The hype and nonsense around January 1st, 2000 AD is a bit daft as the first day of the new millennium is completely arbitrary. Our original calendar was known as the Julian calendar because it was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. That calendar allotted 365 days for the year with every fourth year a leap year of 366 days. The problem with the Julian calendar was that it was too long by about 11 minutes. This amounts to a total of about one day every 128 years. This bothered the Christian church because they needed to compute an accurate date for the death and ascension of Jesus for their Easter festivals. Pope Gregory 8th remedied this problem by coming up with a new modified calendar which became known as the Gregorian Calendar. In 1582, he decreed that the day after October 4th should be reckoned to be October 15th. So in effect he wiped out 10 days, making up for all the extra 11 minutes per year that had gone past since the time of Julius Caesar. Pope Gregory must have been quite a complicated fellow because he also decreed that future years that had a number ending in two cyphers should not be a leap year unless the number was divisible by 400. Nobody could get their head around what the hell Pope Gregory was talking about, so things muddled along much the same with every fourth year a leap year. In England and Scotland, things were further complicated by the fact that the legal year began on March 25th not January 1st. So during the reign of King George II in 1751 the English and Scottish Parliament decided to adopt the Gregorian Calendar and they passed a law saying in future the legal year would begin on January 1st. So the Gregorian calendar became adopted around the English speaking world. The English Parliament decided that the day after December 2nd, 1752 should be reckoned December 14th. So they then knocked 11 days off and nobody bothered with Pope Gregory's complicated system of dividing things by 400. The other thing which is heaps of fun to think about is this: There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. But how long is a second? In the olden days, they attempted to work it out astronomically. Since the invention of atomic clocks in the 1950's we have more accurately been able to determine how long a second is. In 1967, there was a general conference on weights and measures and it was agreed to base the definition of a second on atomic time. According to the Natural Physics Laboratory in Great Britain, a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. In plain man's English, it is this: caesium atoms can be made to flick between two possible energies by illuminating them with microwaves tuned to a specific frequency. In a caesium clock, atoms with one energy are sent through a chamber containing microwaves. The frequency of the microwaves is tuned until the maximum number of atoms flip from one energy to the other, showing it is equal to the value that defines the second as 9,192,631,770 vibrations to one second. The problem is even that isn't quite accurate enough. By international agreement in 1972, it was decided to use occasional leap seconds so that we could have a World-wide Co-ordinated Universal Time. In fact, there have been 21 leap seconds added to the calendar in the last 25 years or so. Now here's the fun bit. Most historians conclusively put the birth of Jesus Christ at 4 BC not at zero AD. If that is correct, you would have to subtract four years from our calendar. And as approximately 250 years have passed since the act of Parliament in 1751 which fixed English and Scottish dates and thus America's and the rest of the English speaking world, it would seem to me that our calendar is now approximately four year behind (Jesus' Birthday), plus two days ahead of itself (the 11 minutes per year over 250 years). Then because on January 1st 2000 we'll be three quarters of the way through a four-year span prior to the next leap year (2001), our calendar on the great day will be 3/4 of a day behind the correct date as the leap year will not have been added as yet. I reckon you have to subtract four years to adjust for the correct birth of Christ, then deduct two days because the calendar is going too fast by 11 minutes per year and then add a further 3/4 of a day for our position in the leap year cycle, as of midnight 1999, then knock off a few seconds for your atomic leap second adjustment, whatever that might be. And in the end I reckon January 1st, 2000 AD took place just before the end of 1996. In fact, 1 1/4 days (minus a few as yet not added leap seconds) before the end of 1996. In other words the great moment - the beginning of the next millennium actually took place at about 3 seconds before 6am on December 30th, 1996. So it looks like we all missed the party. Shame really. As to the Mayan calendar, they were very accurate in their calculations. Their fifth sun ends in the year December 23rd, 2010 AD at which point the Mayan's reckon the world is going to end. The problem with the Mayan's is they ended first, so none of them will be there to say I told you so. They may be right I'll let you know on December 24th, 2010 give or take a few leap seconds. I hope this clarifies things. The point is no-one's got a bloody clue what date it is, or what time it is, and in the end what does it matter as long as we are having fun in the meantime.