Ask your average new ager or conspiracy theorist, and they'll tell you that the ancient Mayans predicted that the world would end in the year 2012. But historians who study the Mayan civilization say that this is a grave misinterpretation of the record -- and actual Mayans (who are still very much alive, thanks) are getting increasingly irritated by the 2012 hype. Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun says, "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
With thirty seconds of research you can see that there is nothing astronomically interesting about December 21st, 2012.
I've heard that there's some grand planetary alignment. This is complete BS, and can be easily confirmed by plugging the date into any number of free online solar system simulators.
The sun also eclipses the galactic center in 2012. But it's actually not even close to a real eclipse. It's about 5.5 degrees out of alignment, which in astronomical terms, is a distance in the night sky roughly equal to the diameter of 11 full moons. That's a pretty big miss. Not to mention these things happen so slowly, our current alignment is close enough that we're already experiencing 99.987% of whatever gravitational influence it would have anyway.
Do people even do 30 seconds of research before buying into this crap?
And yes, the Mayan calendar "runs out" on that date. But our calendar "runs out" every December 31st. If that actually meant anything, I wouldn't worry about setting aside money for taxes.
by Rob (not verified) on 10/21/09 at 5:32 pm |reply
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
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Seriously is that it? no facts to back up "this is a grave misinterpretation"there's more
You can see the whole story at the cbs5.com link I supplied above.No facts?
No facts? Are you serious?There were no facts to begin with!
With thirty seconds of research you can see that there is nothing astronomically interesting about December 21st, 2012.
I've heard that there's some grand planetary alignment. This is complete BS, and can be easily confirmed by plugging the date into any number of free online solar system simulators.
The sun also eclipses the galactic center in 2012. But it's actually not even close to a real eclipse. It's about 5.5 degrees out of alignment, which in astronomical terms, is a distance in the night sky roughly equal to the diameter of 11 full moons. That's a pretty big miss. Not to mention these things happen so slowly, our current alignment is close enough that we're already experiencing 99.987% of whatever gravitational influence it would have anyway.
Do people even do 30 seconds of research before buying into this crap?
And yes, the Mayan calendar "runs out" on that date. But our calendar "runs out" every December 31st. If that actually meant anything, I wouldn't worry about setting aside money for taxes.