Talk Back

[malabar]

What promises to be a rigorous scientific study of why 2012 was so important to the Maya is marred by faulty scholarship and lack of integration between the writing of the two authors. For details on the mistakes made, see http://alignment2012.com/mproph.htm; they have offended some really anal fanboys out there and are now reaping the reward from it. I did find one interesting idea here: Cotterell has postulated a mechanism whereby astrology could have some basis in external reality.

In 1986 Maurice Cotterell put forward a revolutionary theory concerning astrology and sun cycles. He had for some years suspected that the sun's variable magnetic field had consequences for life on earth. The sun has a complex field which loops and twists itself into knots. It has long been suspected that these loops give rise to sunspots, whose number, size and location are constantly changing and have profound effects upon the earth's magnetic envelope, the magnetosphere. Cotterell wrote a computer program to illustrate relationship between the sun's magnetic field and the Earth, which predicted that there should be a sunspot cycle of roughly eleven and a half years. Apparently, there is a roughly equivalent cycle in human birth rates (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/r0140v705x38277t/), which may be due to weather changes (see http://www.newsdaily.com/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20070807-15474300-bc-us-africanrains.xml.
I'm not sure how much of this I believe, but it was interesting to think about. Overall, this book was a waste of time, though.