Welcome To The Beginning Of The World

First of all, today's video is currently unlisted again.  Here's the description:

Physically, the world did not end, of course.  Few people expected it to.  However, if we want to, we can now leave the old world behind and decide it has ended, in the sense that it could be psychologically past.  This is similar to the question of the Law Of Attraction, but that's a subject for another blog.

We can just decide now that we're tired of the old world, and that now we are living in a new, better world, of sympathy, understanding and whatever else the song says.  It sounds simplistic, but then maybe things just are that simple.

and here's the video itself:

It's remarkably brief and poor quality, and the quality goes down when the light comes on.  However, i felt i had to do it and it constitutes the third and last of the three Mayan prophecy videos in the "Twelve Days" series.

On that subject, there is of course this guy:

The Age of Aquarius!  To be honest, i'm not clear when that starts, but i choose to assume it starts today.  I'm going to talk about what the age system is now.

Earth's axis is not at right angles to the Sun but tilts over at about 23.5 degrees.  It also wobbles slowly like a gyroscope over a period of 26 000 years.  As a result, the night sky looks different at the same time of year as the millenia pass.  For instance, the pole star is currently Polaris but it has and will be Vega.  In fact, Vega makes a better pole star than Polaris.  This is because the axis very slowly draws a circle in the sky.

This also means that the position of the Sun in the sky during the Vernal Equinox shifts gradually along the Ecliptic, which is roughly the plane in which the planets and asteroids orbit.  Astrologically rather than astronomically, the Ecliptic is divided into twelve equal arcs bearing the same names as most of the Zodiacal constellations and referred to as "signs".  Since there are twelve of them, over the twenty-six millenium cycle during which the axis precesses ("wobbles"), the equinoctes also precess, moving through the twelve signs and entering the next one along about once every 2160 years.  In fact, to be precise, an age lasts 2147 years, 243 days and twelve hours, which is of course spurious accuracy.

The Age of Aquarius is simply the interval during which the Sun is in the sign (not the constellation) of Aquarius at the Vernal Equinox.  The song says:

Speaking of 'Hair', i really should go into mine some day and explain why it's the way it is.  In fact, while i'm at it:

Like chakras, astrological ages are identifiable entities but it's not clear how useful or meaningful they are beyond that.  However, they are certainly useful as inspirations, which is how i choose to make them.


The font used, however, is another matter:

I'm quite impressed by this font, as it's genuinely seven-segment and therefore highly practical and an ingenious solution introduced at a time before dot matrix displays were cheap or reliable enough to enable anything like print-like characters to be displayed on them, although oddly they superceded Nixie tubes.  Each one of those seven segments, which when all lit display an "8", is either on or off and each character can therefore be associated with a binary integer between zero and ten dozen and seven inclusive.

Regarding the numbers displayed themselves, the top one is the Julian Date, the second is not hexadecimal in spite of appearances, the third and fifth are the Long Count date, needless to say, and the fourth is the date in the Gregorian calendar expressed using British syntax.

That's it for now.