Don't worry neb. Accodding to the reaserch done by the Weekly World news, new dicosveries of Nostradamous and Edgar Casey are being found all the time.

Just check out their magazine for all the new ones. They have a agreement with the archaeologists around the world that any nostradamous or edgar casey material is to be used soley by them.

I did a little research for my limerick, neb, and I found a great website, called religioustolerance.org that lists all the dates. That should do you.

Oops! That quote was from Captain Kid. I messed up in posting, but I just fixed it. :wink:

Thanks for that link, though. I find it quite humorous!

(I love how Bible-believers try date-setting something the Bible says can't be date-setted!) :roll:

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TLC channel had a show on profits last noc and they said the Hopi Indians predicted the end of the calendar or the planet or something in 2012. I was channel surfing so I didn't catch it all.

That would be wierd if both cultures predicted similar dates. I wonder if the show attributed the origin on the date to the wrong group.

If anyone has time to check into it, I am curious. If not I should have time later.

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A quick google does show some websites that have the year 2012 with some end of the world significance for the Hopi, but check out those links I gave before--almost every year has a couple, if not more, groups that are predicting calamity for that year.

Well, I believe Nostradamus predicted the human race would die out in the year 3797, but that's a little far off. :P

I know that in 2038 UNIX is suppose to rollover but the common person probably doesn't even know what UNIX is, much less to worry about it.

Ok

This common person does not know what UNIX is so enlighten me please.
:-?

sorry the quote thingy did not work ops:

It's a computer operating system.

http://www.geek-girl.com/unix.html

Oh ops: I knew that !!! How is its crashing going to destroy the world?

Death by inconveniance (sp?) :-?

I don't know, I think its one of those scenarios like Y2K or something. Of course it'll only be a big deal if we're all using UNIX in 35 years.

that'll be HUB then

One of my peeves too.

If we're going to pick nits , then can I play? Mayan long count 13.0.0.0.0 correlates to December 21, 2012 according to the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation constant of 584283, which is the one used by most Mayan scholars. Another less popular correlation constant is 584285, in which Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0 correlates to Dec 23, 2012. I'm still new here and don't yet know everyone, so please pardon my nits.

That date will be the max date for UNIX, no biggie...unless you are a UNIX admin near that time ...expect some major overtime then

Computers keep time internally by counting seconds (or other small timebits) from some starting date (which in UNIX is 1 Jan 1970). UNIX systems using 32 bits to represent numbers run out of numbers to count seconds in 2038, so any system still using 32 bits will get unpredictably bad errors when the counter overflows.

The potential problems are the same as those from the Y2K bug. It could affect things like power systems, networks, mission-critical hardware, databases, etc. However, the belated Y2K effort has already fixed or otherwise mitigated the problem on most vulnerable systems. (The Y2K problem wasn't as severe as it some doomsayers said anyway. However, IMO - I spent some time doing Y2K testing for a DoD project - the repair/mitigation effort was necessary - a significant number of headaches were avoided.)

In any case, the ordinary upgrading/replacement of systems and software will pretty much reduce the UNIX rollover problem to the noise level by then. I really doubt many current systems will still be running then, and new ones use 64 or 128 bits. Maybe by then we won't even be using binary computers.

So, 2038 won't be a problem - we can turn our attention to the next one (see the last stanza).

8)

Does UNIX account for leap seconds in determining the date? Counting seconds is especially problematic in computing future dates, since leap seconds are not entirely predictable.

I would say that they are not predictable at all.

It counts seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC. That is all.

Now, the library functions that programmers use to convert the seconds to human readable dates have to account for all that stuff. In the GNU libc it seems to depend on whether leap second support is enabled, but if it is, it will deal with minutes having 61 seconds.

It doesn't matter. The only way it would matter is if your program is calculating the difference between two dates and there were enough leap seconds between them to actually affect the answer. I can't right now think of a possible situation where it would be relevant.

Amen, brother!

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Well don't sweat it - the bad things always happen in the northern hemisphere. Higher population means more crackpots and more gullible people to believe what they say. So you'll be fine.

Computer clocks aren't accurate enough for leap seconds to matter (even if they happened every day).

Assuming, that is, that Nancy and company haven't picked a "new and improved arrival date" for Planet X now that it has failed to arrive.

More precisely:
*) The UNIX data type time_t represents the number of seconds since 1-Jan-1970 at midnight GMT, and
*) Systems using SIGNED 32-bit integers to store a time_t will have this number "wrap around" to a negative value at about 3:15 AM GMT on 19-Jan-2038. (Very few systems use an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer to store a time_t, as time_t's frequently have to be subtracted from one another.)

In my not-so-humble opinion, the kinds of fixes you do to a piece of code to make it handle years beyond 1999 are completely different from the kinds of fixes you do to a piece of code containing time_t's to make it work after 18-Jan-2038. Y2K fixes generally dealt with databases and user interfaces; Year 2038 fixes generally deal with the internal representation of dates and times buried deeper within the application code.

Furthermore, the Year 2000 Problem had the distinct advantage of being something obvious. Even a computer illiterate person can easily imagine the chaos that might result when the "odometer" turns over from 1999 to 2000. There's nothing blaringly obvious about 2038, however -- it looks like any other middle-of-the-road number. Unless you're familiar with the binary representation of dates and times in most C programs, it'll never occur to you that 2038 is significant.

Even if every operating system on the planet had a 64-or-more-bit kernel in 2038, there is still going to be a lot of legacy application software running. There are still old COBOL programs from the 1970s running in some financial institutions, and tons of 16-bit MS-DOS apps. The operating systems of the future can and will support the "old" 32-bit apps of today in a backward-compatibility mode, just like Windows XP can still run MS-DOS programs and 16-bit Windows apps in its w.o.w. layer.

