Diwali, popularly known as the festival of lights, is an important five-day festival in Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, occurring between mid-October and mid-November. During Diwali, lights illuminate every corner of India and the scent of incense sticks hangs in the air, mingled with the sounds of firecrackers, joy, togetherness and hope.

The celebration commemorates the return of Lord Rama from his fourteen-year long exile, and his vanquishing of the demon king Ravana. In joyous celebration of the return of their king, the people of Ayodhya, the Capital of Rama, illuminated the kingdom with earthen oil lamps and burst firecrackers.

While the Diwali is popularly known as the festival of lights, the most significant spiritual meaning is the awareness of inner light. The celebration refers to the light of higher knowledge dispelling all ignorance, the ignorance that masks one’s true nature.

In each legend, myth and story of Diwali lies the significance of the victory of good over evil and the lights that illuminate our homes and hearts. It is the light that empowers us to commit ourselves to good deeds; that which brings us closer to divinity.

Spanish moss is a bromeliad with thin, thread-like leaves that reach up to 10 feet in length. It ranges from the southeastern United States across the West Indies, Central America and as far south as Chile and northern Argentina. It is the most well known bromeliad in the world after the pineapple.

Found extensively in tropical trees, Spanish moss foliage prospers in dappled sunlight under tree leaves. Although tolerant of occasional exposure to heat and sun, the foliage is lush and succulent especially when humidity is high.

It is commonly associated with the live oak and bald cypress trees in the American South. If humidity is high year round, Spanish moss can germinate and clasp onto rock surfaces and cliffs. This ability to grow from any coarse surface manifests itself in human settlements, where the bromeliad grows on roof eaves, fences and telephone lines.

Spanish moss has been used for various purposes, including building insulation, mulch, packing material, mattress stuffing, and fiber. In 1939 over 10,000 tons of processed Spanish moss was produced. It is still collected today in smaller quantities for use in arts and crafts, or for beddings for flower gardens.

The American White Ibis is a species of wading bird which occurs from the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States south through most of the New World tropics. It occurs in marshy wetlands and pools near the coast. It also occurs on mowed grass, lawns, and has become common in some city parks, where it can be found feeding alone or with other Ibis.

This ibis feeds by probing with its long, downcurved beak. Its diet consists of various fish, frogs and other water creatures, as well as insects and small reptiles. They have all-white plumage except for black wingtips visible in flight and reddish bills and legs. The red bill blends into the face of breeding birds; non-breeding birds show a pink to red face.

Like the other species of ibis, the White Ibis flies with neck and legs outstretched, often in long, loose lines. When feeding, the birds often give a soft, grunting croo, croo, croo as they forage. The American White Ibis is the mascot of The University of Miami, located in Coral Gables, Florida.

In typography, rivers are visually unattractive gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text, due to an accidental alignment of spaces. They can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts.

Rivers occur due to a combination of whether the type appears broad or skinny, the values assigned to the widths of various characters, and the degree of control over character spacing and word spacing. Broader typefaces are more prone to exhibit rivers, as are the less sophisticated typesetting applications that offer little control over spacing.

Typographers can test for rivers by turning a proof sheet upside down to examine the text. From this perspective, the eye is less likely to recognize words and the type can be viewed more readily as an overall pattern.

A related but less frequently used term is lake, which refers to a cluster of adjacent or intertwined rivers that create a lighter area within a block of type. Typesetters today are less likely to make adjustments to conceal rivers and lakes than they would using the more traditional methods.

Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the late 19th century characterized by effects of light in landscapes through the use of aerial perspective and concealing visible brushstrokes. Luminist landscapes emphasize tranquility and often depict calm, reflective water and a soft, hazy sky.

The term luminism was introduced by 20th century art historians to describe a painting style that developed as an offshoot of the Hudson River school. The artists who painted in this style did not refer to their own work as luminism, nor did they articulate any common painting philosophy outside of the guiding principles of the Hudson River school.

Luminism shares an emphasis on the effects of light with impressionism. However, the two styles are markedly different. Luminism is characterized by attention to detail and the hiding of brushstrokes, while impressionism is characterized by lack of detail and an emphasis on brushstrokes. Luminism preceded impressionism, and the artists who painted in a luminist style were in no way influenced by impressionism.

In photography, Bokeh is an aesthetic quality of blur. It occurs in parts of a scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

The term Bokeh has appeared in photography books since at least 1998. The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (the “blur quality”).

The shape of the camera aperture has an influence on the subjective quality of Bokeh. When a lens is stopped down to something other than its maximum aperture size, out-of-focus points are blurred into the polygonal shape of the aperture rather than perfect circles. Some lenses have aperture blades with curved edges to make the aperture more closely approximate a circle rather than a polygon.

An alternative mechanical mechanism has been proposed for generating Bokeh in small aperture cameras such as compacts or cellphone cameras, called image destabilisation, in which both the lens and sensor are moved in order to maintain focus at one focal plane, while defocusing nearby ones. This effect currently generates blur in only one axis.

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.

It has been reported that the United States uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries. Others speculate that some of these stations may be related to illegal drug smuggling operations.

According to the notes of The Conet Project, numbers stations have been reported since World War I. They appear and disappear over time, although some follow regular schedules, and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War.

Numbers stations are often given nicknames by enthusiasts, often reflecting some distinctive element of the station such as their interval signal. For example, the “Lincolnshire Poacher” played the first two bars of the folk song “The Lincolnshire Poacher” before each string of numbers. “Magnetic Fields” plays music from French electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre before and after each set of numbers.

Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.

William Willett independently conceived daylight saving time in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He independently proposed daylight saving time in 1907 and advocated it tirelessly.

The practice is controversial. Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun. Although an early goal of daylight saving time was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly and research about how daylight saving time currently affects energy use is limited and often contradictory.

Daylight saving time’s occasional clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Changing clocks and daylight saving time has a direct economic cost, entailing extra work to support remote meetings, computer applications and corrections to errors.

It has been argued that clock shifts correlate with decreased economic efficiency, and that in 2000 the daylight-saving effect implied an estimated one-day loss of $31 billion on U.S. stock exchanges, althought the results have been disputed. The 2007 North American daylight saving time cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.