Well, at least I am; I can’t speak for anyone else at 5 a.m. But I suspect, according to today’s Google doodle, that we all made it:
The Telegraph explains:
Clicking the image send visitors to Google’s search reults page for “End of the 13th Baktun”.
The 13th Baktun is the last cycle of the Mayan calendar, due to end today, December 21 2012. A Baktun is a period of almost 400 years.
The date has been misinterpreted as the heralding end of the world, but descendants of the Mayans have insisted the calendar merely resets and there will be no apocalypse. Instead, a 14th Baktun offers hope and change, they claim.
Sort of like theologians, aren’t they?
Neverthless [sic], across the globe people were last night converging to witness the apocalypse at sites including Mayan ruins, Stonehenge, Stalin’s bunker in Moscow, Byron Bay in Australia, and a sacred mountain in France.
In Central America believers flocked to ancient Mayan sites like Caracol in Belize, where they watched light passing through purposefully positioned structures, just as the inhabitants would have done over a millenium ago.
I heard a Mayan expert on the radio say that there is some dispute over the day & that the Mayans may have meant 24th so you may have to wait until the first day of the famous celebration of Coynezaa
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/happy-coynezaa/
to see if it does end. Which it won’t.
I am confident that we will be celebrating Coynezaa this year. But you should all be sending your gifts NOW!
Note: FedEx, UPS and the USPS will NOT deliver after the End of the World. Check with other carriers.
Not seeing doodle yet. Still here.
Congratulations !
But now for the real news: Nick Lane (UCL) dicovered the origin of life !
Is that the Nick Lane who wrote Power, Sex and Suicide? Fascinating book, even if he did say at one point that Conway Morris’s views on convergence were “persuasive”. And I’m still wondering whether it was him or me who misunderstood Dawkins Selfish Gene idea – Lane says the unit of selection is the organism in the case of bacteria, I say it’s still the gene.
Very likely. Yes, the book is on my shelves. Somewhere.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-life-emerged-from-deep-sea-rocks-1.12109
Yeah – UCL! 🙂 He is a very good lecturer.
All three of Lane’s books were thoroughly enjoyable. He is dead wrong about the unit of selection, though.
Organisms simply do not replicate. You can argue that the entire genome of a bacterium (save plasmids) can be considered a single gene for some length of time, but it’s still the gene that replicates, not the bacterium. The notion that bacteria divide into two exact copies of the same organism is just wrong. One new organism buds off, and the original (which keeps all the eventually fatal detritus of living which can’t be removed) remains.
Part of the problem may be the trendiness of using the term “gene” to mean a protein-coding segment of DNA. That’s not what the word originally meant, and it’s certainly not how Dawkins used the term.
Oh, that sounds interesting … googling … There’s nothing terribly exciting sounding on his publication record at https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/research/personal/index?upi=NJLAN31 ; New Scientist has a little twitch of life from “Panspermia” Wixhramasinghe in response to a June article from Lane, which I vaguely remember reading … nope, I’ll need a reference to see what you’re excited about.
It is the Nature article now out I put the link above…
Wrong link sorry – the actual article is in Cell
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(12)01438-9
We discover the source of life on Earth just in time for it to be snuffed out.
Ironic, ain’t it.
FTFY(See also comment I@m about to write to … uh, Dominic.
Got it, thanks.
At first glance it looks rather like Mike Russell’s hydrothermal vent hypothesis (Jerry may remember me mentioning this work in the Q&A session after his recent Glasgow presentation.), which itself builds upon Günter Wächtershäuser’s work … yeah, it’s potentially an appreciable step forwards. The iron-sulphur world theory has been the front-runner in theories of abiogenesis for … a decade or so, by my measure ; others may put it approaching two decades … and this probably puts it further in the lead.
I wouldn’t say that the case is solved yet – no buckets of chemicals spontaneously generating life – but this looks like a noticeable step forward.
Its just gone 7:15pm in Perth, Western Australia, which is when the world is officially coming to an end. I can assure everyone that absolutely nothing has happe
+1
I’m from Perth, so I have to ask: how could you tell?
Party city, is it?
Sorry. “Was it?”
I’m not one for ‘Atheist Cathedrals’ but I could imagine a block of stone with all the predicted and failed ‘end of the world’ dates engraved on it – as a means of exposing superstition for what it is.
Have to be a damn big block of stone though.
…& written in many languages!
