Why the world did not end: Reason Three

Why the world did not end: Reason Three

Reason Three: Do you want to (differentiate 69x)?

Maths. We all hate it (except Asians, nerds, rich and successful people, people who get the title of this reason...). But remember when your teacher in primary/secondary school told you that you'll need to use maths in everyday life and you thought they were cray-cray? Well, it turns out they were right.

Now the reason why the whole Mayan doomsday thing was slated for the 21st of December was not because they were total bums and wanted to ruin Christmas for all of us (Those Scrooges! Scrooge you! Scrooge you all!), but because it so happened that the 21st of December 2012 was the date you get after converting the Mayan calendar to the Gregorian calendar (ie the 365/366 day one that most of the world uses).

If you did not know, the Mayan calendar does not use the same system as the Gregorian calendar in determining the days of a year/month. Where the Gregorian calendar uses our position relative to the sun, the Mayan calendar uses the position of the moon relative to the Earth (although what they really probably used was the phases of the moon, but that's not the point). If you are bad at maths, and also don't know that the lunar month finishes in roughly a 28 day cycle, then let me tell you that 365 and 366 is not divisible by 28.

What does that mean for all of us? This makes converting the Mayan calendar into a Gregorian one a pain because you either have to work it out by doing a day-to-day conversion, or somehow using remainders in long division (I don't know, I kind of zoned out during that lesson. Yes, I'm an Asian who zoned out during maths, sue me). Clearly, there must have been an error in the conversion, because someone forget a leap-year, or forgot to carry the one.

This leaves us two options. Either the apocalypse was supposed to have hapened before the 21st of December, which I think it is safe to say it has not (Now there's a surprise I'm sure no one would have liked!), or it is supposed to happen some time in the future.

What's the moral of the story? Maths is important, and if you are bad at it, there's still some time left for you to learn it. Not only will you then be able to predict the end of the world, or somehow use calculus and/or trigonometry in everyday life just like your maths teacher wanted you to, but you'll also get the joke imbedded in the title of this reason.