2012 maya calendar

[Laurel]

Either that, or you have to believe unabashedly in numerology - "Oooh, it's a round number! That must be significant!"

Sounds like Dogbert's logic regarding Y2K.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-03-24/

[gillianren]

Hey, the Y2K thing made sense from a Christian perspective if you didn't know the calendar is off from the date it's supposed to be recording!  Maybe God likes round numbers.  Except then you have to explain away the bit in the Bible about how no one knows the time He will end the world, but whatever; it seems a lot of people are perfectly willing to ignore that bit.

[gtvc]

A well-known weather phenomenon appearing one day in Bogata makes those things look like small potatoes, I suppose.

its Bogota , well is media paranoia you find information in the Internet in the news, radio, TV morning shows, newspapers, even NASA talks about the high sun activity, so everybody talks about 2012 but not about 2013.

 Well I don't remember watching a solar double halo, 2 rainbows around the sun in my city before you can check the videos in you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aYU4P672u8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52DWbc-OAgM&feature=relatednever happened before.

[cjameshuff]

Well I don't remember watching a solar double halo, 2 rainbows around the sun in my city before you can check the videos in you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aYU4P672u8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52DWbc-OAgM&feature=relatednever happened before.

There's people who'll swear the moon can't be seen during the day. People generally just ignore the sky most of the time. So you've never personally seen those halos (that you noticed)...how can you conclude they've never happened before? How many times could it have happened without you noticing?

[Laurel]

Gtvc, did you mean that double solar halos have never happened before in Colombia or that they've never happened before anywhere? Because these images appear to predate the YouTube video.

http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/93912239.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/86294470@N00/3245596565/
http://latitudedrifts.blogspot.com/2011/02/sundogs-tangent-arcs-and-double-solar.html

[gtvc]

I mean never happened in Bogotá, at least I don't remember watching a double halo here before, but I think when I was in Florida I remember a halo around the moon, but this was incredible so you can imagine people talking about signs and messages from the sky, I know is a natural phenomenon but I think its more common in other countries not here maybe global warming?

[gillianren]

Halos around the Moon happen all the time here.  When people talk about never having seen something before, the first assumption you should make is that what they mean is that they haven't noticed it.  People just don't look up, as said.  Ask a dozen people when they last saw the Moon during the day, and you'll probably have at least one claim it can't be done.

[twik]

You know, there is a difference between "I never saw that before" and "it never happened before".

[gtvc]

I know, people forget this kind of natural phenomena very fast, and TV news is not going to talk about this halo next year 

[twik]

Even rather catastrophic climactic events get forgotten quite quickly. How often do we talk about "the year without a summer" (1816), when ice was still seen in rivers in Pennsylvania in August? Or the slightly less severe summer of 1903?

[Laurel]

A university professor talked about the year without a summer during my Atmosphere and Climate class. It's also a plot point in a book I read as a child called Shadow In Hawthorne Bay. And it was indirectly responsible for Frankenstein being written, which is interesting. But you're right, it doesn't come up in conversation very often.

[ipearse]

the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000 mostly without incident, albeit thanks to the help of a lot of computer tech types who made sure that what could go wrong with computers didn't.

A lot of people did Y2K compliance work, and the rollover was with only minor incidents.  It is frequently claimed that the first was the cause of the second.

I spent the rollover night walking up and down Terminal 4 at Heathrow checking various systems had done what they were supposed to. it really annoys me when people go on about how the rollover was a storm in a teacup...

[Not Myself]

Let me make things just a little bit more formal.  We have some statements.

A: A lot of people did Y2K compliance work.
B: The rollover was with only minor incidents.
C: A was the cause of B.

I spent the rollover night walking up and down Terminal 4 at Heathrow checking various systems had done what they were supposed to.

That sounds like a little bit of anecdotal evidence in support of statement A.

it really annoys me when people go on about how the rollover was a storm in a teacup...

I'll mark down a new statement.

D: Some find the statement "not C" really annoying.

[gillianren]

That pretty much sums it up, yes.

[ChrLz]

I can offer another couple of little anecdotes for y2k..

I was computer systems manager at an adult education college way back thenabouts (a big one with multiple remote networked campuses) and we had several old systems (eg enrolments and room bookings) that needed to be tweaked to properly handle the rollover.  Nothing too bad would have happened, but they needed fixin'..

I am slightly embarrassed to also admit that I used to do systems analysis and programming .. in dBASE II, III and IV (and dBXL, Clipper, Arago... oh the memories!!)..    and had several custom systems out in the real world that needed to have adjustments to various fields and calculations.  Again, nothing major, but it had to be done.  And I can proudly report no aircraft under any of my system's control ever fell from the sky, thanks to my diligence..

(Ironically, I did write a system for a crop-dusting company's operations..!)