title: Induction cooking

text: For frying, a pan with a base that is a good heat conductor is needed to spread the heat quickly and evenly. The sole of the pan will be either a steel plate pressed into the aluminum, or a layer of stainless steel over the aluminum. The high thermal conductivity of aluminum pans makes the temperature more uniform across the pan. Stainless frying pans with an aluminum base will not have the same temperature at their sides as an aluminum sided pan will have. Cast iron frying pans work well with induction cooking surfaces but the material is not as good a thermal conductor as aluminum.


title: Induction cooking

text: When boiling water, the circulating water spreads the heat and prevents hot spots. For products such as sauces, it is important that at least the base of the pan incorporates a good heat conducting material to spread the heat evenly. For delicate products such as thick sauces, a pan with aluminum throughout is better, since the heat flows up the sides through the aluminum, allowing the cook to heat the sauce rapidly but evenly.


title: Induction cooking

text: First patents date from the early 1900s. Demonstration stoves were shown by the Frigidaire division of General Motors in the mid-1950s on a touring GM showcase in North America. The induction cooker was shown heating a pot of water with a newspaper placed between the stove and the pot, to demonstrate the convenience and safety. This unit, however, was never put into production.


title: Induction cooking

text: Modern implementation in the USA dates from the early 1970s, with work done at the Research & Development Center of Westinghouse Electric Corporation at Churchill Borough, near Pittsburgh. That work was first put on public display at the 1971 National Association of Home Builders convention in Houston, Texas, as part of the Westinghouse Consumer Products Division display. The stand-alone single-burner range was named the Cool Top Induction Range. It used paralleled Delco Electronics transistors developed for automotive electronic ignition systems to drive the 25 kHz current.


title: Induction cooking

text: Westinghouse decided to make a few hundred production units to develop the market. Those were named Cool Top 2 (CT2) Induction ranges. The development work was done at the same R&D location by a team led by Bill Moreland and Terry Malarkey. The ranges were priced at $1,500 ($8,260 in 2017 dollars), including a set of high quality cookware made of Quadraply, a new laminate of stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum and another layer of stainless steel (outside to inside).


title: Induction cooking

text: Production took place in 1973 through to 1975 and stopped, coincidentally, with the sale of Westinghouse Consumer Products Division to White Consolidated Industries Inc.


title: Induction cooking

text: CT2 had four "burners" of about 1,600 watts each, measured by calorimetry. The range top was a Pyroceram ceramic sheet surrounded by a stainless-steel bezel, upon which four magnetic sliders adjusted four corresponding potentiometers set below. That design, using no through-holes, made the range impervious to spills. The electronics section was made of four identical modules which were cooled by a single quiet, low-speed, high-torque fan.


title: Induction cooking

text: In each of the electronics modules, the 240 V, 60 Hz domestic line power was converted to between 20 V to 200 V of continuously variable DC by a phase-controlled rectifier. That DC power was in turn converted to 27 kHz 30 A (peak) AC by two arrays of six paralleled Motorola automotive-ignition transistors in a half-bridge configuration driving a series-resonant LC oscillator, of which the inductor component was the induction-heating coil and its load, the cooking pan. The circuit design, largely by Ray Mackenzie, successfully dealt with certain bothersome overload problems.


title: Induction cooking

text: Control electronics included functions such as protection against over-heated cook-pans and overloads. Provision was made to reduce radiated electrical and magnetic fields. There was also magnetic pan detection.


title: Induction cooking

text: CT2 was UL Listed and received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval, both firsts. Numerous patents were also issued. CT2 won several awards, including Industrial Research Magazine's IR-100 1972 best-product award and a citation from the United States Steel Association. Raymond Baxter demonstrated the CT2 on the BBC series "Tomorrow's World". He showed how the CT2 could cook through a slab of ice.


title: Induction cooking

text: Sears Kenmore sold a free-standing oven/stove with four induction-cooking surfaces in the mid-1980s (Model Number 103.9647910). The unit also featured a self-cleaning oven, solid-state kitchen timer and capacitive-touch control buttons (advanced for its time). The units were more expensive than standard cooking surfaces.


title: Induction cooking

text: In 2009 Panasonic developed an all-metal induction cooker that used frequencies up to 120 kHz, three to five times higher than other cooktops, to work with non-ferrous metal cookware.


title: Induction cooking

text: The European induction cooking market for hotels, restaurants and other caterers is primarily satisfied by smaller specialist commercial induction catering equipment manufacturers.


