For the ten percent of the world population who believes the world end end according to the Mayan calendar, you may want to make plans for 2013. For months, experts have been saying that this is simply hogwash. Now the oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered in ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest and it shows, as previously said, that the Mayans not only believes life would go on past 2012 but would continue for centuries and centuries.
The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, appear to have been used as a reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800. Archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas said
“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future.”
I am personally going to appear in Time Square on my next trip to New Year with a sign reading :Life Will End In Octrillion Years. Are You Ready?”
Source: Live Science
Mespo and Tony C.
All well with the 6th grade understanding, but does the student know the constitution and also his rights? Am not cognizant about the school curricula nowadays.
Has he been told he has a right to remain silent, etc.; should not talk to police officers, never willingly allow his person or effects be searched, should always demand
the services of an attorney, etc. Does he understand the media BS which has been indoctrinating himself since birth?
Dear Professor,
800 AD?
You’re going to NYC with a sign?
Can I stand beside you with my sign: “Anything medieval is well, medieval. Can it be good?”
Mespo, where ya been?
AY: And a friend says that I will die when I die, and I should try to live until then—-fully.
Tony C: Regretting yesterday’ events are useless, we
know. But assuming our fate would have been better if we’d won the match, is also misleading. It could have been much worse.
This story is analogous to the Ten Commandments. There are some versions in the middle east that are carved in stone way back before Sears Roebuck published their version of the King James Bible in America. So the Sixth Commandment says: Thou Shalt Not Kill. There is no exclusion for The People of The State of Texas to kill some schmuck who they tried for murder or some such crime. There is no exception which says: Y’all can.
So if you live in Texas the chances are that when your time comes to meet your maker and pass the the Pearly Gates and seek to enter heaven, the guy standing in for Saint Peter will remind you of your violation of the Sixth Commandment time after time, year after year. The best you can expect is a pass to Limbo–which is a suburb of Saint Louis, Missouri called Oakland.
Hell is a whole lot better.
Rottweilders in Texas are not people, so we get a pass and if we are good dogs we get to come back in the next reincarnation as dogs and if we are bad dogs we probably come back as humans and if we are real bad dogs then we are born in Texas.
Really? Are today’s 6th graders universally condemning the use of drones to murder (oh, I mean, collateral-damage) women and children in Pakistan and Yemen? I hadn’t noticed.
JCTheBigTree 1, May 11, 2012 at 11:24 am
…
I don’t know much about the particulars of why they sacrificed people and possibly children, be it to appease gods or call for rain, but in their society it was well within ‘moral’ definitions.
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Typically, that practice arises near the end of an empire.
Take the Carthaginians for example.
Tony C:
You are certainly right that there was some mathematical proficiency on the part of the ancients. When they weren’t stuffing infants into post holes to consecrate some new temple there wasn’t much else for the intelligentsia of the tribe to do. So math seems s natural fit. They were fine observers of what they saw. As to the “why” part of the equation, I think our modern sixth grader stands in better stead.
“Why anyone would pay attention to any predictions from a primitive, child-sacrificing culture from the 9th Century is beyond me. Any modern sixth grader knows more about how the world works than the most knowledgeable person of that era — and is likely quite a bit more moral.”
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First of all, it was never a Mayan prediction… That would be like someone looking at the calendar on my wall and saying that I’m predicting the world ends on Dec. 31st 2012 because it doesn’t go any further.
The Mayans had an extremely complex knowledge of the solar system and our place within it. Their mathematics are astounding, and their architectural feats are rivaled only by the Egyptian pyramids…both feats which modern day humans can’t even necessarily understand.
Yes, take an ancient Mayan and put him in today’s world and a 6th grader is, in general terms, more understanding of the world. But take a modern human and put him in ancient times and he is lost as well.
And when you say ‘moral’ you need to understand that ‘moral’ is a term that can only be defined in relative terms. I don’t know much about the particulars of why they sacrificed people and possibly children, be it to appease gods or call for rain, but in their society it was well within ‘moral’ definitions.
