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.

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