World ending in 2012? Why? Because the Mayan calendar ends in 2012? Well many computers were going to "end" when our calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000. This was simply because when people were designing the programs, storage was at a premium so they decided to cut a corner and not account for the first two digits of the year. 1900 and 2000 looked the same to a computer - 00.

So why does the Mayan calendar end on Dec 21, 2012 @ 11:11pm UT? It counts the number of days since their beginning date - August 13, 3114 B.C. It goes in cycles of 5,126 years. They use the following units of measure:

kin = one day
uinal = 20 days
tun = 360 days (18 uinal)
katun = 7,200 days (20 tun)
baktun = 144,000 days (20 katun)

July 20, 1969 — the date of the first moon landing — would be written as: 12.17.15.17.0
(baktun).(katun).(tun).(uinal).(kin)

Dec 21, 2012 on the Mayan calendar would look like this: 13.0.0.0.0 People who understand the calendar say Dec 22, 2012 would be written as: 0.0.0.0.1.

So like the much hyped Y2K phenomena, the cycle is just going to repeat.....the date rolls over to the beginning again.With Y2K, the fears were SOMEWHAT justified because so many things relied on computers for calculations - airplanes, satellites, etc. If calculations went awry then perhaps some of these systems would have failed which could have ultimately led to a domino effect of planes/satellites dropping from the sky causing a lot of havoc. Possibly. These computers are based on the Gregorian calendar - not the Mayan calendar.

So while all this doomsday stuff is interesting to read about - I still haven't seen anything that makes me think anything is going to happen. I welcome any evidence to the contrary.