More Logic, Less Emotion

March 9, 2012 By 6 Comments

On Wednesday, I posted an article that clearly disproved the hoax about the Mayan calendar. I showed my evidence using basic multiplication and addition. Unlike some of my controversial articles about religion, I assumed this post would be a slam dunk. Among my friends and regular readers, it was.

The general public had other ideas about my post. Most people seemed to think that basic math is an opinion. Others just thought that the real explanation wasn’t as interesting as the lie. What I’ve been slowly learning is that people tend to hold onto some of the most irrational views.

As a social experiment, I searched for people who were spreading the rumor on Twitter and sent them my article along with the message, “saw your tweet about the Mayans, thought you’d find this to be interesting.” Here are just a few of the negative replies I received.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: General Skepticism Tagged With: , ,

Mayan Calendar and the Gregorian Leap Year

March 7, 2012 By 399 Comments

There has been a bogus forward circulating Facebook and Twitter about the Mayan Calendar. It claims that the Mayans were unaware of our Leap Year system, therefore the world should have already ended. The forward going around reads:

There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013.

Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year…. so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago.

While I appreciate the ultimate goal of this forward, whoever wrote it is very misinformed. The current era (known to the Mayans as a baktun) does end on December 21, 2012. However, the world will not end; the calendar simply rolls over to the next baktun. It’s very similar to the Gregorian date of January 1, 2000.

And just like we celebrated the beginning of the new millennium, the Mayans would have celebrated the beginning of a new baktun. This was not something to fear.

Julius Caesar did modify the Roman calendar in 45BCE to include Leap Years. This new calendar was called the Julian calendar. As of the time of posting, today’s date on the Julian calendar is only February 23, 2012. This is because the Julian calendar adds a leap year every four years, meaning that each year is 365.25 days long.

In reality, one solar year is ~365.24219878 days. In order to correct Caesar’s mistake, it was changed in 1582 to a calendar year equal to 365.2425 days. This was done by skipping leap years that were divisible by 100 unless they are also divisible by 400. For instance, the following years would have been leap years under the Julian calendar, but are now skipped: 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900. Likewise, the following leap years were not skipped because they were also divisible by 400: 1600, 2000. This system, known as the Gregorian calendar, is what we use today.

The Mayan calendar is very inaccurate when calculating years. Not only did they not account for leap years, they were completely wrong about how many days were in a year. The Mayan “tun” is 360 days long, equivalent of 0.986 years.

However, the date of December 21, 2012, is not based on Mayan tuns. It is based on the total accumulation of days since the beginning of the Mayan calendar. It is commonly accepted that the first date on the Mayan calendar is August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, we must start on that date and count forward in time.

The Mayan baktun is the equivalent of 400 Mayan tuns (years). But remember, their years are only 360 days long. 400 x 360 = 144,000. Therefore, each Mayan baktun is a total of 144,000 days long.

As of the time of posting, the Mayan date is 12.19.19.3.11. The first number represents the baktun, the second number katuns (20 Mayan years), the third number is tuns (Mayan years), the fourth is uinals (20 day “weeks”), and the final number is the day. I know that I’m making some history nut cringe at my over simplification of the Mayan calendar; I’m using “years” and “weeks” to make things easy to understand.

On December 21, 2012, the first number in the Mayan calendar will change from 12 to 13, making it 13.0.0.0.0. The last time this happened was on September 18, 1618, when the current baktun started. As you have already imagined, the Mayan date on that day was 12.0.0.0.0. Obviously, the world didn’t end.

But how do we know that 13.0.0.0.0 will happen on December 21, 2012? First, we need to calculate the total amount of days required to reach the 13th baktun: 144,000 x 13 = 1,872,000 days.

If we start counting from August 11, 3113 BCE, we probably won’t get very far. I don’t know about you, but counting to almost 2 million isn’t something that I have time to do. Instead, use any date calculator to do the math. Sure enough, you’ll always arrive at the same date: December 21, 2012.

Update 4/26/2012: I would like to clarify a misconception about when the Mayan calendar began. Some date calculators convert everything before Oct 15, 1582 to the Julian calendar. This is because dates recorded in history during that time were recorded on the Julian system. I didn’t see any reason to convert it twice so I used August 11, 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar and counted forward. However, the Mayan calendar began September 6, 3114 BCE on the Julian calendar. If your calculator is using the Julian calendar for older dates, please keep this in mind. For more information, please read the original message that prompted this.

Update 5/20/2012: Some people still disagree with the date calculator and/or simply do not understand this article. I posted a comment below, showing all of the work required to count days on the Gregorian calendar, further proving that the calendar does end on Dec 21.

