.madagaskar stone forest
	Stephen Alvarez ::: Madagaskar Stone Forest. ??????????: Stephen Alvarez

http://saturnic.livejournal.com/385746.html

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I think there are some interesting articles here concerning the Mayan calendar. Specifically, how 2012 is incorrect. the guy's site is an author of a few books about Mayan/aztec culture and the calendar.

It seems like some of the articles require a bit of background in the terminology of mayan culture and calendar.
 

http://www.mayanmajix.com/art_mc.html

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December 21, 2012 – the End of a Cycle

Since the Mayan calendar is based on cycles (read our article on How Does the Mayan Calendar Work to learn more), December 21, 2012 merely indicates the end of a cycle that began on August 11, 3114 BC. While there are wild interpretations as to what this date means, and many holiday resorts are booked out on this day, there is no evidence from any Mayan literature suggesting that the world will come to an end.

It is simply the end of the current Long Count, and December 22, 2012 will be the beginning of the next Long Count, or cycle in the Mayan calendar. In fact, the Mayans have names for the Long Counts, and the fact that they’ve named Long Counts beyond this one suggests that this won’t be the last. It is significant, however, that we are entering a new cycle in the Mayan calendar.

What Will the Next Mayan Long Count, or Epoch, Bring?

Assuming as we did above that the world will not come to an end on December 21, 2012 – we ask ourselves, what will happen? What is so significant about December 21, 2012? The significance lies not merely in the fact that a Mayan epoch is coming to an end, but in the celestial events that astronomists have confirmed will occur on this day.

What happens on December 21, 2012?

December 21 is the winter solstice, and in 2012 the Sun on the solstice will be almost perfectly aligned with the plane of the galaxy (the Milky Way galaxy). What is astonishing is how precisely the Mayan calendar was able to pinpoint this alignment of the planets.

What’s so Special About Planets Aligning?

The equator of the Milky Way galaxy (Galactic Equator) and the path of the Sun (the Ecliptic) will cross each other at exactly 11:11 am GMT on December 21, 2012. What does this mean exactly? Or, even better, what is the probability of this occurring?

Every year on the winter solstice, our Sun has a Declination of -23.5 degrees, and a Right Ascension of 18 hours. But what makes the alignment of 2012 special is how this alignment occurs relative to very distant stars. On December 21, 2012, the alignment will be right along the plane of the entire galaxy. This precession of the equinoxes goes in a complete circle and happens only once every 26,000 years. In other words, the winter solstice moves 360 degrees every 26,000 years, or 0.01 degrees each year.

A significant detail that promoters of the 2012 doomsday fail to point out, however, is that the plane of the galaxy is not the width of a needle. The plane of the galaxy is quite wide – in fact, it takes the winter solstice between 700 hundred and 1,400 years to cross the plane of the galaxy! So 2012 is just one year amidst a span of 700 years.

We Are Entering a New Mayan Epoch

Did the Mayans know something about 2012 that we don’t? I think more significant than the fact that the planets align in 2012 is the fact that we are entering a new Mayan epoch, or Long Count. While the pundits will be focused on doomsday prophecies and the destruction of the world, those pondering our purpose may find themselves enlightened by a greater perspective – one that may not be clear until hundreds or thousands of years from now.

According to the Mayans we are entering a new age. What does this mean? We think it may have something to do with the shift towards a more Eastern, or spiritualist, way of life. The Western way of life, and the worship of material goods, progress, and capitalism, has accelerated its way headfirst into battles and wars for hundreds of years. Hopefully, our race will eventually elevate itself to a new era of understanding – one where we find ourselves to be more introspective, and spending our time pondering not only the bigger questions of life – but the smaller ones as well. Spending more quality time with our loved ones, and enjoying the moments. Because we feel there will be many more to come.

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The Mayan Calendar Explained

The Mayan calendar has a long and deep history. But its premise is quite simple. Maybe not as simple as our Roman calendar, however. One of the defining characteristics of our Roman calendar is that it is based on various cycles. From minutes, to hours, days, weeks, months – we divide our calendar into increments that repeat on their own cycle.

For example, each hour has a first minute, each week has a Monday, each year has a first of January, and so on. However, it's not every year that a Monday is also the first of January – this occurs only every seven years or so. The Mayan calendar works on a similar premise. As we examine the history of the Mayan calendar, we are given insight into its workings.

