On Friday, some say, the Maya apocalypse will arrive and the
world will end. Fortunately, it won't. A bold claim, we know,
but if it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for us. The
space agency has already issued a press release dated Dec. 22
entitled "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday." The Maya
apocalypse predictions arise from a misunderstanding of the
ancient Maya Long Count Calendar, which wraps up a 400-year
cycle called a b'ak'tun on Dec. 21, 2012, the day of the winter
solstice. This just so happens to be the 13th b'ak'tun in the
calendar, a benchmark the Maya would have seen as a full cycle
of creation. Did you catch that? Cycle. In other words, the Maya
had a cyclical view of time and would not have seen the end of
their calendar cycle as the end of the world. It wasn't until
Westerners began reinterpreting the calendar in the past couple
decades that it got its apocalyptic overtones. [ Images: Mayan
Calendar Carvings ] Maya apocalypse rumors have proliferated on
the Internet, running the gamu