Imo the real bad science is in the cause of it all: neutrinos from the sun have “mutated” so that they heat up the interior of the Earth. They’d have been better off if they’d conjured up an all new previously unknown particle.

Yes. The science is all wrong. But so is assuming the end of the world would happen in 2000 or 1900 or 1800… everyone ‘feels’ something will happen at the end of a calendar.

So…whip people into a frenzy and sell more tickets!!! I’ll be in line.

Oh…and…as for an end of the world plot (and even looking at Independence Day), check out Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”

Genius work.

Hope you have fun at the ComicCon this year!

It looks like a fun end of the world type movie. Seeing cities blow up, sink, etc. is fun. I’m sure the story behind saving human-kind will be lame and those ships look like small versions of the battlestar Galactica.

As for the 2012 nonsense. Roland has said he does not really believe that doomsday stuff but probably made the movie knowing it would be fun and would probably get him some money because of the hype.

SF movies like these are the best way to point out the absurdness in absurd theories. Visualize nonsense in such a way that it is clear that something like that only can happen in movies.

http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2009/06/sony-pictures-and-end-of-world.html

And unlike some people, I don’t think the “fiction” part of science fiction negates the “science” part.

That’s comedy gold. Now, let me explain how we know the earth to be banana shaped.

Were the Mayans able to measure the precession of the equinoxes to better than 1% accuracy, as the above numbers imply? Or is it simply a strange numerical coincidence?

Oh, how I love the pseudoscientific archaeoastrononomy way of fabricating patterns, from buildings, from calenders or what not. (And as far as I know, few or none have been verified by paleontologists.) Precessions aren’t static, and can’t be known with such precision.

I see that modern astronomical methods such as VLBI has allowed for modeling the rate of precession such that the current rate is known to be 25,772 years, adopted by IAU. After a few thousand years apparently the different models don’t agree much, so time for an observational update.

So no, nobody had been able to make those measurements at that time, even if they for some reason had tried. That idea doesn’t pass a smell test, better yet a real assessment of their techniques. And I don’t think there is any evidence of civilizations before the Greeks (Hipparchus) having known about them.

“Numerical coincidences” aren’t coincidences. You can always find formulas connecting two numbers in the same way that you can always draw a line between two points on a plane. And those formulas can always be approximated by simple enough quotas or algorithms in the same way that rationals are embedded in the reals.

In the same way, that less than 1 % “precision” doesn’t mean anything. If Mayans had known about precession and tried to calculate it, they may have come up with any number of baktuns, say 13*6 if 13 was so interesting for them that they tried it on. There is simply no way to assess precision on unknown methods.

These concepts are duds – and that isn’t a coincidence in the imprecise context of pseudoscience.

BTW, the dome on St. Peter’s started cracking almost as soon as it was built. They were really pushing the state of the art and the walls of the drum (the round part that supports the dome) started spreading outwards. It’s actually wrapped with a gigantic iron chain to hold it together. I was watching that clip to see any evidence of giant links a meter or more long flying at the camera.

Oh, well.

- Jack

GAry 7