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.

Glassheart

Glassheart is the third studio album by British recording artist Leona Lewis, released on 12 October 2012 by Syco Music and RCA Records. The album is Lewis' first under RCA Records after parent company Sony Music Entertainment closed J Records and relocated its artists. Glassheart was conceived in 2010 shortly after the completion of Lewis' first headline tour, The Labyrinth. Recording and production took place in Denver, Los Angeles and London; originally the album was due for release in November 2011 but was pushed back several times to accommodate new recording sessions and allow more creative time.

On Glassheart, Lewis reunites with Ryan Tedder, record producer of her previous singles "Bleeding Love" and "Happy" and songwriter Andrea Martin who co-wrote "Better in Time," in addition to a number of new collaborators such as British duo Naughty Boy and Emeli Sandé, Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins and DJ Frank E. Producer Fraser T Smith executive produced the album after impressing Lewis with his work on Hurt: The EP (2011), a cover song extended play (EP) that Lewis released to bridge the gap between Echo (2009) and Glassheart.

Tangle (mathematics)

In mathematics, the word tangle usually refers to one of two related concepts:

In link theory, a tangle is an embedding of n arcs and m circles into – the difference from the previous definition is that it includes circles as well as arcs, and partitions the boundary into two (isomorphic) pieces, which is algebraically more convenient – it allows one to add tangles by stacking them, for instance.

(A quite different use of 'tangle' appears in Graph minors X. Obstructions to tree-decomposition by N. Robertson and P. D. Seymour, J. Combinatorial Theory B 59 (1991) 153--190, who used it to describe separation in graphs. This usage has been extended to matroids.)

The balance of this article discusses Conway's sense of tangles; for the link theory sense, see that article.

Two n-tangles are considered equivalent if there is an ambient isotopy of one tangle to the other keeping the boundary of the 3-ball fixed. Tangle theory can be considered analogous to knot theory except instead of closed loops we use strings whose ends are nailed down. See also braid theory.

Tangle (series 3)

The third series of Tangle, an Australian drama television series, was confirmed in December 2010, and production began in June 2011 and ended in August. Series three will contain six episodes, and is written by Fiona Seres and Tony McNamara, and directed by Emma Freeman and Michael James Rowland.

Cast

Episodes

References

Tangle (TV series)

Tangle is an Australian drama series for the Showcase subscription television channel. It focuses on the tangled lives of two generations of two families. Tangle is filmed in Melbourne and first screened on 1 October 2009. It is written by Fiona Seres, Tony McNamara and Judi McCrossin, and directed by Jessica Hobbs, Matthew Saville and Stuart McDonald. There have so far been three seasons.

Plot

Season 1

Tangle revolves around the intertwined lives of the Kovac and Williams families and their network of friends and extended family. Nat Manning (Kat Stewart) returned to her home town of Melbourne after ten years in England on the minor celebrity circuit. She created ripples and then waves in the lives of two clans already struggling under the weight of their myriad secrets. Ally (Justine Clarke) is the devoted wife of builder Vince (Ben Mendelsohn), mother of Romeo and Gigi (Lincoln Younes and Eva Lazarro), who is happy to have her sister Nat back. Politician Tim (Joel Tobeck) had an affair 15 years ago with Nat, and as a result, Nat became pregnant. Tim and his wife Christine (Catherine McClements) patched up their marriage and fought hard for custody of the child, Max (Blake Davis). Divorcee Em is having an affair with married man Vince and doctor Gabriel (Matt Day) has a secret lust for married Ally.