Time

Today I would like to dive right into our topic.  I don't want to waste valuable time by filling this once empty canvas with senseless meaningless words to simply pass the time.  I don't want to be ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, simply to fritter away the hours in an off hand way (Pink Floyd ROCKS!)  After all, time is a precious commodity.  Time cannot be made up.  Let's break our nose as we run face first into the wall of time just to read today's topic:  Time

Time has been around since its beginning.  That's a long time, and therefore we should know a lot about it.  Unfortunately we do not.  We know very little about this meek substance that lurks in the shadows as we brush our teeth getting ready for bed.  Hiding behind the toilet it looks up at us and smiles as it takes a step back against the wall.  Scientists have wasted valuable time doing tests on time.  They have tried to stretch it, mold it, package it, and improve it's shelf life.  Alas time cannot be tamed as easily as one would think. 

Before our modern-time scientists studied time, other magnificent societies have studied time.  The Mayans (Mayas, no, I think I had it right the first time, Mayans) studied time by studying the movement of the stars.  They weren't the only ancient people to study the stars, there were many others but I don't know of any of them therefore we will discuss Mayans only in this article for the sake of time.  After all, it would take me a long time to read about all the ancient people to have studied time, and we are short on time and therefore we need to march onward.  Much like time often does. 

The Mayans were once proud people who looked at the stars and noticed they didn't stay in the same place.  Neither did the moon, and they also figured out that the Earth was not the center of the universe, a concept that would take European scholars centuries to figure out.  We call this concept Heliocentric Solar System, whereas the European scientists of yesteryear called their Earth centered concept Geocentric, named obviously after the popular automobile manufacturer Geo. 

As advanced as the Mayans were, they are considered to have been in the stone age.  Meaning their cars had no floor boards.  They noticed that it takes 365.242036 days for the Earth to revolve around the Sun, and this is when someone stubbed their toe as they stumbled into time.  They decided to break time into many segments, and those segments broken into more segments, and those into even more segments.  When they finished they saw a huge jigsaw puzzle, which puzzled them since it would be a long time before the jig saw would be invented in America, a continent not yet discovered even though the Mayans were living in it, and had been for a long time.  But what could they do with all the knowledge they had learned about time?  They decided to build a large tablet out of stone so many years from then someone would make a movie about the end of the world.  They chipped all the information into this tablet we would need to know about how to keep time, and they called it, the name escapes me but it's on the tip of my tongue.  We'll keep going as names are irrelevant.  Contradictory to popular belief, the Maya calendar does not end in 2012.  That would mean the end of time, and this article would be meaningless.  The calendar mentions how the winter solstice will take place around the time that the path of the Sun crosses the Galactic Equator.  The Mayans called this The Sacred Tree.  This takes place once every few thousand years, and it will take place at exactly 11:11 am GMT on December 21, 2112.  Much like the Gregorian calendar, the Mayan calendar does not end at that time.  Like the Gregorian, it simply starts over again.  If you have trouble wrapping your head around that concept, try to think of it like an odometer in your car.  When it reaches 99,999 miles, the odometer rolls over to 00000 to start all over again.  There is no need to panic, no need to make plans about not making plans since the world will not end.  The Sun will rise on December 22, 2112 just as it has since two hydrogen molecules ran into each other in a crowded metro, and the attraction has been going on for billions of years. 

This concludes our view into time.  I hope you had a good time reading this short yet informative article as much as I had writing it.  Please unbuckle your safety belts and exit in a single line through the exit doors. 

See you next time.

Oh, I remember the name of the Maya calendar, it's Tzolk'in.

The End