Hamlet's Mill and the Mayan prediction

I'm watching a program on National geographic, they are looking at the
mayan prophecies and how the world is going to end in 2012 as predicted by
the Mayans. It's a strange mixture of Science, History and religious mumbo
jumbo from 'descendants' of the Mayans. "When the sun aligns with the center
of the galazy it will create energy that will end the world"

It is a strange mixture because this program is overlying the mumbo jumbo
on top of a description of the ancient Mayans as astronomers and technically
proficient.

This story was already told in a book called Hamlet's mill that tries to explain
the reason that there are so many stories around the world describing end of
the world floods and ends of the world as cycles end. Two different things
must be kept in mind about the people that created the world destruction myths.
They were serious people that built pyramids and Empires. Your average new age hippie wouldn't know how to begin to build a pyramid, and in the same way the people that built the
pyramids wouldn't create a frivolous myth, their myths were used to transmit
information over long periods of time. The second thing to keep in mind is that
these same stories of end of the world due to flood are the same all around the
world.

The reason the myths have to be transmitted over long periods of time is there
was no writing when the original builders and astronomers lived and worked and
the time periods discussed were very long because they are trying describe the
precession of the equinoxes. So they needed a timekeeper, an object with a fairly
long period that repeated and they called that Chronos, but literally it was the planet
saturn with an orbital period of 80 years. Saturn marks off a second hand on a massive
clock where the hour hand is the precession of the equinoxes around the zodiac.
Each hour is the 2400 year age that is occuring. (eg age of Aquarius), and the end
of an age is the end of the "world" when the old gods die and new gods take over.
Kronos to Chronos to zeus. Interesting, but if you're not living in a completely agricultural
world that risks famine if the equinoxes are mis-predicted then it's not really end
of the world stuff.

So in the end it was a pretty annoying program. Instead of highlighting yet another
society that was either influenced by truly ancient people (egyptians were in Mexico?),
or just pointing how smart the people were 2000 years ago and look at all these things
they built and observations they made, they spent an hour of my life trying to predict
how the world is going to end as predicted by the ancient Mayans.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My wife went out into the Italian wilderness and came back with
the makings of thanksgiving dinner, with Turkey, macaroni & cheese
(pasta) and mashed potatoes and gravy. mmm.

I'm thankful for that and for my family.

do you want to kiss me?

More global warmin hack

Bishop Hill has a list of emails from the hru server that is
pretty damning. The great thing about the list is includes
a unique number for each email, and if you google that number
the first hit is the original text. from 1107454306.txt

Mike,
        I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
     Just sent loads of station data to Scott.  Make sure he documents everything better
     this time !  And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is
    trawling them.  The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
    there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
    send to anyone.  Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within
     20 days? - our does !  The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
    We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried
     email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code.  He
     has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.

I'm no lawyer, but if you conspire to break a law is that conspiracy or just
obstruction of justice?

I kind of feel for these guys. If my email got hacked it would be a boring
list of go here and do that, and me either going there and doing that or finding
some way to weasel out of going there, or if I really go there do I have to do that
or can I just sit in a pub and drink?

Which just points out the futility of my career versus these guys who are supposed
to be gathering accurate data that will determine whether the government wrecks
the economy to prevent a bigger disaster. They seem to be working on an agenda
to change the world and wreck the economy, which would be the plot of a bad Tom
Clancy novel except that I think all this will be coming to a vote in the next few months.

Note to climate scientists: Gather good data. Try and compare data to models.
When your models can reproduce the weather of the past 50 years I'll listen to
the future predictions of your models. Oh yea, good job on appearing to have not a single
dirty joke or nudie picture in the entire archive. Stop working so hard, you're making
us look bad.

Hacking the real scoop on global warming

Over at WUWT and climate audit, they are posting some mail
and documents posted by a hacker that hacked into the CRU facility
in the UK.

If some of the documents are real then it's just another example of don't
put anything in an email that you wouldn't printed in a newspaper, but
without the sex talk seen in normal examples of released emails.

I can't download the info to a work computer, the hacked docs are probably
chock full of virus', but the posted examples seem too good to be true:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

If some of those mails and documents are true, then get ready with
tar and feathers for these people. More likely they were created by
the hackers or taken out of context. They would be more believable
if there were some off color jokes or light sex chat.

Hurricane passed

The hurricane passed and everyone is ok at home. No Hurricanes
here, just cold, then rainy and colder then cold again. Winter still
hasn't started though, so it's not really cold, unless I-10 is your normal
boundary in which case your thermostat is sitting on the maximum of
24 deg c. (we've got a smart meter that keeps us from using more than
4 kw at a time, and a thermostat with a max temp of 24.) I don't know
what we'd do if it got really cold this apartment is just a brick sh-thouse
writ large, no insulation, no attic. Hopefully the government would come
with more blankets.

Hades temperature decreasing

The saints won and there's a hurricane in the gulf in November,
sure signs that the saints reaching 8 - 0 is affecting the weather
down under, not meaning Australia.

I'd be on the lookout for heavy houston snowstorms, ice in Lake
Ponchatrain and sober people in the french quarter, all signs
that the Saints can go all the way.