Long Count Mayan Calender planetary conjunctions and mathematical alignments Explained   My mind can't wrap around exactly what is going on past 04:00  at the moment, (or really, ever) , but his voice is pleasing enough to listen to, making this a mesmerizing number lullaby for December 21   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsqDB-jeW0E     Australian PM Julia Gillard Warns About Doomsday Apoclypse   Julia Gillard has recorded a tongue-in-cheek video address to the nation warning the world is about to come to an apocalyptic end, as predicted in the Mayan calendar.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FxKgcZPops       Maya Calendar 101: What Does 'December 21, 2012' Really Mean? - Huffington Post linked article   This Friday at the stroke of solstice (4:12 a.m. Mountain Standard Time), the Maya Long Count calendar will click over to read "13.0.0.0.0," (pronounced "thirteen b'aktun") for the first time in 5,125 years.   A b'aktun is a period of 144,000 days (about 393 years) in the Long Count. It is an especially important unit, "used for describing the creations of humans and of the world," as Guatemalan writer Gaspar Pedro González says. Some historians, looking at the historical record, have argued that there is a correlation between major world events and b'aktun endings. Thirteen is a sacred number for the Maya, so the completion of 13 b'aktuns, or 1,872,000 days, lends even more import to December 21, 2012. The calculations were made at least 1,300 years ago in southern Mexico (perhaps even earlier by pre-Maya Olmec cultures). The dates were scrawled into stone stelae and temple walls, then lay hidden for many centuries and are still being unearthed and deciphered today. Entire books are dedicated to explaining the unique and complex base-20 Maya calendar system -- Barbara Tedlock's Time and the Highland Maya is a standard on the subject.   Dr. Edwin Barnhart, Director of the Maya Exploration Center, writes about the Maya's affinity for "calculating the lowest common multiples and highest common divisors between the celestial cycles they were tracking." He says, "I believe the Long Count allowed them to tease those temporal conjunctions out and that they viewed them as the hidden synchronicities of the cosmos."   podcast interview with John Major Jenkins "2012 Galactic Alignment & The End of the Mayan Calendar" - Red Ice Radio listen here   John Major Jenkins is an independent researcher who has devoted himself to reconstructing ancient Mayan cosmology and philosophy. Since beginning…

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