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The leap year crap is from people with no idea what they are talking about. One of the reasons why the Mayans had such a long calendar was to take care of things like leap years and leap seconds.
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The claim that the date of the Mayan Long Count rollover has already passed first appeared on Facebook about 6 months ago. It is wrong, but it's astonishing the number of people who blindly repeat it thinking it makes them appear clever when it actually makes them appear dumb.
Why did the person on Facebook assume that the scholars who have been studying the date correlation for more than a century must have forgotten all about leap years?
The Mayan Long Count is not based on any celestial entities. It's a count of days. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. The end of Baktun 13 (which is what all the fuss is about) is Day 13.0.0.0.0 in their system, or Day 1,872,000 in a straight count. All that remains to be done is estimate the start date of their Long Count (11th August 3114 BCE) and count forward 1,872,000 days, thus arriving at 21st December 2012 (taking all leap years in OUR calendar into account). Since it's a count of days, the question of accuracy doesn't come into it.
Whether calendars are 'right' or 'wrong' doesn't come into it either. A|ll that's required is to know the arithmetic by which they work and to be able to use it to convert from one to the other.
Why did the person on Facebook assume that the scholars who have been studying the date correlation for more than a century must have forgotten all about leap years?
The Mayan Long Count is not based on any celestial entities. It's a count of days. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. The end of Baktun 13 (which is what all the fuss is about) is Day 13.0.0.0.0 in their system, or Day 1,872,000 in a straight count. All that remains to be done is estimate the start date of their Long Count (11th August 3114 BCE) and count forward 1,872,000 days, thus arriving at 21st December 2012 (taking all leap years in OUR calendar into account). Since it's a count of days, the question of accuracy doesn't come into it.
Whether calendars are 'right' or 'wrong' doesn't come into it either. A|ll that's required is to know the arithmetic by which they work and to be able to use it to convert from one to the other.