Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of How the Mayan Calendar Works - Slashdot
source link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/04/21/0010253/scientists-finally-solved-the-mystery-of-how-the-mayan-calendar-works
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Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of How the Mayan Calendar Works
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"Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of visible planets," the study authors write. "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar." That means the Mayans took a 45-year view of planetary alignment and coded it into a calendar that has left modern scholars scratching their heads in wonder.
Mercury was always the starting point for the tricky timeline because its synodic period -- 117 days -- matches nicely into 819. From there, though, we need to start extrapolating out the 819 number, and if you chart 20 cycles of 819, you can fit every key planet into the mix. And Mars may be the kicker for the overall length. With a 780-day synodic period, 21 periods match exactly to 16,380, or 20 cycles of 819. Venus needs seven periods to match five 819-day counts, Saturn has 13 periods to fit with six 819-day counts, and Jupiter 39 periods to hit 19 819-counts. "Rather than limit their focus to any one planet," the authors write, "the Maya astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used for predictions of all the visible planet's synod periods, as well as commensuration points with their cycles in the Tzolk'in and Calendar Round."
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You start counting cycles of 819 and tell us when it ends.
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Maybe the world already ended and we're just the last to know.
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The Mayan world mostly ended. Did their calendar show that?
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Email says it's still loading...
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To reply with a non-joke: climate change, sea level rise, ecological collapse and probably nuclear war are all coming this century. Billions will be dead in the process, and disregarding some minor greenwashing, we are happily sleepwalking into it. Might as well be the end of the world.
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What, no mention of pandemics? I guess you're right... COVID-19 was pretty overhyped and forgettable.
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Indeed if a more serious pandemic happens you will probably be among the first to go still clutching your horse paste.
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Quite a self own since the horse paste that cured Africa of river blindness has been shown to be more effective a therapeutic.
The lies keep coming, don't they? Show your evidence for this statement. Not some anti-vaxxer on Youtube, show the clear hard, scientific-based evidence to make this claim.
You can't, because no such evidence exists. Every single supposed study about horse paste and covid has been shown to be doctored or outright false.
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"Every single supposed study about horse paste and covid has been shown to be doctored or outright false."
Not really. When I searched for more serious information on the topic, I ran into just one study after I gave up: too many self-proclaimed experts without any credibility diluted the search results.
Anyways, that report looked at many many cases and clearly found an overmortality by those adhering to Ivermectin. Didn't need to search any further.
That same friend who trusts 'alternative' medicine also tru
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You see, you have look outside the small box that is the heavily, neigh over-regulated world that is western medicine to find conclusions of efficacy of a therapeutic against Covid 19. Where? Here: https://c19ivm.org/mustafa.htm... [c19ivm.org]
Why? Because for $200,000,000,000.00 to be given to various drug companies for an emergency use authorization, BY LAW, no other therapeutic can prove effective at all. Otherwise; there would be no EUA possible under the law. But you would rather rely on the same industry that t
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"Your generic and widely available 3Cl protease inhibitor for treating COVID-19 is killing people"
"Our patented and expensive 3Cl protease inhibitor for treating COVID-19 is saving lives"Guess which one is Ivermectin and which is Pfizer Paxlovid?
Now guess who got hoodwinked and will leave a non-sensical rebuttal in anger.
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They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Pfizer was so flattered by Ivermectin that they released Paxlovid, an oral medication that uses the same mechanism to address COVID-19.
"Paxlovid is an active 3Cl protease inhibitor. Paxlovid exerts its antiviral efficacy by inhibiting a necessary protease in the viral replication procedure."
It would take Olympic level mental gymnastics to both defend Pfizer Paxlovid while simultaneously demonizing Ivermectin.
And if you want to know how effective Ivermecti-
Well, ivermectin paralyzes the nervous system of insects and parasites, while paxlovid prevents viruses from replicating. Very different processes, I donâ(TM)t know where you see this information. Just check out their wiki pages, I donâ(TM)t see how one is related to the other, except that theyâ(TM)re both oral?
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Every single supposed study about horse paste and covid has been shown to be doctored or outright false.
Oh, like the reports of vaccine efficacy and mortality rates?
