8 ms·
The Mayan calendar might represent a longer timescale than previously considered
- jutrewag 4y ago[flagged]
- steve_adams_86 4y agoOdd, all I can think of in contrast of this supposition is how many women’s accomplishments in history have been subdued or co-opted by men. There is plenty of evidence of that, but none I can think of to confirm the ham-fisting you’re describing.
- jutrewag 4y ago[flagged]
- throwaway81523 4y agoThe mention of a $26 article from Cambridge University Press immediately made me think of a woman, Alexandra Elbakyan. Heh.
- dang 4y agoWe've banned this account for repeated ideological trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- aaomidi 4y agoLooking through their comment history nothing stood out, and unfortunately the comment they made is now invisible :( Im now very curious what the straw was that broke the camels back.
- dang 4y agoYou can see dead comments by turning 'showdead' on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If you do that, just please realize that (1) you're signing up to see the worst that the internet brings to HN (because we don't delete any of those posts - the most we do is kill them), and (2) don't forget that you did it! We regularly get emails from users complaining about awful comments on HN, and then it turns out those accounts were banned a long time ago and the user just forgot that they had 'showdead' on.
- aaomidi 4y agoOh god. Well I’m glad that’s an option but damn. Makes sense now why they’re banned.
- fjfaase 4y agoThis implies that the Mayan must have been recording the positions of the planets with great accuracy over a rather long period of time, probably spanning several generations.
- dmbche 4y agoIt seems incredibly clever - and I realise that I assumed they weren't aware of most planets since they're hard to see today, but I'm sure they were very noteworthy event in the pristine sky they were looking at.
- readthenotes1 4y agoThose planets are much easier to see without light pollution. All but Neptune* can be seen by the naked eye. (Shamelessly abusing the classification of Pluto as a dwarf planet here to exclude it from the conversation). Uranus: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/07/starwatch-opposition-is-a-chance-to-see-uranus-with-the-naked-eye https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/07/starwatch-op...
- dmbche 4y agoYou remind me that I wanted to book an airBnB in one of the parks near me, they have an observatory and as such the sky is legally required to be untainted - I haven't seen the milky way in almost 10 years, I can't imagine seeing the stars every night.
- sammalloy 4y agoBefore the light pollution got really bad where I live due to development, provided it wasn’t cloudy, I could see the Milky Way every night for about 15 years. Now, it’s gone due to lax rules and regulations due to commercial security light fixtures which throw light in all direction at night to deter thieves. It’s pretty upsetting, but even worse, most people I talk to don’t even notice it’s gone. That’s almost more disturbing that the light pollution. We’ve lost something that most people aren’t aware they lost in the first place.
- dzdt 4y agoSounds like a "guess" rather than a "solution". They have noticed a numerical coincidence and formed a hypothesis. Without additional evidence tying the 819-day count to astronomical observations its not particularly convincing.
- hvs 4y agoYeah, I'm all for investigating this line of thinking further, but all sorts of weird coincidences come up in numerology that no serious person would consider "science".
- irrational 4y agoIs this science? This is a human made up calendar, not how many protons are in a gold atom.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoScience doesn't have some super clear, strict, reductive definition like the "scientific method" you may have been taught in school. The idea that all science must make or test predictions is just based on an old misinterpretation of the philosophy of Karl Popper, mainly by physicists. The only real general requirement I think you can make is that all science involves some level of interrogation and study of the physical world. Anthropology qualifies in abudance. Whether it's good science is beside the point.
- voz_ 4y agoThis is a nonsense definition. Science absolutely must follow the scientific method. What you are talking about is natural philosophy and protosciences - its the difference between alchemy and chemistry - which is all the difference in the world.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoAnd what is the scientific method, in your mind, exactly?
- ks2048 4y agoToo bad following the "More Information" link only leads to a Cambridge University Press page offering the article for $26.
- partiallypro 4y agoJust as the Mayans predicted.
- ssalka 4y agoOk, so when is the actual end of the world if not 2012?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- culi 4y agoHow do you know it wasn't 2012?
- irrational 4y agoSeriously. Looking around, I would not be surprised to learn we have already passed the end of the world and have moved into hell.
- api 4y agoInstead of doing the whole hell thing, which God decided was kind of harsh, they just moved us into a shitty timeline run by hack writers. It's kind of like what's done with a show that somehow hasn't been cancelled yet but where all the good writers and a few of the lead actors have moved on. Their ideas are shit like: "I've got it! Let's make Donald Trump President! Then we'll have Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy try to overthrow the US government!" "Not until we launch a red sports car into space! Then there's a pandemic that causes a toilet paper shortage." "Let's turn Elon Musk into a thirteen year old edgelord 4chan troll and have him buy Twitter!" "Enough cheap jokes. We need some serious drama. Let's have Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine and then lose really bad to an army run by a former comedian that uses Discord for battlefield comms." "After that we'll have a superintelligence descended from something called 'llama' take over the world after it leaks out of Facebook with a torrent file." "Facebook? No way let's have Zuckerberg bet the entire company on the metaverse idea from Neil Stephenson except it doesn't really exist. He'll rename the company Meta." "Yeah that's awesome! Now when does Dogecoin become the global reserve currency?" "After the llama makes everyone wear hats or be murdered by drone swarms."
- 4y ago
- avodonosov 4y agoAny divider of 819 also aligns. > And 13 cycles of Saturn's 378-day synodic period adds up to 4,914 days, which is the same as six times 819. 6 * 819 = 6 * (3 * 273) = 18 * 273. All integers that divide 819: 1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 21, 39, 63, 91, 117, 273, 819 How this hypothesis explains why 819 was preferred over those other numbers?
- dmbche 4y agoBecause they had found a prior mention of a 819 day period in relation to calendars, but didn't make the link at the time (from my understanding of the paper)
- avodonosov 4y agoThe researchers saw prior mention of 819. But Mayans, why did they choose 819?
- sidlls 4y agoMost cultures choose values like this based on their aggregate interactions with observable natural phenomena over a period of some generations. It’s too bad Spanish invaders wiped out much of anything that might help discern what that might have been for this culture
- dmbche 4y agoLooking at it quickly it seems that 819 might be the number that lets the multiplier be as small as possible, since they are saying that all planets fit in a 45 year timeline I assume all mutipliers are smaller than 45..maybe that's the most handy form of optimization for their uses? Both number remain quite small, compared to 18*273.
- avodonosov 4y ago> They noted that for Mercury, the synod period is 117 days, which, when multiplied by seven, equals 819 So for Mercury the multiplier is 1/7. Doesn't look very convenient. It would be more natural to use 117 as the magic number. Of course, convinience depends on their arithmetics. Looking from our decimal system perspective could be misleading. I was thinking maybe smaller divider can produce meaningless results with some multipliers (e.g. 117 *5 predicts nothing, no planet has this period). While every multiple of 819 predicts something. But I doubt that's the case. The authors of the hypothesis shоuld address these questions.
- justinzollars 4y agoTLDR: Researchers solved the Mayan 819-day count mystery by finding that 20 cycles of it align with the planets' recurring positions in the sky over a 45-year period, connecting it to the general Maya calendar, the Tzolk'in.
- gh_throw 4y ago[flagged]
- jeron 4y agoThankfully we didn’t build those boats like the 2012 movie
- youainti 4y agoOr require another virgin birth like the 2012 doomsday one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hknmtt 4y agoAnyone interested in this will find Zecharia Sitchin's "Lost Realms" quite interesting book to read.