Six on Geography and Science: Contemplating the Lives behind Ancient Bones; Commercialization-of-the-Ayahuasca-Ritual; A 53-Y
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"Endemic to the Amazonian regions of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela the plants are traditionally used in shamanic rituals, guided by ‘yachaks’ or a community’s spiritual leader. When combined, the herbs produce a potent psychotropic which contains dimethyltryptamine.
"When the plant is taken, the effect produced is not ' hallucinogenic,' as it is usually sold abroad, but it is entheogenic, that is to say, during the ritual, several parts work simultaneously, both at a bodily and mental level. It's like the awakening of conscience, a process that can last for days, tourists often ask for a drug withdrawal to have fun and it's not what should be done, it's not entertainment," Roger Neira, director and founder of 'Ayahuasca Peru' told RT.
The custom has caught the attention of the tourism industry, foreigners are flocking to the region to "experience" the herbs’ unusual properties. Now included in most tourism packets, a shot of the pungent herbal tea can go for US$70 or up to US$500 for multiple doses.
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"Network coloring problems, which were inspired by the question of how to color maps so that adjoining countries are different colors, have been a focus of study among mathematicians for nearly 200 years. The goal is to figure out how to color the nodes of some network (or graph, as mathematicians call them) so that no two connected nodes share the same color. Depending on the context, such a coloring can provide an effective way to seat guests at a wedding, schedule factory tasks for different time slots, or even solve a sudoku puzzle.
Graph coloring problems tend to be simple to state, but they are often enormously hard to solve. Even the question that launched the field — Do four colors suffice to color any map? — took more than a century to answer (the answer is yes, in case you were wondering).
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"He had heard, however, of the turtles being killed. The turtles being killed, that’s real, man.
To my surprise and delight, the sky had cleared considerably while we were talking indoors. It was still cold and damp, but, followed by a loyal coterie of dogs — my coyote protection squad — I headed up the gravel road into the pitch-black night to get a better look.
I took my final measurement of the trip. The sky meter read 22.2 mag/arcsec². The number was the highest I’d seen, so high it doesn’t even show up on the legend on the front of the meter, and it meant that my view of the night sky was tempered only by natural airglow and zodiacal light. I was well into Class 1 on the Bortle Scale — the dark-sky bigtime. At this level of darkness, not only is the Milky Way visible in great detail, but you can also see the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light-years away) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (25 million light-years) with the naked human eye.
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A domed, inky tent of dark stretched above me, from mountain range to mountain range, with me squarely at its center. It’s hard to blame the ancient philosophers, like Anaximander, who thought the stars were tiny holes in the wheel of the sky through which a great fire could be seen. So it seemed to me then. To look up was to get lost. And to look up was to be found."
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