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Not sure it's even worth responding to, but eh. Let's take this even further towards its logical extreme, and say that every time you use a condom, it's murder. What's the death toll from that? Or, let's go even further. You've decided to have a quiet night in, instead of going out and drunkenly impregnating some girl? Murderer! You've gone to university and had a career instead of marrying at the earliest age the law in your country allows and immediately starting to bang out kids every couple of years? Ma
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I don't know if this AC is one of those people,
Have no fear. It is almost a certainty the AC is one of those people who will cite the Bible for everything, then completely ignore what Mark says about a man committing adultery if he divorces then remarries, or that one of the commandments is one shouldn't bear false winess against their neighbor, or the entire portion of Proverbs 6:16 -19 [biblegateway.com], while at the same time worshipping at the foot of their orange idol.
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That's because we're made in the Biblical God's image, don't you know?
The Biblical God is the greatest abortionist of all time, having regularly aborted 68% of all embrios and fetuses (we call those "miscarriages"), plus assassinated about 27% of the survivors in their first year of life (we call those "infant mortality"), for a grand total of aborting/assassinating ~77% of all babies ever conceived -- that is, until modern medicine reduced both ratios way below the threshold the Biblical God considers acce
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As a christian and yahwist and regular and repeated reader of the bible--this is correct.
Yes, the breath-taking living-being shaped/sculpted (created) in the shadow (or shape thereof) and likeness of "us." Furthermore, hebraic laws regarding pregnancy are for the woman, the one already taking breath and being alive both. because also, being alive used to mean more to humans that not being alive yet. And yahweh is remarked is his own manual for being the god of the living.
Paraphrase of Genesis 1:26-27 using
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Nuclear war reduces the effects of climate change while rendering ecological collapse redundant. Sea level rise is means more water to alleviate shortages and of course more fish.
Prophetically obvious given average global life expectancy is ~70 and global population is over 8 billion.
Sleepwalking is quite rare something only a few percentage of the population does. Most of us only walk while we are awake.
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Ah, crap! Where are the Georgia guide stones when you need 'em?
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My calendar ends on December 31st, 2023. By the "logic" applied to the Mayan calendar, we all have just months to live because the world is going to end soon.
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Aw crap! The world already ended for me! I still haven't replaced last year's calendar. So am I in heaven or hell...I think that's an easy enough answer to figure out.
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December 2012 was a new calendar cycle. And if you look back a whole bunch of shit started happening more frequently since. More frequently severe weather. More frequent mass shooting events. More frequent political scandal after scandal. More frequent riots. More mass brainwashing on social media. They very well may have gotten it right. 2013 onward is a stark contrast to 2012 and before. In the 90s that blue dress was all the scandal for over a year. Today that would be yesterdays news after 2 days. Somet
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Sounds reasonable, but also probably wrong. LLMs are incentivized to produce answers, even when the answer is possibly wrong, so they will make up false information in order to satisfy the request. This is the major flaw with LLMs, imho -- I'd rather have the computer tell me it didn't know than outright lie to me with confident tenor.
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I asked chatgpt how I might be able to store user defined certificates in fido keys, and it literally made up a CTAP command that sounded very plausible to the point that at first I thought it was real. I asked it for the complete APDU, and not only did it provide that but it even annotated it. And then I noticed the instruction number it provided went to another already existing CTAP command that doesn't do anything with certificates. I asked where it got this information, and it linked to the fido allianc
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I don't get all these questions people keep asking it. I'd ask it where to find buried treasure and easy women.
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I'd settle for buried women and easy treasure...
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> Definitely not going to replace any jobs I can think of any time soon.
Like any useful tool, it may allow workers in some jobs to get more done in less time, which may reduce the number of employees needed for those jobs in some cases. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Freeing up labor can allow more stuff to get done that previously wasn't happening. Do you really want to go back to a world where everybody had to spend more than half of their time just producing enough food to survive and basic c
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Not just LLMs, humans as well. Throw enough terms into an equation and you can fit almost any curve, even if the curve is a random walk though a plane. The explanation for this one sounds just a bit too complex to be plausible, why would a not very high-tech society create a calendar this complex? For all we know the number 819 could have been sacred to Huitzilotezcatzibilchalixkunyaxchilancoatl or something.