Roman vs. Mayan calendar – Working in Cycles

You might say that the Mayan calendar works the same as the Roman calendar, but with more complex, and overlapping cycles. A 52 year cycle on the Mayan calendar, for example, is called a Calendar Round. Now, similar to the way the first of January only occurs on a Monday every seven years or so, each day in the Mayan Calendar Round, referred to as a Long Count, is given a unique name based on a combination of various cycles.

Base 10 vs. Base 20

Unlike the Roman day, which is calculated using base ten, the Mayan Long Count is calculated using base twenty. What is base twenty? Just like our base ten system uses 10 numbers (zero through ten), the Mayan base 20 system uses 20 numbers (zero through twenty). So, while moving the decimal one spot in the Roman system changes our result by a factor of 10, moving the decimal in the Mayan system changes the result by a factor of 20.

Breaking Down the Mayan Long Count

The Mayan Long Count breaks down into the following units, where a kin is one day in the 52 year period:

• 20 kin = 1 uinal
• 360 kin = 19 uinal = 1 tun
• 7200 kin = 360 uinal = 20 tun = 1 kactun
• 144000 kin = 8000 uinal = 400 tun = 20 kactun = 1 bactun
• 13 bactun = 1 Mayan epoch
• 1 epoch ~ 5125.26 Mayan years

Subtracting from today, that puts the beginning of the current Mayan Long Count at August 11, 3114 BC, and the end at December 21, 2012 AD.

Does that mean the world will come to an end on December 21, 2012? We don't think so. Read our article on the 2012 Planetary Alignment to find out why.

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2 Surefire Ways To Maximize Your Adsense Earnings

Most webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. That is why most of them use it to go after high paying keywords. They have with them the lists that tells what the keywords are and have already used various methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these supposed-to-be high paying keywords into their pages, the money they expected to come rolling in is not really coming in.

What is it that they are doing wrong?

Having the pages is with the proper keywords is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is another matter and often the factor that is lacking.

The thing is, to get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, you need to optimize your site navigation.

Stop for a moment and think about how visitors are using your website. After a visitor has landed on a certain page, they have the tendency to click on another page that sounds interesting. They get there because of the other links that appears on a page that they initially landed on. This is site navigation. It is all about enabling visitors to move about your site. And one way of maximizing your Adsense earnings.

A typical website have menu links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitor’s attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of that website. Links that have “free’ or “download” are oftentimes good attention-grabbers.

This navigation logic can also be applied to driving traffic to your high paying pages. There are some websites that are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, but have low earnings. The trick is to try and use come cleverly labeled links to get the visitors off that pages and navigate them to the higher earning ones. This is one great way of turning real cheap clicks to real dollars.

Before you begin testing if this same style will work for you and you website, you need to have two things. Something to track and compare and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. An option is to select a few of your frequently visited pages. This is ensuring fast result to come by.

Now, the next thing to do is think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to try and click on the link that will take them to your high earning pages. Come up with a catchy description for that link. Come up with a catchy and unique description for the link. Think of something that people do not get to see everyday. That will trigger their curiosity enough to try and see what that was all about.

You can also use graphics to grab your readers’ attention. There is no limitation to what you can do to make your link noticeable. If you are after the success of your site, you will do everything it takes just to achieve that goal. Just be creative. As far as many Adsense advertisers are concerned, there are no written and unwritten laws to follow regarding what they write. Just as long as you do not overstep the guidelines of the search engines, then go for it.

Also remember that it is all about location, location and location. Once the perfect attention grabbing description has been achieved, you have to identify the perfect spot on your page to position that descriptive link to your high paying page.

There is nothing wrong with visiting other websites to see how they are going about maximizing their site navigation. “Hot pages” or “Most read” lists are very common and overly used already. Get to know the ones that many websites are using and do not try to imitate them.

Another way of doing it is to try and use different texts on different pages. That way you will see the ones that work and what does not. Try to mix things around also. Put links on top and sometimes on the bottom too. This is how you go about testing which ones get more clicks and which ones are being ignored.

Let the testing begin. Testing and tracking until you find the site navigation style that works best for you site.

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