Whatever...
The Mayan calendar did not predict the end of the world. The Mayans also did not predict that centuries later people would use their calendar to sell thousands of books predicting the end of the world.
The Mayans also believed that the sun is a god and the Milky Way is the gateway to life and death, the therfore concluded that this intersection (the solstice occurs at the same moment of the conjunction of the Galactic Equator with the Milky Way) in the past (August 11, 3114 B.C) must have been the moment of creation. Mayan hieroglyphs seem to indicate that they believed the next intersection (in 2012) would be some sort of end and a new beginning of a cycle.
However, the solstice occuring at the same moment of the conjunction of the Galactic Equator with the Milky Way happened already... in 1998, so the world ended then, I guess. Since the Sun is half a degree wide, its solstice position takes 36 years to precess its full width. Given this determined location for the line of the galactic equator, its most precise convergence with the center of the Sun already occurred in 1998, and so asserts that, rather than 2012, the galactic alignment instead focuses on a multi-year period centered on 1998.
