayans chose a 13 Katun cycle I couldn't tell you.

Probably the same reason England used to use a 13 month callendar:

Originally Posted by wikipedia

Old English 13-month lunar year

In England, a calendar of thirteen months of 28 days each, plus one extra day, known as "a year and a day" was still in use up to Tudor times. This would be a hybrid calendar that had substituted regular weeks of seven days for actual quarter-lunations, so that one month had exactly four weeks, regardless of the actual moon phase. The "lunar year" is here considered to have 364 days, resulting in a solar year of "a year and a day".

Jam it back in, in the dark.

2012 is going to be awesome for a number of reasons. The Chinese are having political shakeups slated for that year, the US is having elections, the US is ceding military control to the Rep. of Korea after that 50 year agreement thing... the largely symbolic Mayan end-of-an-age thing seems oddly appropriate given the year. Also, I will finally finish grad school.

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