Xah's a Word a Day — the Making of Belles-Lettres (temp area)

Abelson: Right. But it's still weird to me that I would start teaching programming by going through a litany of what are all the primitives in the language and what are the data types and all that stuff. For me, the first breakthrough is how do you put stuff together.

The 2012 phenomenon was a range of eschatological beliefs that cataclysmic or transformative events would occur around 21 December 2012. This date was regarded as the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Various astronomical alignments and numerological formulae were proposed as pertaining to this date, but none had ever been accepted by mainstream scholarship.