[George Guice] has long chased after sparkly green rocks, known to geologists as ultramafic. They’re rich in magnesium and make up the majority of our planet as the mantle. But pieces of the mantle are rare at the surface, and ultramafic rocks can form in several different ways, including in large crystallizing magma chambers. They’re also devilishly difficult to study.

Huddled up next to a small slice of muskeg, the cliffs glowed in a strange light. This was ultramafic rock, Birdman told us, placing his hand on a slab. Volcanic intrusions, brimming with iron that stained the rock red. This type of rock was as substantial as we could hope for. Our feet would stick to it even at a dangerous angle, but in places the weather was slowly crumbling the rock into tiny pebbles. We would have to be careful. We would have to respect the rock.

The dates we now use … [are] based on the calculations of a sixth-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus. He sought to find a replacement for the old Christian calendar which was based on the years since the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian, the last emperor to persecute Christians. He died in 311. Prior to that, dates had been calculated in the Roman Empire using Ab urbe condita (from the founding of the city), the date of the foundation of the city of Rome in 753 BC. Dates in antiquity were also calculated according to the year of the reign of an emperor and the dates of the two pro-consuls elected in Rome on an annual basis.

Basically every civilization has also had some kind of accumulating count of elapsed time. In the West, we’re celebrating the start of the year 2022, counting the years since a particular approximate determination of the birth of Jesus; we’re a quarter of the way through the year 5782 in the Jewish calendar (counting from the supposed date of creation) and not quite halfway through 1443 in the Islamic calendar (which has the most historically solid origin of the three, starting with the Prophet Muhammed’s move from Mecca to Medina). In the more distant past, the Romans dated events ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city, and the Maya had the Long Count which put a bit of a cyclical gloss on the steady accumulation of years.

For a hamlet named after the eternal banquet hall where the slain warriors of Norse mythology caroused, Valhalla is low on drama. Residents appreciate the forested hills, compact homes and soothing cul-de-sacs of this small Westchester community (population 3,400).

It’s festival season and that’s good news for many people. Be it Body & Soul here or Glastonbury across the water, thousands of people will spend the weekend showing their standard of festival fitness in the open air. They will carouse, dance, shout, drink, scream, fall over and generally act the maggot in various charming and not so charming ways.