(1) Short fictional pieces of various themes

lines

I write short essays occasionally, mostly fictional ones. A selection is shared here as part of a personal archive. These stories explore a range of themes, including fantasy, science fiction, and everyday life.


(2) The cognitive science behind the adventures of Junajpu and Xbalamke

csm

The logo of our project is
made up of two glyphs that
mean Junajpu and Xbalamke.

In 2024, I secured funding from Cognitive Science Society to conduct an outreach activity together with my colleague Alex Socop. In our online workshop, we introduced four cognitive science topics (i.e., Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Comparative Psychology, and Developmental Psychology) to indigenous communities in Guatemala using stories from Popol Wuj. All our materials (in English and Spanish) are publicly available in CogSci-Maya. Read about our latest blogpost here.


(3) Converting Gregorian dates to the Mayan Long Count

kat

This is a glyph showing
7 k'at of the Cholq'ij
cycle.

The Mayans have a unique way of keeping track of days, in which they count the number of days that have passed since the start of a 144,000-day cycle (i.e., baktun). At the time of writing, the Long Count is 13.0.11.8.5 (the Cholq'ij date being 8 Kan). There are a number of websites that offer the conversion between a Gregorian date and the Mayan long count; however, most of them do not show how the calculations are performed. I therefore invited my Mayan colleague Alex Socop to start this calendar project to provide open-source scripts (currently available in HTML, Python, and R) on the Gregorian-Long Count conversion.