Excellent idea. But you’d need to leave a lot of blank space to engrave future ends of the world.
Didn’t I hear something about proposals to drain a reservoir built into the “second Yosemite” valley near San Francisco? That should provide a decent size chunk of nice smooth granite.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_of_the_end_of_the_world
That looks to be a fairly short list. Try A Brief History of the Apocalypse for a longer one.
Yeah, the RW list demands a reference for each one. Need to go through that longer list and cover it in detailed refs.
Oops, sorry. I just spilled my coffee. As I was saying absolutely nothing has happened.
…it depends what you spilled it on & how hot it was!
The Guardian is doing a live blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/21/end-world-live-blog?CMP=twt_fd
So the fact that 12 baktuns have ended without the destruction of the world somehow escaped all these doomsayers? Was it because 13 is an unlucky number for Mayans, or something?
Well I just had to peel back some wallpaper to ascertain the extent of what appears to be a leak in the exterior weatherproofing of my property.
Honestly, to hear my wife going on about the damage I did to that wallpaper you’d think the world *had* come to an end …
I am on Eastern Standard Time. When will I experience the End?
Several days before the news gets to St Johns NL.
Is that where you are? Nice place. At least it was before the world ended.
Not where I am,but it s a place that I’ve been. And been snowed-in at, in both directions.
Behold, the Mayan Lord of the Underworld has been seen in the mountains behind my house!
VIVA OTORONGO, the Great Spotted Kitteh!
(And let’s hope the gun nuts leave him alone this time.)
http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/ua-government-agencies-release-photos-of-jaguar-in-santa-ritas/article_7c6661ae-db1e-5c39-b704-06fe99cff42b.html
From the article:
Years and years training in the lab, to culminate in sequencing litterbox biscuits. The bad part is I’m envious of those people.
Speak for yourself — I’m up to my eyeballs in zombie guts, I’m dodging tornadoes, and I can’t hear a thing above all the HORRIBLE FLAMING DEATH AND THE DARK EYES THEY BURN RIGHT THROUGH ME OH THE PAIN THE HUGE MANATEE AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!
Might be a bit thin on the posting today, all things considered….
Cheers,
b&
I experienced the End of the World once. I got better….
Ha! You had it easy.
Back when I was a lad, we had to end the world ourselves, I tell ya, and there was none of this “getting better” afterwards. Yes sir, after you ended the world, you were a zombie for the rest of your death, and that was that. “Getting better” — what luxury!
Kids these days….
b&
“HORRIBLE FLAMING DEATH”
Another ho-hum perfect day in the Valley of the Sun, I see.
Yup.
Indeed, there was some frost on the roofs overnight, but it’s already burned off. And, when I write, “burned,” that’s exactly what I mean.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, the living room fire extinguisher is in need of a refill….
b&
We lost power for a while though. 🙂
Loosely related:
http://www.gocomics.com/beardo/2012/12/21/
You know, it occurs to me…the only way to take seriously any of the “We’re domed!” scenarios is to be completely ignorant of deep time and the size of the universe.
Kinda makes for an easy filter, doesn’t it?
b&
Isn’t that what the suave, brainy, omnivorous and and adaptable Troodon said about those stupid tyrannosaurs and ceratopsians?
The problem is that none of them were very WISE….
b&
Haven’t studied this much. But if this was some kind of rapture, hardly anybody were beamed up to the creepy overseer.
Kinda spoils the looting part for the rest of us….
I’m away from my notes*, but I’m amused that the blocks look like they could be giving today’s date: a date marker at the top left, 13.0.0.0.0 in the long count, then two number + glyph that could be today’s date in the calendar round (3 Kankin 4 Ahau), and another sign that I don’t recognize.
* A friend of mine was an anthropology/physics double major and taught a summer course on reading classic mayan.
At least the Mayans provided a date. Christians have been promising the end is “near” for 2000 years.
Talk about moving the goalposts….
I think you may have misinterpreted why people are at Stonehenge, they are every Winter Solstice…..celebrating the shortest Day…something we can definetly rely on!
Don’t blame the Mayans because some nimrod at the History Channel chose to interpret their calendar ending as an apocalypse prophecy.
Stupid Mayans
No Steve, the Mayans simply had a calendar – its the current new-agers that are stupid.
“Sort of like theologians, aren’t they?”
Are you talking about the Mayan ancestors? Because people were saying that the Mayan calendar didn’t predict the end of the world long before now.