title: Induction cooking

text: Taiwanese and Japanese electronics companies are the dominant players in induction cooking for East Asia. After aggressive promotions by utilities in HK, many local brands emerged. Their power and ratings are high, more than 2,800 watts. Some of these companies have also started marketing in the West. However, the product range sold in Western markets is a subset of that in their domestic market; some Japanese electronics manufacturers only sell domestically.


title: Induction cooking

text: In the United States, as of early 2013 there are over five dozen brands of induction-cooking equipment available, including both built-in and countertop residential equipment and commercial-grade equipment. Even restricting to built-in residential-use units, there are over two dozen brands being sold; residential countertop units add another two-dozen-plus brands to the count.


title: Induction cooking

text: The National Association of Home Builders in 2012 estimated that, in the United States, induction cooktops held only 4% of sales, compared to gas and other electric cooktops. The global induction cooktops market was estimated at $9.16 billion in value during 2015 and is set to grow to $13.53 billion by 2022.


title: Induction cooking

text: In April 2010, "The New York Times" reported that "In an independent survey [in 2009] by the market research company Mintel of 2,000 Internet users who own appliances, only 5 percent of respondents said they had an induction range or cooktop. Still, 22 percent of the people Mintel surveyed in connection to their study [in 2009] said their next range or cooktop would be induction."


title: Pantone

text: Pantone LLC (stylized as PANTONE) is a limited liability company headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey. The company is best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, notably graphic design, fashion design, product design, printing and manufacturing and supporting the management of color from design to production, in physical and digital formats, among coated and uncoated materials, cotton, polyester, nylon and plastics.


title: Pantone

text: X-Rite, a supplier of color measurement instruments and software, purchased Pantone for US$180 million in October 2007, and was itself acquired by Danaher Corporation in 2012.


title: Pantone

text: Pantone began in New Jersey in the 1950s as the commercial printing company of brothers Mervin and Jesse Levine, M & J Levine Advertising. In 1956, its founders, both advertising executives, hired recent Hofstra University graduate Lawrence Herbert as a part-time employee. Herbert used his chemistry knowledge to systematize and simplify the company's stock of pigments and production of colored inks; by 1962, Herbert was running the ink and printing division at a profit, while the commercial-display division was US$50,000 in debt; he subsequently purchased the company's technological assets from the Levine Brothers for US$50,000 () and renamed them "Pantone".


title: Pantone

text: The company's primary products include the Pantone Guides, which consist of a large number of small (approximately 6×2 inches or 15×5 cm) thin cardboard sheets, printed on one side with a series of related color swatches and then bound into a small "fan deck". For instance, a particular "page" might contain a number of yellows of varying tints.


title: Pantone

text: The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to "color match" specific colors when a design enters production stage, regardless of the equipment used to produce the color. This system has been widely adopted by graphic designers and reproduction and printing houses. Pantone recommends that PMS Color Guides be purchased annually, as their inks become yellowish over time. Color variance also occurs within editions based on the paper stock used (coated, matte or uncoated), while interedition color variance occurs when there are changes to the specific paper stock used.


title: Pantone

text: The Pantone Color Matching System is largely a standardized color reproduction system, as of 2019 it has 2161 colors. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another.


title: Pantone

text: One such use is standardizing colors in the CMYK process. The CMYK process is a method of printing color by using four inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. A majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process, and there is a special subset of Pantone colors that can be reproduced using CMYK. Those that are possible to simulate through the CMYK process are labeled as such within the company's guides.


title: Pantone

text: However, about 30% of the Pantone system's 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts, called base colors. Those 1114 colors included 387 colors with numbers 100 to 487 from 1975 and some lighter colors from 600 to 732 in 1991. The original 4 digit colors introduced in 1987 were remapped into 3 digits.


title: Pantone

text: The Pantone system also later allowed for many special colors to be produced, such as metallics, fluorescents (neons) and pastels. There are 56 fluorescents from 801 to 814 (first 7 here are base colors, so called Dayglo) and from 901 to 942. Packaging metallics (previously premium metallics) are placed from 10101 to 10454 (54 of those added later, 354 altogether, 2 base colors Silver 10077 and Rose Gold 10412), while normal metallics are placed from 871 to 877 (first 7 here are base colors) and from 8001 to 8965. Pastels are from 9140 to 9163 with base colors being 0131, 0331, 0521, 0631, 0821, 0921 and 0961. While most of the Pantone system colors are beyond the printed CMYK gamut, it was only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen-based colors. Screen-based colors use the RGB color model—red, green, blue—system to create various colors. A lot of colors are outside sRGB. The (discontinued) Goe system has RGB, LAB, SPD values with each color and has 10 base colors while only 4 of those new: Bright Red, Pink, Medium Purple and Dark Blue. Other 6 were in the system before: Yellow 012, Orange 021, Rubine Red, Green, Process Blue and Black that in Goe were named Medium Yellow, Bright Orange, Strong Red, Bright Green, Medium Blue and Neutral Black. (PMS has 8 more basic base colors, some not monopigmented: Yellow 010, Red 032, Warm Red, Rhodamine Red, Purple, Violet, Reflex Blue, Blue 072.)


