Yucatán Peninsula

The Yucatán Peninsula (Spanish: Península de Yucatán), in southeastern Mexico, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico, with the northern coastline on the Yucatán Channel. The peninsula lies east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a northwestern geographic partition separating the region of Central America from the rest of North America.

Etymology

The proper derivation of the word Yucatán is widely debated. Hernando Cortes, in the first of his letters to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, claimed that the name Yucatán comes from a misunderstanding. In this telling, the first Spanish explorers asked what the area was called and the response they received, "Yucatan," was a Yucatec Maya word meaning "I don't understand what you're saying." Others claim that the source of the name is the Nahuatl (Aztec) word Yocatlān, "place of richness."

Human history

Maya

The Yucatán Peninsula comprises a significant proportion of the ancient Maya Lowlands (although the Maya culture extended south of the Yucatán Peninsula, through present Guatemala and into Honduras and highland Chiapas). There are many Maya archaeological sites throughout the peninsula; some of the better-known are Chichen Itza, Tulum and Uxmal.Indigenous Maya and Mestizos of partial Maya descent make up a sizable portion of the region's population, and Mayan languages are widely spoken there.

Mexico

Coordinates: 23°N 102°W / 23°N 102°W / 23; -102

Mexico (ⁱ/ˈmɛksᵻkoʊ/; Spanish: México [ˈmexiko]), officially the United Mexican States (Spanish: Estados Unidos Mexicanos,  listen ), is a federal republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Covering almost two million square kilometres (over 760,000 sq mi), Mexico is the fifth largest country in the Americas by total area and the 13th largest independent nation in the world. With an estimated population of over 120 million, it is the eleventh most populous country and the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world and the second most populous country in Latin America. Mexico is a federation comprising thirty-two states, including Mexico City, its capital and largest city, which is also a state.

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is the largest travel guide book publisher in the world. The company is owned by American billionaire Brad Kelley's NC2 Media, which bought it in 2013 from BBC Worldwide for US$77 million (the equivalent of £45.5 million in May 2014) after it was valued at US$250 million in 2008.

Originally called "Lonely Planet Publications", the company changed its name to "Lonely Planet" in July 2009 to reflect its broad travel industry coverage and an emphasis on digital products. After the Let's Go travel guide series that was founded in 1960, the Lonely Planet books were the second series of travel books aimed at backpackers and other low-cost travellers. As of 2011, the company had sold 120 million books since inception and by early 2014, it had sold around 11 million units of its travel apps.

As of 2014, Lonely Planet's largest office is located in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, but its Franklin, Tennessee, United States (U.S.) office is the company's de facto headquarters. Other Lonely Planet offices are spread throughout the world, in locations such as London, United Kingdom (U.K.); Beijing, China; and Delhi, India.

The Culture

The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchist utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, which features in a number of his space opera novels and works of short fiction, collectively called the Culture series.

In the series, the Culture is composed of several inter-bred humanoid species, as well as machines with intelligences ranging from basic computers, to human-equivalent drones, to superintelligent artificial intelligences called Minds. The Culture's economy is maintained automatically by its non-sentient machines, with high-level work entrusted to the Minds' subroutines, which allows its humanoid and drone citizens to indulge their passions, romances, hobbies, or other activities, without servitude. Many of the series' protagonists are humanoids who choose to work for the Culture's elite diplomatic or espionage organisations, and interact with other civilisations whose citizens hold wildly different ideologies, morals, and technologies.

The Culture has a grasp of technology which is advanced relative to most of the other civilisations which share the galaxy. There are a few Elder civilizations far more advanced than the Culture, but they tend to keep to themselves. Other civilizations have "Sublimed," or transitioned to some unknowable higher dimension or state of existence and have apparently lost interest in the mundane goings on of more corporeal beings. Most of the Culture's citizens do not live on planets but in or on artificial habitats, such as huge orbitals, or on ships, the largest of which are home to billions of individuals. Biologically, the Culture's citizens have been genetically enhanced to live for centuries, and have modified mental control over their physiology, including the ability to introduce a variety of psychoactive drugs into their systems, change gender, or switch off pain.