I personally love that people associate the end of the Mayan <i>short</i> calender (most people claim it as their predictive end of the world, when in reality their long calender ended millions of years in the future) with the end of the world. The Mayans associated the end of the short calender as a party, because a new b'ak'tun was to them like the new millennium was to us.<p>We're about to hit the 13th b'ak'tun, which some people claim is the end of the calender. However, it's generally regarded the count is supposed to go up to 19 b'ak'tun (they counted 0). Incidentally the end of the 20 b'ak'tun will be in the year 4,376.<p>What all the end of the world nuts are too ignorant to see when they obsess over these things, is that despite the end of their calender being thousands of years in the future, they'd already fixed the problem. There's four larger integers in their calender: piktun, kalabtun, k'inchiltun, and alautun. If the b'ak'tun is in fact a cycle of 20 then each of these are also a cycle of 20. This puts the end of the world about 400 million years away, which is probably very close to when the Earth will actually be uninhabitable as in about 1 billion years the sun will have gotten so hot that the oceans will have evaporated.<p>I give no credence to this guys argument, first he has no clue how the Mayan calender works, just like all doomsayers, they only see what they want. The fact that the earth hasn't ended in the 23 previous solar cycles that we've recorded, seems to lend credence that the 24th won't end it either. Just because it's the end of the Mayan short calender doesn't make it in the least bit more special.<p>My prediction, this is another load of bunk, just like the predictions that the world would end in 1999, 2000 and pretty much every year.