2012: The beginning and the end?

[ZaphodBurner]

Zaphod, to answer your questions...

... Rather than rush a half-assed write-up, the decision was made to do it after the burn. I'm told we can expect an announcement and post very soon.

Thank you, sir. That works for me. I just found another discussion about it. I'll pass on the word. Cheers, and thanks.

[trilobyte]

As for the actual topic, it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

The Mayans didn't simply stop counting at the end of the 12th/beginning of the 13th baktun (which coincides with December 21, 2012... 11:11am CST if I remember correctly), they stated it was the end. Done so rather matter-of-factly, without the flourish of saying what they expected was going to happen, and without name-dropping any feathered serpents or deities in the way they did for a lot of their religious rituals. Their culture did maintain a limited separation between religion and science, in that the math/science boys who did things like keep track of comets, alignments, eclipses, and whatnot did their own thing, without adding a lot of hoopla. It's believed that the average Mayan didn't understand any of their work anyways, and only really picked up on what was spoonfed at ceremonies and events.

Since it was noted so matter-of-factly and without any fanfare, I suspect the date was marked by the aforementioned math/science boys. Which makes it a bit more troubling, because they were very, very good. Without the use of computers and gadgetry we have today, they worked out incredibly detailed and accurate bits of astronomy, working out the orbits/returns of comets, the timing of eclipses, and even the length of the galactic year (how long it takes the sun to travel around the center of the Milky Way). That's stuff we're only starting to grasp now. For them to have made the predicition and it turn out to be nothing at all would be extremely unusual (quite possibly the first time they ever got a major event wrong). If the date as well as claim it was the end was theirs, there's a reasonable chance they could have worked out some kind of collision event or cosmic ray/gamma ray burst event. Or who knows what -anything is possible, we'll see soon enough.

Kind of cool that we're in the midst of a bit of a galactic alignment, with the sun in alignment with the center plane of the Milky Way and a number of planets lining up in that general timeframe as well. My little pocket universe app shows Saturn, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto all near the rising Sun (nothing's all in a straight line or anything, but it's unusual to see so much in the same general space like that).

It could be the end, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, or it could just be a Friday.

[Lassen Forge]

To drift, almost, a little...

I kinda like that the theme announcement has been postponed... Maybe it's a return to more traditional times at BRC. Will get people, maybe, to stop relying on a theme to build their art, and instead, create!

[Simon of the Playa]

That day I flew a Cirrus SR-22, helped teach a young woman to fly over the Columbia Gorge, made it to band rehearsal and spent the rest of the evening building Lego airplanes with my little girl. Who thinks I'm pretty cool. And now you're cool too. We're like Fonzis. ("And what is Fonzi?")

"burning man is a total Fonzi Scheme"

[ygmir]

That day I flew a Cirrus SR-22, helped teach a young woman to fly over the Columbia Gorge, made it to band rehearsal and spent the rest of the evening building Lego airplanes with my little girl. Who thinks I'm pretty cool. And now you're cool too. We're like Fonzis. ("And what is Fonzi?")

"burning man is a total Fonzi Scheme"

and, we all know how "the Fonz" can water ski......

[theCryptofishist]

That day I flew a Cirrus SR-22, helped teach a young woman to fly over the Columbia Gorge, made it to band rehearsal and spent the rest of the evening building Lego airplanes with my little girl. Who thinks I'm pretty cool. And now you're cool too. We're like Fonzis. ("And what is Fonzi?")

"burning man is a total Fonzi Scheme"

I love you, Simon...

[Timezone LaFontaine]

Or who knows what -anything is possible, we'll see soon enough.

It could be the end, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, or it could just be a Friday.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

[B the B]

Whas a shibari knot? Is that like a searching motor?

[bluesbob]

I watched a video on Mayan Indians at a museum one day. The video was made years before the current brouhaha over their calendar. But the calendar ending in 2012 isn't lost on the filmmakers. They ask some modern day Maya what the end of the calendar means. They reply, "It means we start over."