Firefly

The Lampyridae are a family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera. They are winged beetles, and commonly called fireflies or lightning bugs for their conspicuous use of bioluminescence during twilight to attract mates or prey. Fireflies produce a "cold light", with no infrared or ultraviolet frequencies. This chemically produced light from the lower abdomen may be yellow, green, or pale red, with wavelengths from 510 to 670 nanometers.

About 2,000 species of fireflies are found in temperate and tropical environments. Many are in marshes or in wet, wooded areas where their larvae have abundant sources of food. Their larvae emit light and often are called "glowworms", in particular, in Eurasia. In the Americas, "glow worm" also refers to the related Phengodidae. In many species, both male and female fireflies have the ability to fly, but in some species, the females are flightless.

Biology

Fireflies tend to be brown and soft-bodied, often with the elytra, or front wings, more leathery than those of other beetles. Although the females of some species are similar in appearance to males, larviform females are found in many other firefly species. These females can often be distinguished from the larvae only because they have compound eyes. The most commonly known fireflies are nocturnal, although there are numerous species that are diurnal. Most diurnal species are not luminescent; however, some species that remain in shadowy areas may produce light.

Fireflies (computer graphics)

Fireflies are rendering artifacts resulting from numerical instabilities in solving the rendering equation. They manifest themselves as anomalously-bright single pixels scattered over parts of the image.

Fireflies need to be distinguished from noise (overall graininess in the image), which can be reduced by simply increasing the number of rendering samples (amount of computation) per pixel. Fireflies tend to be harder to get rid of.

Fireflies tend to be confined to particular parts of the image, where they are caused by interactions between particular material and lighting settings that only affect certain objects in the scene.

Curing Fireflies

Sometimes fireflies can be reduced by various tweaks to renderer settings, for example clamping the maximum intermediate amplitude during pixel calculations, or disabling the calculation of caustics if these are not needed. Another option is application of a despeckle filter as part of rendering post-processing, or manually removing the fireflies with the brush or clone tool in an image editor.

Fireflies (novel)

Fireflies is a novel by Shiva Naipaul originally published in 1970. It was his first book, a comic novel set in Trinidad. In an essay in An Unfinished Journey, Naipaul described how in 1968 as a final year student at Oxford University studying Chinese, he had been moved to write down a sentence, which proved to be the beginning of his first novel, which he then worked on for the next two years. The novel was hailed on publication, winning the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Writer Martin Amis said of Fireflies

References

Bank (card game)

Bank, also known also as "Polish Bank" or "Russian Bank," is the name of a comparing card game. The game requires a standard 52-card deck and five or six players.

Rules

At the start of the game, each player contributes an arranged stake to the pool. The dealer gives three cards to each player and turns up another; if this is not lower than an eight (ace is lowest), the dealer continues turning up cards until such a card is exposed. The player on the dealer's left, without touching or looking at the three cards received, can bet the amount of the pool, or any part of it, that among those cards is one that is higher (of the same suit) than the turn-up. If the player wins, the player takes the amount from the pool; if the player loses, the player pays that amount to the pool. Each player does the same in turn, the dealer last. Whenever the pool is exhausted, a fresh stake is put into the pool. After a round is over the deal passes. No player may touch any cards received until making a bet; the penalty is a fine to the pool of twice the stake, and the loss of the right to bet during that round.

Ocean bank

An ocean bank, sometimes referred to as a fishing bank or simply bank, is a part of the sea which is shallow compared to its surrounding area, such as a shoal or the top of an underwater hill. Somewhat like continental slopes, ocean banks slopes can upwell as tidal and other flows intercept them, resulting sometimes in nutrient rich currents. Because of this, some large banks, such as Dogger Bank and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, are among the richest fishing grounds in the world.

There are some banks that were reported in the 19th century by navigators, such as Wachusett Reef, whose existence is doubtful.

Types

Ocean banks may be of volcanic nature. Banks may be carbonate or terrigenous. In tropical areas some banks are submerged atolls. As they are not associated with any landmass, banks have no outside source of sediments. Carbonate banks are typically platforms, rising from the ocean depths, whereas terrigenous banks are elevated sedimentary deposits.

Seamounts, by contrast, are mountains, of volcanic origin, rising from the deep sea, and are steeper, and higher in comparison to the surrounding seabed. Examples are Pioneer and Guide Seamounts, west of the Farallon Islands. The Pioneer Seamount has a depth of 1,000 meters, In other cases, parts of a bank may reach above the water surface, thereby forming islands.

Diaper bank

A diaper bank is a social institution or nonprofit organization formed for the sole purpose of providing diapers to people in poverty who do not have access to diapers. Federally funded public assistance programs do not pay for or contribute to the payment for diapers. and diaper banks accept donations and diapers to provide for either children or adults suffering from incontinence and distribute diapers to partner agencies for distribution to people in their social programs in need of diapers. Most recently The National Diaper Bank Network was formed to help distribute diapers across the United States.

History

The idea of a diaper bank is a relatively new. The Diaper Bank of Southern Arizona claims to be the first diaper bank that was started in 1994 initially as a donation to the local community by a local consulting company, ReSolve, Inc., under the leadership of Hildy Gottlieb and Dimitri Petropolis.