"Sorry Jack, but my God, you fell right into that. OK, deep breath, deep breath. Alright, you asked what a k'in is. A k'in is a day. Their days were the same as ours - the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation around its axis. Right?"

"Yes," I said, thankful that Tuck seemed to be getting serious again.

"OK, so a b'ak'tun works out to 144,000 k'in, 144,000 days. That's close to 400 years. But the key point is where you start counting your b'ak'tun from. It all goes back to their creation date."

"Oh, you mean like the birth of Jesus, for us?" It made sense. Every scale needs to have a zero.

Look at temperature. Early civilizations would base their temperature on arbitrary measures, such as defining 0 degrees as when the king was cold and 100 degrees as when the king was hot. But that wasn't such a great idea. Not only was it arbitrary, but it was inconsistent, since the king wouldn't always feel hot or cold at the same temperatures. Any reasonable temperature scale needs to be consistently reproducible under all conditions.

The Fahrenheit scale is a familiar example of a reproducible temperature scale. Water always freezes at 32 degrees, and it always boils at 212 degrees, so there's no potential for ambiguity. But while it's consistent, it's still arbitrary. 32 and 212 sound like pretty random numbers, so what was the scale really based on?

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