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Historically, "not very high-tech" societies have put a lot of effort into astronomical observations and predictions. This has been consistent all across the world. It might not be the case this time, it could just be a product of 7, 9 and 13 as others have suggested, but I wouldn't discount a basis in astronomy.
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Sure. I was thinking more that they'd want something that most of the population could understand without needing a phone app to sort it out - it's the same reason why the Egyptians used cubits, hands, and fingers rather than millimeters and hectopascals.
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Their calendar could have been knowledge the Priest and Ruling castes wanted to keep control of and not make easy for the populace. Therefore, they can more easily control the populace. "Today, Huitzilotezcatzibilchalixkunyaxchilancoatl decrees that everyone go jump in a lake and do the Hokey Pokey until the sun is at it's highest in the sky. Because the calendar that none of the rest of you can read says so!"
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The two major driving forces in making overly complex calendars for ancient people were:
1) Food, which can be divided into:
a. Predicting the seasons and other climate phenomena to try and get the most food possible from the land.
b. Getting the periods of festivals and prayers to the harvest, rain, etc. gods right so they'd be pleased and provide even more food.
2) Divination, which mainly helped in deciding things like:
c. If and when to start a war, and if an when to end it, with whom to ally, and with whom
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by Xoc-S ( 645831 ) on Friday April 21, 2023 @03:44AM (#63466406)
ChatGPT gets Maya dates wrong. I have asked it to convert Maya dates into Gregorian, and it always gets them wrong. When I tell it what the correct date is, it apologizes and tells me I am right.
John Linden and Victoria Bricker, the authors of the article being discussed, are well-respected scholars. So these are not the normal nut-jobs that talk about the Maya Calendar. I have yet to read more than the summary, but will read the article in the next few days. I am sure that Linden and Bricker got the math and astronomy right. However, I am very suspicious that this is how the Maya actually used the 819 day count. There are only about 21 of these 819 day counts recorded in the Maya inscriptions, so proving anything about these is very difficult. 819 is the multiplication of 7x9x13, three periods frequently used by the Maya, so it is more probable that it is just a larger period that comes from these three smaller periods.
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Exactly, now lets ask the AI why e.g. the Cheops Pyramid has this specific size.
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by superposed ( 308216 ) on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:13AM (#63466288)
Expanding to 20 cycles of 819 days instead of 4 is interesting, but only Mercury, Venus and Mars will be in the same position at the end of 20 cycles as they were at the start. Mercury will repeat 7 times per cycle, Venus will repeat 28 times in 20 cycles and Mars will repeat 21 tiems in 20 cycles.
But Saturn will repeat 43 1/3 times in 20 cycles and Jupiter will repeat 41 1/19 times. That's not very satisfying.
It seems like if the Mayans really knew these cycles then they probably had a calendar in mind that was 1,140 cycles of 819 days each (about 2,556 years). After 1,140 cycles, all the planets would be back exactly where they started. During that time, Mercury would repeat exactly 7,980 times, Venus would repeat 1,596 times, Mars would repeat 1,197 times, Saturn would repeat 2,470 times and Jupiter would repeat 2,340 times.
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Could this be connected to Vedic yugas?
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by superposed ( 308216 ) on Friday April 21, 2023 @01:53AM (#63466326)
Another way to look at this is that the Mayans would probably have nested cycles for the return of the planets.
According to the numbers in the article, if you start counting when all the visible planets are in a particularly interesting alignment, then Mercury and Venus will be back in the same positions after 5 cycles of 819 days, and Mercury, Venus and Mars will all be back in position every 20 cycles.
Then every 60 cycles (3 sets of 20), Saturn will be back in position with the first three, and every 380 cycles (19 sets of 20) Jupiter will be back with the first three.
Finally, every 1,140 cycles (3 x 19 sets of 20), all five will be back to the original alignment.
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I don't know if Mayans were interested in having a full cycle in about 45 years. Seems sort of long for the average person.
Maybe it has to do with the average lifespan of a humans those days? Or at least average lifespan of the royalty at that time if the average Mayan has a lesser lifespan?
I can see the royalty thinking in terms of things they want to achieve within their lifespans and using that long span calender for milestones on objectives.
