Pard said:
Theo,
Doesn't it have something to do with how the Mayans stopped their calendar at 12/21/2012? Frankly, to come to the conclusion that the day the Mayan calendar ends must be the end of the world i stupid. If we went by this thinking then the world is gonna end on 12/31/2010, cause my calendar ends then!
Not exactly. The Mayans actually used more than one calendar. The one people are talking about in relation to 2012 is correctly called the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar. You can read all about it on
wikipedia, but here it is in a nutshell.
The year, which was called a tun, consisted of 18 months, or "winal", with 20 days in each. There are 20 "tun" in a "k'atun" and 20"k'atun" in a "b'ak'tun". (Don't ask me how to pronounce any of that.) Since the year is just short of a solar year at 360 days, the b'ak'tun is about 394.3 solar years.
Their way of representing dates in the long count calendar was similar to our way of writing short dates. It varies in different places around the world, but the basics are the same. In Europe, for example, today's date would be written 04.08.2010, indicating that it's the 4th day of the 8th month in the year 2010. The Mayans counted the days since creation (according to their account). Transliterated, it could be represented as b'aktun.katun.tun.winal.day. The date 4.3.2.1.0, for example, would represent 4 b'ak'tun, 3 k'atun, 2tun, 1 winal and 0 days after creation. December 20 in the year 2012 will be the Mayan long count date 13.19.19.17.19. The next day, December 21, will be 14.0.0.0.0. December 22, 2012 will be 14.0.0.0.1. That's all that happens. It's like going from 31.12.99 to 1.1.00 - no big deal. Maybe we should all plan to get together to throw a big New B'ak'tun Eve party.