Well, we’ve all gone back to work today. No one can use earthquakes, seas of fire or other apocalyptic challenges as an excuse to stay home. It appears the end of the world was not nigh, despite Harold Camping’s prediction that the righteous would ascend to heaven on Saturday, leaving everyone else to perish slowly in the aforementioned earthquakes seas of fire, etc. He was very sure of himself and spent millions upon millions to get the word out.

An engineer by trade, he used some very complex calculations to arrive at the date and time of the apocalypse. Scientific Americandescribes the math behind his apocalypse here.  Camping claims to have used the Bible to pin down the date of the crucifixion and then counted forward 722,500 days (10x5x17x10x5x17, for numerological reasons that would take too much space to describe here). He did by some accounts subtract one day to adjust for a shift between the Old and New Testament calendars.

Yet here we all are. Can someone out there correct his apocalyptic math?