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Lifespan averages are misleading. Child and infant mortality greatly skew the average; after surviving a few years, people were likely to live quite a long time, probably as long as they did before antibiotics; not long ago.
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Could be simply that Jupiter and Saturn don't really move much. Not saying you wouldn't noticing them moving over say 20 years but when compared to like Mercury its something a child would even notice. In my mind you would either have to have really detailed drawings each night of the stars to be able to calculate this or do it only on brute force memory. In either case I am betting Jupiter and Saturn must come up somewhere in the mythos. You can't have that many board people looking to the stars evey ni
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Jupiter makes almost two complete orbits in 20 years, and Saturn about 2/3s of one. I hope you'd notice that.
You could easily be off by a few days measuring their orbital period by naked eye though.
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You don't actually have to observe 20 or 1140 full 819-day cycles to figure this out. You just have to know the synodic period for each planet (e.g., Jupiter reaches its closest point to some peak every 389 days). Once you have that, you just have to noodle around looking for common factors among the planets.
That seems to be the significance of the 819 days. It's a base unit for all these cycles. Pretty impressive combination of observation and math.
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I like your maths...and the way that you innocently proved that scientists in the article got "participation trophies", not graduation degrees, because they could not do their maths.
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I think we're reaching here. Mathematically speaking, if you take the lengths of all the cycles, prime factor them, and multiply together the minimal set of prime factors that's a strict superset of all of the cycles, then *of course* you're going to get a cycle length that matches up with all of them. It's fairly trivial to prove, mathematically, that this technique will work for any set of cycles of integer length. Proving that you can make the part-of-a-day fudge-factors work out for non-integer-lengt
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31.13.3 Converting from the Mayan Calendar [gnu.org]
You can enter dates into your calendar using Mayan notation. And it will auto-complete the Maya date names because EMACS!
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Oooh. Now we just need to set it up to tell us the positions of the planets each time.
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Would have been nice if they figured this out before the world ended.
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The Mayan civilization had already pretty well fallen apart before the rise of the Aztec, let alone the arrival of the Spanish. This is not to excuse some of the things the Spanish did; they certainly did some bad things; but the Mayan civilization was really not still around to be a victim of their invasion in any meaningful way. (Ethnically Mayan people were still around, of course, but that isn't the same thing.)
As for the Aztecs, they *deserved* what they got. Nasty, nasty empire that. Almost as bad
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Can they now investigate why some online calendars and date selectors start the week on SUNDAY?
Do the words WEEK END have some different meaning for the programmers who do this?-
Maybe they believed Weekends should be like Bookends, one on each side?:)
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Obviously they are products of the Satanic Temple reversing the Genesis account.
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It's those damn money worshipers e.g. the Mega Church types... not the Satanists. Many pay calendars start the week on Sunday rather than Monday,l
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Hmm, I don't know. Makes sense to me but I am a programmer...
If I told you to put a pencil in front of you and asked you to point at the end (however many there are), would you point to just 1 or would there be 2? Why can't the 'beginning' of something also be an 'end'? Just because it is measuring time instead of something more physical doesn't mean it doesn't have 2 edges and I'm fine calling those edges 'ends'.
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Because what we designate "Sunday", legacy systems designate "day one" and use 1-based indexing.
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Sunday was the first day of the week in most human cultures for most of history, and still is for a bit over half of the world's population. Monday-first calendars originated in the modern era, in Europe, in a business context, originally solely for use by businesses that were closes on Saturday and Sunday. Their widespread adoption postdates that of cheap wood-pulp-based paper in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their use didn't become universal, even in Europe, for a couple more decades
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Are tables beyond the capabilities of the Popular Mechanics writers? After battling filters:
|...... | Modern | Aztect |....... |
| Planet | Sideral| Sideral * Periods = Days = N * 819
|
| Mercury| 116 | 117 * 7 = 819 = 1 * 819
| Venus | 584 | 585 * 7 = 4095 = 5 * 819
| Earth
| Mars | 780 | 780 * 21 = 16380 = 20 * 819
| Jupiter| 399 | 399 * 39 = 15561 = 19 * 819
| Saturn | 378 | 378 * 13 = 4914 = 6 * 819
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