The Beat Exists Beyond the Metronome

Humans have short memories. Little more than a decade after the underwhelming climax that was the Y2K bug, yet another human-generated phenomena is beginning to seep into the American mainstream consciousness.

If you listen to the Average Joe, who has either heard the rumor or repeated the meme, the Mayan long-count calendar has predicted THE END OF THE WORLD for December 21st, 2012 .

Before you run off to rape, pillage, dig a bomb shelter, or withdraw your life savings as gold Krugerrands, consider this story.

On February 24th, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued an order, known as a papal bull, that the world (really just Central and Western Europe, silly pope man), would adopt the Gregorian Calendar. It was a bold, yet necessary move to extend the previous calendar, known as the Julian Calendar, by 10.8 minutes.

Though historically never friend to math or science, the Vatican knows a sure thing when it sees one, and this modification was indeed that sure thing. The Gregorian Calendar corrected issues regarding the length of days, occurrences of equinoxes (equinii?), and seasonal variations that had been accumulating sloppy mathematical remainders since the First Council of Nicea had fixed the Vernal equinox permanently to September 21st, MORE THAN 1,200 YEARS BEFORE.

That's right folks, for more than a millennia the modern world had just occasionally dropped as many as ten days from the calendar to make their wonky, miscalculated calendar match the seasons of the natural order of Earth and its Solar System. The Gregorian Calendar would not find widespread acceptance in Eastern Europe and Russia until the 20th century, another 400 years, give or take a decade, after the first 1,200 years of the miscalculated Julian Calendar.


My point is this. Calendars, whether Julian, Gregorian, advent, lunar, or long-count Mayan, are human-made constructs. Though their approximation and refinement processes have gotten more precise over the years, they still exist as a lens to understand and predict the natural world, not as extensions of the natural world itself. Even our modern estimation of incremental time, using ceasium-based atomic clocks, has changed many times during the 20th century and will continue to change into the 21st century.

It does not cease to amaze how anthropocentric humans remain, even centuries after geocentric theory was abandoned for heliocentric theory. We are not, nor have we ever been, the center of the universe, our galaxy, even our own solar system, yet humans like to believe that our estimation of events, is the end-all, be-all for the natural world and its patterns, events, and changes.

I intend to host a dinner party on December 22nd, 2012 and I sincerely hope you have the presence of mind to RSVP.