Moral to one society is not always the equal to moral in another.
Somebody, somewhere down the line, will uncover a picture of that sign and take it as proof that the apocalypse is nigh.
It’s not that I believe in the Mayan calendar, but I don’t understand how finding the oldest version of a document has much influence on the authenticity over the published version of a document.
Maybe I’ve been around computers too long.
Then again, I belong to a sect that values the oldest version of the Bible and most of you belong to sects that values the newer, sillier, more phony, more made up, bogofied version of the Bible. Splitters.
All I know is that the rough draft of the Constitution is interesting, but I prefer the later published variety with its Bill of Rights added to it.
Frankly 1, May 11, 2012 at 8:45 am
actually life on this planet only has a couple of billion years left at best. Then the sun will start acting up & conditions will deteriorate so that no life is sustainable. A couple 3 billion after that the sun will expand & engulf the rock remains.
But thats not really what we should be worrying about. We are making conditions on earth untenable for human life. The world won’t end but our time on it could come to a screeching halt if we continue down this road.
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Yeah, the word “world” can mean a lot of things. The word “civilization” can too, but it is a bit more concrete at the moment.
Calendars were never envisioned to determine the beginning or end of anything, especially the world or any civilization.
Calendars merely determine where planets and stars are in their orbits and rotations at a given time, then official watchers translate that data into Pavlovian marks on something, sometimes enhanced with Pavlovian bells and whistles (Droolology). 😉
But the clock/calendar that signals the demise of civilization is not the doomsday clock of scientists, who base that tic-toc on nuclear weapons.
No, that clock/calendar is more like the canary in the coal mine, for example the birds, the bees, and ice melting:
(Later Than We Think?). Those quotes come from a paradox (a pair of world renown doctors), and were written this week.
The 2012 story was already debunked. For some reason the latest debunking is getting a bit more press, but the actual scholars of Mayan civilization have been rolling their eyes for years.
Where’s Speedy when you need him?
Alka Seltzer sales will go down some now.
@Mespo: The Mayan calendar is actually astonishingly accurate and captures cycles of the earth, sun, and moon not taught to any sixth grader today; in fact such cycles are not taught formally until college astronomy courses.
I have been frequently surprised by the mathematical sophistication of ancients, particularly in regard to astronomy. Mayans, the Stonehenge people, the Egyptians with their pyramids, and many others accurately mathematized the cycles of the moon, planets, stars, and the sun through the galaxy, and predicted all the types of eclipses, 5000 years before the invention of the telescope. Many ancients, thankfully far from the Catholic Church in time and space, were computing using the heliocentric theory thousands of years before Galileo was persecuted for it.
Of course that doesn’t make them magical seers, we can agree on that.
There was a disturbance in the force and my fingers typed “mood” instead of “moot”.
Not that it matters much, seeing as the world has already ended.
This new story of the Mayan calendar stretching beyond 2012 is just a fabrication designed to minimise panic.
It’s all pretty mood anyway.
I have it on good authority that the world ended yesterday.
actually life on this planet only has a couple of billion years left at best. Then the sun will start acting up & conditions will deteriorate so that no life is sustainable. A couple 3 billion after that the sun will expand & engulf the rock remains.
But thats not really what we should be worrying about. We are making conditions on earth untenable for human life. The world won’t end but our time on it could come to a screeching halt if we continue down this road.
Mespo,
I would like to say that I just love this type of stuff, but when people get hysterical about it and then use the fear to build a following then I must object…..
Come to think of it….isn’t that how religicious folks do it and now the political parties….. When you think about it not much has changed…..
I will say this….. The world will end when it ends and not a minute before…..
Why anyone would pay attention to any predictions from a primitive, child-sacrificing culture from the 9th Century is beyond me. Any modern sixth grader knows more about how the world works than the most knowledgeable person of that era — and is likely quite a bit more moral..