LONGCOUNTFive wheels count in days and in millennia at once — watch them mesh a deep-time date into carved stone.

Five wheels, and only one of them ever hurries.

The Maya Long Count is a place-value clock for history: not days of a month, but days since a fixed zero — stacked into ever-larger bundles.

The innermost wheel is the kin, a single day. Twenty kin make a winal; eighteen winal a tun, the 360-day year; twenty tun a katun, and twenty katun a baktun — a bundle of 144,000 days, near enough four human centuries. Each wheel advances the next only when it completes a turn, exactly the way an odometer rolls.

So the kin wheel spins like a second hand while the baktun outside it barely stirs. Read outward and you are reading down through time: the day you are in, the generation, the age.

Watch the moment one wheel hands time to the next.

A carry is the whole idea made visible. When the kin wheel passes its twentieth day, it clicks the winal forward one and the origin notch swings back to the top.

The date on the right assembles from those carries. Its last glyph re-carves almost constantly; give it twenty days and the winal glyph re-carves too, a gold flash rippling leftward through the inscription as a larger bundle completes. Wait long enough — a tun, a katun — and a heavier place stirs that a single lifetime would never see move.

Every wheel here turns at its true ratio, driven from one running day-count, so a carry never lands early or late. The mechanism is honest; only the clock is sped up.

Here, one day is compressed to half a second — so a winal turns in ten.