Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/Filmmaking 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography

The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Adams described the Zone System as "[...] not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939–40."

The technique is based on the late 19th century sensitometry studies of Hurter and Driffield. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history 🔗 Military history/Canadian military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

The origins of the FVEY can be traced back to the post–World War II period, when the Atlantic Charter was issued by the Allies to lay out their goals for a post-war world. During the course of the Cold War, the ECHELON surveillance system was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor billions of private communications worldwide.

In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress. As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.

In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in history.

Since processed intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and often involves defence intelligence as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). The following table provides an overview of most of the FVEY agencies involved in such forms of data sharing.

A light-on-dark color scheme (dark mode, night mode) is available to Wikipedia's smartphone apps and website (for users using the default skins) since July 2024.

In addition to this there is a gadget on English Wikipedia, and various volunteer-written CSS files that allow customization for logged-in users.

🔗 Computing

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are "self-replicating programs", "self-reproducing programs", and "self-copying programs".

A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language.

The name "quine" was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his popular science book Gödel, Escher, Bach, in honor of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who made an extensive study of indirect self-reference, and in particular for the following paradox-producing expression, known as Quine's paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

🔗 Novels

Celine's Laws are a series of three laws regarding government and social interaction attributed to the fictional character Hagbard Celine from Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy. Celine, a gentleman anarchist, serves as a mouthpiece for Wilson's libertarian, anarchist and sometimes completely uncategorizable ideas about the nature of humanity. Celine's Laws are outlined in the trilogy by a manifesto titled Never Whistle While You're Pissing. Wilson later goes on to elaborate on the laws in his nonfiction book, Prometheus Rising, as being inherent consequences of average human psychology.

A piece entitled Celine's Laws appears in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminati Papers, which features articles written by Wilson under the guise of many of his characters from The Illuminatus! Trilogy alongside interviews with the author himself. One article pulls from another, as well as from the original Trilogy.

Celine, in his manifesto, recognizes these are generalities, but also says that their basic principles can be used to find the source of every great decline and fall of nations, and goes on to claim they are as universal as Newton's Laws in applying to everything.

🔗 Economics

The parable of the broken window was introduced by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay "That Which We See and That Which We Do Not See" ("Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas") to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.

The parable seeks to show how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are unseen or ignored. The belief that destruction is good for the economy is consequently known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Military history/Early Modern warfare 🔗 Military history/Spanish military history 🔗 Mesoamerica 🔗 Spain 🔗 Military history/European military history

Gonzalo Guerrero (also known as Gonzalo Marinero, Gonzalo de Aroca and Gonzalo de Aroza) was a sailor from Palos, Spain who was shipwrecked along the Yucatán Peninsula and was taken as a slave by the local Maya. Earning his freedom, Guerrero became a respected warrior under a Maya lord and raised three of the first mestizo children in Mexico and one of the first mestizo children in the Americas, alongside Miguel Díez de Aux and the children of Caramuru and João Ramalho in Brazil. Little is known of his early life.

Below is a mostly comprehensive gallery of all images — illustrations, diagrams and animations — that I have created for Wikipedia over the years, some of which have been selected as featured pictures, or even picture of the day. As you'll probably notice, they're mostly related to physics and mathematics, which are my main areas of interest.

If you have any comments, requests, suggestions or corrections, feel free to drop me a message on my talk page. But please, before making a suggestion, first take a look and see what sort of stuff I can do. Due to time, knowledge and complexity constraints, I cannot guarantee I'll be able to make a good illustration of any topic.

You can also follow me on tumblr for WIPs, current and failed projects and other creations.

If you appreciate my work, consider making a donation.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Military history/European military history

Anti-tank dogs (Russian: собаки-истребители танков sobaki-istrebiteli tankov or противотанковые собаки protivotankovye sobaki; German: Panzerabwehrhunde or Hundeminen, "dog-mines") were dogs taught to carry explosives to tanks, armored vehicles and other military targets. They were intensively trained by the Soviet and Russian military forces between 1930 and 1996, and used from 1941 to 1943, against German tanks in World War II. Initially dogs were trained to leave a timer-detonated bomb and retreat, but this routine was replaced by an impact-detonation procedure which killed the dog in the process. The U.S. military started training anti-tank dogs in 1943 in the same way the Russians used them, but this training exposed several problems and the program was discontinued.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

In computer programming, a poltergeist (or gypsy wagon) is a short-lived, typically stateless object used to perform initialization or to invoke methods in another, more permanent class. It is considered an anti-pattern. The original definition is by Michael Akroyd 1996 - Object World West Conference:

"As a gypsy wagon or a poltergeist appears and disappears mysteriously, so does this short lived object. As a consequence the code is more difficult to maintain and there is unnecessary resource waste. The typical cause for this anti-pattern is poor object design."

A poltergeist can often be identified by its name; they are often called "manager_", "controller_", "supervisor", "start_process", etc.

Sometimes, poltergeist classes are created because the programmer anticipated the need for a more complex architecture. For example, a poltergeist arises if the same method acts as both the client and invoker in a command pattern, and the programmer anticipates separating the two phases. However, this more complex architecture may actually never materialize.

Poltergeists should not be confused with long-lived, state-bearing objects of a pattern such as model–view–controller, or tier-separating patterns such as business-delegate.

To remove a poltergeist, delete the class and insert its functionality in the invoked class, possibly by inheritance or as a mixin.