When I hear of people panicking over tomorrow’s “Mayan apocalypse”, I like to imagine future archaeologists reassuring people that the quirks of the long-abandoned and poorly understood “Gregorian calendar” are nothing to be alarmed about.

“You see, the ancients had not yet realized the superiority of an octal base for numerals; they used base-10 counting because at that time the recognized ‘humans’ still had a total of ten fingers each. (Please, don’t laugh; you must remember that they had not yet admitted non-primates to the Circle of Sentience.) This naturally led them to ascribe special numerological significance to periods of 100 and 1,000 years. But their calendar doesn’t in any sense ‘end’ tomorrow, on what they would have called the first of January, 6000.” Continue…