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NOTE TO SELF: MAKE VACATION PLANS - WORLD IS SAFE


After reading doomsday scenarios - I'm big on these - it's a relief to read that the 2012 Mayan cataclysmic end-of-the-world scenario has been cancelled. At least according to a new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010). As much as this news is a relief, there is no correction or re-prediction of when the end will come.

According to the critique which I haven't read, the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar could be off as much as 50 to 100 years. Good. Still time to place my bets in Vegas. Since the Mayan calendar ended in 2012, earthlings interpreted this as an omen or indication that our time was up on planet earth.

In an article published on the Live Science site: ( http://www.livescience.com/culture/mayan-apocalypse-miscalculated-calendar-101018.html) "the Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies."

Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus. There is a further explanation focusing on the rationale for reaching this conclusion in the Live Science piece.

Over the years and centuries, there have been numerous end-of-world predictions, obviously all of which have not panned out. The James Randi Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization, "aims to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today." The Foundation offers a $1,000,000 prize to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions. This prize money is held in a special account which cannot be accessed for any purpose other than the awarding of the prize.

The site features an impressive list of end-of-world prophecies that have failed over the centuries. For example:

- October 3, 1533, at Eight A.M. Mathematician and Bible student Michael Stifel (known as Stifelius) had calculated an exact date and time for Doomsday from scholarly perusal of the Book of Revelation. When they did not vaporize, the curiously ungrateful citizens of the German town of Lochau, where Stifel had announced the dreaded day, rewarded him with a thorough flogging. He also lost his ecclesiastical living as a result of his prophetic failure.

- 1665 With the Black Plague in full force, Quaker Solomon Eccles terrorized the citizens of London yet further with his declaration that the resident pestilence was merely the beginning of The End. He was arrested and jailed when the plague began to abate rather than increasing. Eccles fled to the West Indies upon his release from prison, whereupon he once again exercised his zeal for agitation by inciting the slaves there to revolt. The Crown fetched him back home as a troublemaker, and he died shortly thereafter.

- October 13, 1736 London was once again targeted for the "beginning of the end," this time by William Whiston. The Thames filled with waiting boatloads of citizens, but it didn't even rain. Another setback.

There is a whole list of failed appocolyptic prognostications listed on the