Update 6/25/2012: Some small mix ups with the year because certain Gregorian calendars use the year zero while others do not. Please see this comment from a very informed reader who explains it all.

The Mayan Calendar

The Mayan Calendar The Aztec Sun Stone. Commonly, but incorrectly, shown to represent the Mayan calendar

Filed Under: General Skepticism Tagged With: , , , ,

Testimony of My Father

March 5, 2012 By 18 Comments

Five years ago this morning, my father committed suicide. My father, who was separated from my mother, was living at my grandparents’ house with my sister. Like this year, it was a Monday. With my grandparents out of town and my sister at school, my dad went into the garage and shot himself. I was downtown at a hearing for a traffic ticket. I actually have pictures from that day, I’m in a suit smiling and laughing about my court victory. It was the last time I’ll ever experience the childhood bliss of ignorance and happiness.

This picture was taken at 12:04PM, possibly the exact moment that my father pulled the trigger. These pictures have haunted my photo gallery for 5 years; I don’t know if I should feel guilty about them or hold onto these very last moments of childhood bliss. They always say that when things like this happen, you know. A sixth sense comes over us and we can feel it. I did not feel any sixth sense, my soul was not tugging on my heart, I was absolutely ignorant to the fact that five blocks away, my father had just taken his own life.

It wasn’t until Saturday, March 10, that my world shattered. My sister, for reasons I will not speculate, waited until Saturday to alert the family that dad was missing. I’ve never asked, but I can’t imagine what she went through over those 5 days or how she felt after learning he was in the garage. I was at Chili’s with my girlfriend of the time, when my mother called me in tears, asking me if I had seen or heard from dad.

I paid our tab and went to meet with the family at my grandparents’ house. It was just after lunch when most of the family arrived. My mother and sister were there. My aunt and her wife showed up shortly after. My uncle, a cop, was working a detail and asked us to keep him posted. We started off by calling all of the police departments, jails, and hospitals in Western Pennsylvania.

After getting nowhere, everyone started to get upset and restless. My aunt and I stopped at a couple local bars to ask about my dad, but nobody had any information. When we arrived back, the others had started cleaning up my grandparents’ house. Maybe it was out of anxiety, but we all helped, hoping that my dad would show up.

His white truck was still in the driveway. His wallet, cellphone and an empty pack of cigarettes lay on an end table in the family room. The signs were there, but none of us wanted to accept it. The police finally showed to take a missing person’s report. For whatever reason, the cop needed to walk around the property checking every room and closet before filing the report. Like all of us, he didn’t enter the garage and therefore never found my father.

I went to take the garbage out through the garage, but it was packed tight with two vehicles, an Astro Van and a 91 Lincoln Towncar. There was a strong smell, which my mind assumed was just garbage that had been sitting out all winter while my grandparents were away. My aunt, who was near the door way, must have realized what it was. She said something along the lines of, “Do you smell that?”

We circled around the house and opened the garage from the outside. My aunt opened the door to the van. I was directly behind her and immediately went into shock when I saw my dad. He had lain plastic down in the back of the van before doing it. He knew that my sister would never look there and saved her from having to find him. I ran inside as fast as I could and pushed my sister and girlfriend back inside of the house. I kept repeating some sentence that everything was going to be okay, but not to go outside. I was out of my mind.

I cannot clearly or accurately recall the details that followed these events for the next six months, let alone the rest of the night. I know that I called my uncle and told him what happened. He showed up about the same time that the local police and fire department showed up. They found a 9mm handgun under my dad. My grandparents on my mother’s side came to pick up my sister, my girlfriend and me because none of us were in any position to drive. In my emotional state, I lashed out at my grandfather and told them to let me walk the rest of the way home.

This single moment in time has forever changed my perspective on life. I don’t believe my dad wanted to put any of us through it. To really understand the situation, we have to go back… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Atheism Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

U.S. Foreign Policy in Iran and the Middle East

March 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

It’s no secret that the U.S. has been pressuring the global community to increase sanctions on Iran. Sanctions are often precursor to war. We did it to Japan during World War II and they bombed Perl Harbor. You cannot put sanctions on a nation like Iran and expect them to just roll over.

For more than 60 years, we have meddled in the business of the middle-east for the sole purpose of guaranteeing a strong and cheap oil supply. Oil is the blood of free-market capitalism. Without oil, our entire way of life stops. But instead of spending that time building more refineries, opening oil reserves and inventing alternative energies, we’ve been setting up dictatorships and regimes in the middle-east.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: General Skepticism Tagged With: , , , , ,
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