This year's Fan Faire united two events: The Fan Faire and DEF CON 21!

The Crushbone contingent combined with a slippery Toukai (who, with a little hacker social engineering, crashed the party), and whooped it up until the pool closed at the strike of midnight.

It was a great pleasure to once again meet the people behind the characters; an especially warm welcome to Adaac, who traveled far to attend his first Fan Faire!

I sincerely hope the opportunity for us all to meet again comes soon, and that the timing is more favorable. (Sequential cons next time, not concurrent!)

Yup, bad news, your bills are still due.

The Mayans and their predecessors, the Olmec, figured out the concept of zero hundreds of years before other parts of the world including the Mediterranean and Europe. But the confusion about the end of the world occurred because the same marker used to indicate zero also could be used for 13.

The Mayan long-count calendar has names for certain chunks of time. A baktun is a unit of time that represents close to 400 years. On Friday, there will have been 13 baktuns passed since the Mayan "year zero." The baktun is the largest chunk of time depicted on most long-count calendars, but there are also pictuns, or 20 baktuns.

Mayanist Michael Coe may be responsible for starting the fear surrounding the end-of-the-world scenario in the 1960s, before the great revolution in Mayan studies. Coe speculated as to how the Mayan people might have envisioned the end of 13 baktuns:

"This, our present universe, would be annihilated when the great cycles of the long-count reached completion."

In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.