The basic structural equipment used in oil, natural gas, or water well drilling operations. Rigs are massive scaffolds used in a variety of procedures that require penetrating the surface of the Earth's crust. For example, rigs are used to drill holes and to install pipes, tunnels, or underground utilities. They are also used in studies and projects that require testing sub-surface soil, groundwater, and mineral deposits.
A term in microbiology referring to substances used in a chemical reaction to detect, measure, examine, or produce other substances.
A police record for an individual that records his or her criminal history, including arrests, convictions, misdemeanors, and warnings. This term is primarily used in the United States and Canada. Synonyms for this word include: police record and criminal record.
A device that emits electromagnetic waves. These waves can be used to transmit sound at different frequencies, and the sound is picked up by radios tuned to those frequencies. The radio transmitter was first created in 1887 by German physicist Heinrich Hertz and the first music signal transmitted via radio waves was in 1906 in Boston, Massachusetts. Radio transmitters are still in use today, especially in remote areas with limited telephone capabilities.
A place from which large amounts of stone have been extracted, often leaving a deep pit and a fragmented landscape.
A Native American building form found along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and west as far as the Hopi mesas in Arizona. Pueblos are clustered, modular structures traditionally built of adobe, although pueblo buildings in more arid areas, like Chaco Canyon, have been built of unfinished sandstone blocks. Pueblo architecture is a fundamental synthesis of spiritual, social, and material sustainability. The block-like rooms, constructed of local materials, are typically built around one or more communal spaces called plazas, and are often terraced in rising and receding stories that create an open-air amphitheater around the plaza below. Although the interior spaces of pueblo structures are functional, they serve more as storage space rather than living space, because most traditional activities occur in the plaza or on the terraced patios created by the stepped nature of pueblos' aggregated stories. Few windows or doors penetrate load-bearing walls, so ventilation and access occurs through the ceilings into the rooms below. Descending into the darkened and enclosed space of a pueblo interior from the ceiling above is an enactment of returning to the womb and sacred space of Mother Earth, while climbing up out of these spaces functions as a reenactment of the Pueblo peoples' birth, or emergence, into the current world from the underworld.
Although contact with Europeans over the past five centuries has altered superficial elements of the pueblo building style, including its romanticized appropriation in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style popularized by U.S. architects during the 1920s and '30s, pueblos retain much of the same functionality and significance today as they did to the Pueblo communities who lived in them prior to European contact. Several pueblos have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, which speaks to the resiliency of pueblo architecture as both a building form and as a social and spiritual practice.
A mind-altering substance that induces a state of heightened awareness and perception, often accompanied by hallucinations. Psychedelic plants such as peyote, which is native to Mexico and the southwestern U.S., were traditionally used in indigenous cultures as part of spiritual rituals, aiding in vision quests or healing ceremonies. LSD, also known as acid, one of the most commonly used synthetic psychedelic drugs, was developed in 1938 in Switzerland, and reached a height in popularity in the 1960s and '70s as the drug of choice of the hippie subculture in Europe and the U.S. A synthetic form of the active chemicals of the peyote cactus, LSD is exponentially more powerful than peyote or other plant-based psychedelics, and is considered a dangerous, illegal substance. Consequently, many other natural and synthetic substances that induce similar effects to LSD have been outlawed by association.
A reference to an outline of, for example, a person's face, or of information. In the second example, the information provided can take the form of a description, a general sketch, or a narrative of events in chronological order.
Officially known as the Utah State Prison in Draper, this correction facility was opened in 1951 and today can house approximately 4,500 inmates. The Draper Prison complex is located about twenty miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah. It has separate units for male and female offenders, and these units range from minimum to maximum security. The prison site is informally called "Point of the Mountain" because it is situated right next to a mountain range by the same name, which forms the eastern parts of the Traverse Mountains.
In Hillerman's 1980 Navajo detective novel People of Darkness, the place is mentioned as "Idaho's Point of the Mountain Prison," although the facility is located in Utah, not in Idaho.
