As Hoopes indicated, serious scientists are reluctant to even acknowledge the 2012 movement.

* not really a calendar either

Now, this isn’t to say that the world ends in 2012… but it does pull the curtain back on the biggest failure of modern science. If there were some effort made to study the subject issues, and then relate the findings to the general public, there might well be far fewer fringists and a lot more people who didn’t see science as a dusty leather-bound desk in a cobwebbed library filled with musty people who find comfort in the stagnation of the status quo. 

It’s just too much like politics… and we’re all sick to death of that, lol.

The world has ALWAYS been full of nonsense. That’s why religion exist to try to make heads-and-tales of it (pun intended). In fact, the Greek Pantheon was built upon the idea that the Gods WERE human-like, because the world couldn’t be NATURALLY stupid and chaotic and pointless (right?).

That is, unless you DO mean that the end of the world has already happened… ten thousand years ago upon the dawn of human civilization…?

http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/4835/ascende-maima-perma-and-mary-the-lifeship

http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2011/06/waiting-for-doomsday.html

Let’s look at some basic facts to back me up: the world is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old. Anatomically modern humans are thought to have first appeared somewhere around 200,000 years ago and became behaviorally modern (civilized) somewhere around 50,000 years ago. From the earth’s point of view, we just showed up earlier today. Still, 50,000 years is such a huge amount of time that it’s very hard to grasp the concept in any meaningful way, never mind 4.5 billion years.

It’s thought that our home star, Sol (the sun), is somewhere around middle-age right now, which is actually only slightly older than the earth (4.57 billion years old, compared to the 4.51b of earth). If we assume a relationship between the age of the sun and the age of the earth, we can estimate that our world is likely to exist for another 4.5 billion years, give or take a hundred million. If the sun goes Red Giant later in life, it will consume the earth and maybe shave a half-billion years off our life expectancy.

By the time that happens, homo sapiens sapiens will almost certainly be long gone, replaced by whatever awesome race of creatures evolve from us. I have every confidence that the loss of earth at that point will be incidental to our descendants. The biggest threat to human survival today isn’t from some silly religious prediction, but from each other.

That said, there is a major problem in academia with open access, and history-related fields seem to be particularly severe in this regard. I know of several professors in dance history, for example, who not only refrain from publishing most of their research for fear of others reading it and making them less personally useful to other researchers, but also keep their primary sources in their private libraries, restricting access as much as possible.

The hard sciences are becoming drastically more open as of late; hopefully this attitude will eventually diffuse into other fields as well.

An excellent interview – and it already cost me $23 at Amazon.

“That it requires a lot of scholarship and reading, and you have to look
at the original academic literature. You can’t rely on popular
magazines. You have to evaluate the primary information itself. Lots of
people can’t afford the academic training they want and so they try to
do it themselves and wind up with an autodidactic education that
includes a lot of bizarre and totally wrong speculative literature. In
fact, a lot of people writing about this are self taught in the same
way.”

I agree, but academia has made it very difficult for folks who are not affiliated with a particular institution of higher learning to access the ‘original academic literature.’  This has been a problem for me, for example, being a grad student.  It’s all good when I’m on campus, but, for example, this year, I’m going to spend a year in France and the University library has cut off my remote access to their journal subscriptions.  I had to pay a bunch of money and use a little-well-known policy at the local community college to be able to access interlibrary loan materials since I’ve spent the summer at my parents’ house… but still no access to articles.

It’s even worse for folks who want to attend grad school abroad.  You often have to take an entrance exam and have a research project already planned out.  How on earth can you do that without access to decent library resources?  And how to access those resources without already being a grad student?  You can’t! 

Maybe people could right more informed books if they could have access to the ‘actual research.’  Just sayin’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cults

When the reign of Bama of Oh is coming to an end
The sign of the Tea Bag on high, there will come to us
The upright beam, it will manifest itself
To light the world.
The union ended, envy ended,
When the bearer of the future sign came to us,
The priest lord,
You shall see it from afar
Coming. The Twitter of the beam comes
To awaken us. From everywhere
It comes to us. To the power of SuperPACs
Approaches our master, Beth of Warren.
Your brother is coming now.
Receive your bearded hippies from the east,
Bearers of the standard of Green.
Receive the word of Krugman which
Comes to us on the day of the double dip
Which is feared by all in the world, Lord,
What kind of God would admit to creating us?