I have a more detailed page I wrote back during the Y2K hysteria about the Year 2038 Problem, at http://www.netcom.com/~rogermw/Y2038.html.

Yah, I blew off the signed/unsigned matter. Just goes to show that someone with more knowledge will come along and point it out. You can't get away with anything on this board!A very good point, and it was, well, wrong for me to say that Y2K fixes (which included changing code in many OSs) covered the 2038 bug. They are indeed different in nature and the solutions are different. True, though Y2.038k has the advantage of having had a big prompt already occur. To drive the overflow problem home, we should regularly replay the Ariane 5 launch with Ariane 4 code :P The point about legacy code is well taken. I didn't mean to say it would all be gone, but I am (foolishly) optimistic that we willl be largely past that. But who woulda thought so much 1970s code would be running by 2000?Nicely done! I've bookmarked it.

You mean, the Ariane 5 launch failure was caused by a date bug?!

I guess what I had in mind was that between now and 2038 there is likely to be a leap second every 500 days or so, on average. Is that not a safe prediction to make?

I dunno, I doubt it. The last leap second was over 1700 days ago, and there won't be one this year, probably not until June 2004, if then. The longest previous gap between leap seconds was only 900 days.

So, either the rate has changed, or there will be some catching up to do. Let's see, from June 1972 to Dec 1998, there was 21 leap seconds inserted. That's an average of (26.5yr/21) one per 461 days. But by June of next year, it will have been well over four times that.

PS: This is a lot more serious problem than has been realized. The slowing down is thought to be at a rate of 2 msec per century, due to tidal friction from the moon. But our timekeeping standard is a day in 1900--so the Earth rotation has slowed about 2 msec in that time. Hence, every 500 days we'd need 500x2 msec = 1 second added, as you say. However, all that slowing of the past century seems to have been negated, by processes in the Earth, in the past five years!

well... hello all... this is from the geneal knowledge of allmost all Mexicans that have gone to elementary school... (so it is basic but it serves to explain the topic of the mayan calendar)

the mayans had the belief that every 52 years the sun cooled out ... so their civilization would end ... in that preciselly night, the priest made everybody to destroy their possesions .. as you could not go into "heaven" if you owned "earthling" things...

so everobody burned their possesions, houses, things, etc... in the hope that with the fire from those things... they "jumpstart" the sun again and its fire will continue...

if you go to a Mayan ruin (specially chichen Itza) .. the Guide explains that those rituals were basically made by the priest to have the control over the population (as those guys were the only ones who know when the 52 year date was exactly) ...

Mayan ruins have piramids and temples builded over past destroyed piramids and temples, in that way archeaologist know how many "end of the world" dates that town survived....

so, to have a Mayan Date as the end of the world (even if it is a roll over date) is not such a smart thing to do ... as if the mayans were right ... the world have been out from loogn loong time

Just to emphasize this point: that would be true even if the Earth did no additional slowing in that 500 days. OF course, we expect it to continue to slow down. It just hasn't--in fact, that 2msec seems to have been erased:
Hence, we have not needed any leap seconds.

We discussed this briefly last year in connection with the news that the Earth shape is increasing equatorially, but the leap second situation has become even more pronounced.

At the end of that thread, I mention a possible connection, but there is another. As mass wells up within the Earth, the shape of the gravity field also changes. Normally, you'd expect a rise of high density mass to produce a bulge in the gravity field--but that would seem to be in conflict with the two observations. A rise of high density mass along the equator somewhere would, like a skater throwing their arms out, slow down the Earth, but the leap second record seems to show that it has sped up.

Interestingly, movements of mass deep in the Earth, covered by a very high viscosity mantle (too high to support the mantle convection needed for plate tectonics, but in line with a lot of other data on the mantle), would invert the signature in the gravity field. So, if a low density mass were to erupt at the core-mantle boundary and start floating to the surface, we'd expect a speeding up (which we see) and a bulge in the gravity field (also what we see). Perhaps, in ten million years (the length of time it's thought it would take to traverse the mantle), we'll see the appearance of a new hot spot somewhere in the equatorial region, along with massive volcanism as in the Deccan traps.

Thanks, kilopi, for bringing me up to speed.

When I first went looking for a list of historical leap seconds, I was puzzled why I couldn't find any since 1998, and my first assumption was I wasn't looking in the right place, but now I learn there haven't been any since then.

If I remember my chariots of the gods, I veleive Von Daniken was not talking about anything ending in 2012, only the the extraterrestrials would return then. Whether or not that will signal the end of humanity or not probably would depend on how we treated them when they return (IF). Based on human history, we'll probably try to destroy them as soon as they appear. Sice we have no idea what their mood will be when this happen, the whole thing is up for speculation. We're not an especially friendly lot so I'm hoping they can't find their way back to earth. So when 2013 comes along, we can all be thankful that the aliens got lost out here in the sticks.

On the other hand, having grown up on hundreds of post apocalypsic movies and novels, I'm not so sure that it would be a bad idea to be prepred for the worst. I'm not talking about building a bomb shelter, but I will be keeping my eye on the sky. You never know, maybe navigation is not their weakest skill, maybe their anal about time and show up early.

In any event, if you were in their shoes, knowing what you know about humanity, would you EVER make first contact? I wouldn't. I'd leave earh alone until it outgrew it self destructive tendancies. I don't think that THAT is going to happen any time soon. Maybe in a couple of mayan calander cycles things will be different but I doubt that we'll ever know.