On December 21, 2012, our calendar will align with the Maya date
22.214.171.124.0, completing a great Maya cycle of time. There's
been a lot of hoopla that we are about to face a doomsday --
better known as the Maya apocalypse. There are television
specials and panic buying of disaster supplies in Russia, a
reminder of the stockpiling that took place for Y2K back in
1999. While the Maya date will coincide with the solstice, the
shortest day of the year, will it also coincide with the end of
the world? I'm no seer, but I am confident that December 22 will
see the dawn. The ancient Maya of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and
Honduras were close keepers of time. They charted every day,
organizing them into 20- and 400-year periods. Using a base-20
counting system (ours is base 10) and zero, they easily
calculated thousands of dates, some noting the existence of
millions of years. During the height of their civilization in
the 8th century, the Maya recorded dates and deeds at dozens of
city-states, from births and batt