Fox News reports that the impending Mayan prediction of the apocalypse coming on December 21st, 2012 has been postponed.
Roger Ailes decreed, that with the Republican take over of congress and the likely recapture of the presidency in 2012 that Armageddon would be bad for business and would interfere with conservative plans to keep the devastation confined to the poor and middle classes of the world.
More over the speed bump...
I hope you will forgive the snark, but, in actuality, Fox news appropriated an article from the web journal LiveScience much to the chagrin, I suspect, of Mr. Rupert Murdoch who rails at news aggregation by anyone borrowing a few paragraphs from the Wall Street Journal.
At any rate, LiveScience reporter Stephanie Pappas writes that (article) there may have been a miscalculation in the transformation from Mayan dates to the Gregorian calendar.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)
Unfortunately, Gerardo Aldana of the University of California, Santa Barbara doesn't, much like Republican theories of government, have a theory to replace the current GMT hypothesis which was improved by Floyd Lounsbury's work.
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.
Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.
Here's the Faux News Link (which I suggest you not visit)
2012 Apocalypse -- Postponed