
And yet the world feels fine.Friday was supposed to be the day life on Earth ceased to exist. The predicted apocalypse -- which spawned a disaster movie "2012," a TV show tracking "Doomsday Preppers" taking extraordinary measures for the end-of-a-lifetime event and numerous jokes on social media and elsewhere -- stemmed from the end of an important phase of the ancient Mayan calendar.Founded around 2000 B.C. and still active, though its numbers and influence have waned significantly over the past several hundred years, the Mayan civilization...