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

Seed (2007 film)

Seed is a 2007 Canadian horror film written, produced, and directed by Uwe Boll. Filming ran from July 17 to August 11, 2006 in British Columbia, Canada, on a $10 million budget.

Plot

As a boy, a reclusive and antisocial Sufferton resident, Max Seed, was disfigured in a school bus crash that killed everyone else involved in it. In 1973, Seed began torturing and murdering people, filming some of his victims starving to death in his locked basement, and ultimately racking up a bodycount of 666. In 1979, Seed is arrested by Detective Matt Bishop in a siege that claims the lives of five of Bishop's fellow officers. Seed is sentenced to death by electric chair, and incarcerated on an island prison, where he is a model inmate, only acting out when he kills three guards who try to rape him.

On Seed's execution date, the electric chair fails to kill him after two shocks. Not wanting Seed to be released due to a state law that says any convicted criminal who survives three jolts of 15,000 volts each for 45 seconds walks, the prison staff and Bishop declare Seed dead, and bury him in the prison cemetery. A few hours later, Seed digs his way out of his grave and returns to the prison, where he kills the executioner, doctor, and warden before swimming back to the main land. The next day, while investigating the massacre, Bishop realizes Seed was responsible when he discovers the serial killer's empty cemetery plot.

Seed (surname)

Seed is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Seed (student newspaper)

Seed is a student newspaper published at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. The magazine, established in 1990 as NoName, is produced by the Victoria University Student Union.

History

Victoria University was formed from the merger of a number of technical and higher education campuses in the suburbs of Melbourne. Seed grew out of the merger of NoName, published from 1992 at the Footscray Institute of Technology, and Genesis, published since 1995 at the Western Institute. In 1996, the two merged to form NoName + Genesis, before rebranding later that year as Seed.

Art of Shoplifting controversy

In 1995, NoName, reprinted a controversial article from Rabelais Student Media, its La Trobe University counterpart, entitled The Art of Shoplifting – one of seven student newspapers to do so. Although the Rabelais editors responsible for the original article were prosecuted for ignoring a ban on publication issued by the state's Chief Censor; the editors of the other seven newspapers were not targeted by the authorities. Charges against the Rabelais editors were later dropped.