In 1962 Sidney Cohen presented the medical community with its first warning about the dangers of the drug LSD. LSD had arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an...

The success of snake bite healers is vaguely understood in Kenya, partly due to their unknown materia medica and occult-mystical nature of their practice. A comparison is made of plants used in snake bite treatments by two culturally distinct African groups (the Kamba and Luo). Thirty two plants used for snakebite treatment are documented. The majority of the antidotes are prepared from freshly...

Morphological resonances are detected in elastic scattering and fluorescence excitation spectra from a cluster of two spheres, each -5 /im in radius, isolated and oriented in an electrodynamic levitator trap. Light scattering at 90' and perpendicular to the line of centers of the particles, by broadside illumination with polarization in the scattering plane, shows that an independent particle m...

mystical texts are the most important texts have been set to convey epistemic teachings and to influence the audiences concerned with awareness and esoteric training.  therefore it seems that specific techniques have been used in rhetoric to fulfill this objective. according to the style of speech in mystical texts, they can be considered as rhetoricals. reviewing the concept of rhetoric and it...

3-D tracking of free-moving objects has to deal with brightness variations pronounced by the shape of the tracked surface. Pixel-based tracking techniques, though versatile, are particularly affected by such variations. Here, we evaluate two illumination-adaptive methods for a novel efficient pixel-based 3-D tracking approach. Brightness adaption by means of an illumination basis is compared to...