A mirage is a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. The word comes to English via the French mirage, from the Latin mirare, meaning "to look at, to wonder at". This is the same root as for "mirror" and "to admire".

In contrast to a hallucination, a mirage is a real optical phenomenon which can be captured on camera, since light rays actually are refracted to form the false image at the observer's location. What the image appears to represent, however, is determined by the interpretive faculties of the human mind. For example, inferior images on land are very easily mistaken for the reflections from a small body of water.

Mirages can be categorized as "inferior" (meaning lower), "superior" (meaning higher) and "Fata Morgana", one kind of superior mirage consisting of a series of unusually elaborate, vertically-stacked images, which form one rapidly-changing mirage.

Cold air is denser than warm air and has therefore a greater refractive index. As light passes from colder air across a sharp boundary to significantly warmer air, the light rays bend away from the direction of the temperature gradient. When light rays pass from hotter to cooler, they bend toward the direction of the gradient. If the air near the ground is warmer than that higher up, the light ray bends in a concave, upward trajectory.

A mind ( /ˈmaɪnd/) is the complex of cognitive faculties that enables consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception, and judgement — sometimes considered a particular characteristic of humans.

A long tradition of inquiries in philosophy, religion, psychology and cognitive science has sought to develop an understanding of what mind is and what are its distinguishing properties. The main questions regarding the nature of mind is its relation to the physical brain and nervous system - a question which is often framed as the Mind-body problem, which considers whether mind is somehow separate from physical existence (dualism and idealism ), deriving from and reducible to physical phenomena such as neurological processes (physicalism), or whether the mind is identical with the brain. Another question concerns which types of being are capable of having minds, for example whether mind is exclusive to humans, possessed also by some or all animals, by all living things, or whether mind can also be a property of some types of man-made machines.

Closing credits or end credits are added at the end of a motion picture, television program, or video game to list the cast and crew involved in the production. They usually appear as a list of names in small type, which either flip very quickly from page to page, or move smoothly across the background or a black screen. Credits may crawl either right-to-left (common in U.K. and some Latin American television programs) or bottom-to-top (common in films and U.S. television). The term credit roll comes from the early production days when the names were literally printed on a roll of paper and wound past the camera lens. Sometimes, post-credits scenes or bloopers are added to the end of films along with the closing credits.

The use of closing credits in film to list complete production crew and cast was not firmly established in American film until the 1970s. Before this decade, most movies were released with no closing credits at all. Films generally had opening credits only, which consisted of just major cast and crew, although sometimes the names of the cast and the characters they played would be shown at the end, as in The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, Oliver! and the 1964 Fail Safe. Two of the first major films to contain extensive closing credits - but almost no opening credits - were the blockbusters Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and West Side Story (1961). West Side Story showed only the title at the beginning of the film, and Around the World in Eighty Days, like many films today, had no opening credits at all.