The year 2012, the end of the world?

[crushing]

... anybody remember the catastrophies predicted for Y2K? Boy, that turned out pretty accurate didn't it?

Yeah, the people making those predictions didn't have any faith in the people and organizations putting a lot of time and money into fixing the Y2K bug. I think those 'sky is falling' people became meteorologists. They now think everytime we get some snow or a heavy rain it's the storm of the century and have to put radars pics and warning crawls across your local TV channels.

You may experience some hiccups this coming Sunday morning. Major software vendors were still rolling out DST patches and fixes to their patches this week.

 

[Carol]

Worked out pretty well for me - nice couple of grand bonus for being on stand-by cover just in case any of our systems went squeeky-pop-boom!

The only downside was being the only sober person in the room on New Years Eve ... .

Y2K was veddy veddy good to me too. There was certainly quite a bit of hype surrouding the situation but I think many reasons why everything went well was because a lot of companies did testing of their systems and hired folks that worked their butt off trying to close holes in code.

A team at my company has been working in a similar frenzy trying to get as Daylight Savings Time patch debugged and deployed out to our American customers. Sounds trivial on paper but in practice...it's really not. Maybe we need a crack engineering squad to work out y2012 bugs

 

[zDom]

nano-tech machine plagues et al. ...

You referring to "Ceres Storm" by David Herter? Or some other sci-fi book I haven't read?

 

[Shaderon]

Y2K was veddy veddy good to me too. There was certainly quite a bit of hype surrouding the situation but I think many reasons why everything went well was because a lot of companies did testing of their systems and hired folks that worked their butt off trying to close holes in code.

A team at my company has been working in a similar frenzy trying to get as Daylight Savings Time patch debugged and deployed out to our American customers. Sounds trivial on paper but in practice...it's really not. Maybe we need a crack engineering squad to work out y2012 bugs

At least I know my 1990's programming time didn't go to waste... I was one of them people who PUT the holes in the code with orders from my boss, when I asked him "why don't we fix this now instead of firefighting closer to the time?" I was told "We want to have jobs in the future, just do it as I say". Charmer huh?

Sorry people! I was one of them who caused the sober but lucrative milleniums

 

[Sukerkin]

Sorry people! I was one of them who caused the sober but lucrative milleniums

:lol: I don't know whether to thank you or not ! Still, I've worked hard at making up for that enforced sobriety since, so alls well that ends well :tup:.

 

[Sukerkin]

You referring to "Ceres Storm" by David Herter? Or some other sci-fi book I haven't read?

I wasn't thinking of any non-science publication on this one, tho' I wouldn't be surprised if there hasn't been fiction on the idea ... in fact, I now recall reading "Blood Music" many moons ago (and I suppose "Trillions" was sort of a prophetic little book as nano-tech wasn't even theoretical back then (when I was a pre-teen)).

 

[CoryKS]

Y2K was veddy veddy good to me too.

Me too!

Overtime... gooood.

 

[tradrockrat]

OK guys - this subject is a favorite of mine because I've always been fascinated by history and the Mayans are a wiked cool society (fun as hell to study!)

Fact: The Mayan Calender ends on December 21, 20012.

Fact: the mayans were obsessed with time and calenders (thay actually had 14 major calenders they used for daily living)

Fact: the main calender (and cause of all of this hoppla) is more astronomically accurate than our own.

Fact: the Mayn calender predicted the year and month of the end of their own empire (weird but true). the story was of the white bearded God that would come and destroy them. In that exact month and year, the Spaniards arrived. this little tidbit is supposed to "prove" the validfity of the end of the world

Fact: NOWHERE in traditrional Mayan beliefs does it state thet the ACTUAL WORLD will end. That new age crap is from a guy and his book called "The Mayan Factor". He is a fraud and a charlatain and is disavowed by every Mayan Shaman on the planet. The actual belief is that the world will forever be altered - signifigantly - by the events leading up to and caused by the astrological alignment of the solar system on Decmber 21, 2012 at approximately 10:10 at whatever they now call the international date line (didn't they recently change the name? I can't remember)

Fact: In late December, the earth will be directly between the sun and the center of our galaxy

Fact: THere is a small black holw at the center of our galaxy- the Mayans knew this, we figured it out a few years ago.

Fact: The Mayan culture did NOT disappear. It was destroyed, but because they believed in their calender, Mayan Shaman had left the cities several months before the Spanairds arrived with more than 17 Codecise (their version of writting) and hid in caves and other innacessible places until they slowly reintegrated thamselves into other villages and such. We westerners have relied on one main historical source for our information on the Maya for several hundred years - a book written by a Spaniard. Meahwhile, outside of the book, the Mayan teachings survived. I beleive we now have 13 codices validated as authentic besides the one that was claimed to be the last by the spaniard and his book.

Fact - there are several prophecies of doom centered around December 2012 - that's why it's getting such great press. Some quack even "decoded" the I-ching and showed that it represented a calender of soprts that ends in December 20012.

Now then - I'm not a believer, but I do love the hype! I find it more fun than a good movie.

In fact, I highly recomment the rather hystrerical (pun intended) book "Apocaltpse 2012" by Lawrence E Joseph. Several times in Barnes and Noble I actually burst out laughing at sections - and not always at the parts he intended to be funny...

http://www.apocalypse2012.com/book/

 

[Xue Sheng]

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.



Sorry I could restrain myself no longer and I just had to post that here.

 

[jks9199]

I hate being a pain in the ***, I really do. But (as per my previous post)since, as reported in Wikipedia, Wiccan `theology' is less than 100 years old, just how is any `lost' primaeval knowledge going to come from it?

There is one surprising bit of lost knowledge we may get from the founder of Wicca, however. Gerald Gardner, the colonial civil servant Heretic mentioned, published a book about traditional Malaysian weapons and MAs in the middle 1930s. He was something of an expert on them, and his book is, so far as I know, well-regarded by ethnologists. So he's not totally irrelevant to the dedicated focus of the board!

That's my biggest problem with a lot of these "revived ancient religions." Somebody basically cobbled what they interpreted as the (cue the appropriate ominous voice, please) "ANCIENT WISDOM" together from a mish-mash of mythology and archeology (if you're lucky)...

Sorry, unless you can explain why your "ancient faith" was so well hidden that not a single practitioner was even hinted at... and there are no ancient scrolls/manuscripts/whatever to support it... It's probably not true.

(Kind of like a lot of these "super secret family hidden martial arts.")