Live it up today, for in 2012 it’s all coming to an abrupt end.

Go ahead and stop saving your pennies to buy the car of tomorrow. Blow all your hard-earned cash on candy, tickets to a concert or a trip to Rio.

The end of the world is nigh.

At least according to the Mayans. Their calendar plays things out so that in just a few short years our ride on this big blue and green ball we call Earth is going to come to an end.

The forward thinking society came up with a way to measure time that has the year 2012 as an end date. Their system used circles of time with a huge disaster marking the completion of each loop. The Mayans’ demise as a dominating population actually coincided with one of these predicted end points.

If you’re not buying into that theory for the world’s big finale, how about some more scientific conjecture about the end of our planet.

How about a geomagnetic shift? Some speculate it has happened before and brought an end to all the dinosaurs. The shift screws up the atmosphere which makes the Van Allen Radiation Belt more porous so we all get zapped. Of course this one could take place at any moment, like maybe in the year 2012.

There’s a happy thought for you.

For those of you who think we’ll be around a lot longer than that, there’s the “heat death” theory. This idea points out that as the universe continues to expand there won’t be enough energy to maintain life. Eventually all the suns will burn out and life comes to a cold, quiet end.

The good news is none of us will be around to see that since it won’t happen for a gajillion, bazillion years, approximately.

The Purple Slinky breaks all these end games down in more detail.

Well, maybe you should put a few bucks back for a rainy day or the car of tomorrow.

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]