title: Pantone

text: Pantone colors are described by their allocated number (typically referred to as, for example, "PMS 130"). PMS colors are almost always used in branding and have even found their way into government legislation and military standards (to describe the colors of flags and seals). In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a petition (reference PE512) to refer to the blue in the Scottish flag as "Pantone 300". Countries such as Canada and South Korea and organizations such as the FIA have also chosen to refer to specific Pantone colors to use when producing flags. US states including Texas have set legislated PMS colors of their flags.


title: Pantone

text: On September 5, 2007, Pantone introduced the Goe System. Goe consisted of 2058 new colors in a new matching and numbering system. In addition to the standard swatch books (now called the GoeGuide), the new system also included adhesive-backed GoeSticks, interactive software, tools, and an online community where users were able to share color swatches and information.


title: Pantone

text: The Goe system was streamlined to use fewer base colors (ten, plus clear coating for reflections, only 4 base colors were new) and accommodate many technical challenges in reproducing colors on a press.


title: Pantone

text: The Pantone Goe system was discontinued in November 2013, but 4 new base colors were added into PMS and some of new colors too, though those 4 base colors are harder to purchase.


title: Pantone

text: In mid-2006 Pantone, partnering with Vermont-based Fine Paints of Europe, introduced a new line of interior and exterior paints. The color palette uses Pantone's color research and trending and has more than 3,000 colors.


title: Pantone

text: In November 2015, Pantone partnered with Redland London to create a collection of bags inspired from Pantone's authority on color.


title: Pantone

text: Pantone also produced Hexachrome, a patented six-color printing system. In addition to custom CMYK inks, Hexachrome added orange and green inks to expand the color gamut, for better color reproduction. It was therefore also known as a CMYKOG process. Hexachrome was discontinued by Pantone in 2008 when Adobe Systems stopped supporting their HexWare plugin software. In 2015 7-color printing system was developed, adding Violet in CMYKOGV, that can cover 90% of 1114 spot colors, while CMYK only about 60%. 1729 new colors were added, marked XGC (extended gamut coated), some colors do not have a number, like Process Blue XGC or Purple XGC. Base colors of OGV were new mono-pigment inks, pigments PO34, PG7 and PV23 were used respectively with 58°, 180° and 311° hue angles.


title: Pantone

text: Pantone Color Manager allows for users of the Adobe Creative Suite and Creative Cloud as well as other software to import the most up to date information inclusive of L*a*b* numbers as well as CMYK and sRGB representations of all the various palettes (including chromatic adaptation under default D50 or D65 with 2 degree or 10 degree observer or even any ICC profile). L*a*b* numbers allow for the most accurate representation of color in a device-independent manner, but ideally X-rite InkFormulation is needed to emulate substrates and all 14 base colors of main Pantone system or 7 colors of CMYKOGV. Support is being phased out in favour of Pantone Connect plugin from Adobe Exchange of Creative Cloud. Adobe Illustrator removed five acb files (Adobe Color Books) of Pantone+ from 2023 version, since Pantone+ was deprecated by Pantone anyway. Photoshop 2023 and Acrobat still work.


title: Pantone

text: Since 2000, the Pantone Color Institute has declared a particular color "Color of the Year". Twice a year the company hosts, in a European capital, a secret meeting of representatives from various nations' color standards groups. After two days of presentations and debate, they choose a color for the following year; for example, the color for summer 2013 was chosen in London in the spring of 2012.


title: Pantone

text: The selected color purportedly connects with the zeitgeist; for example, the press release declaring Honeysuckle the color of 2011 said "In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues." The results of the meeting are published in "Pantone View", which fashion designers, florists, and many other consumer-oriented companies purchase to help guide their designs and planning for future products. In 2016 and 2021, Pantone chose two colors for Color of the Year.


title: Pantone

text: In 2012, the color of the year, Tangerine Tango, was used to create a makeup line, in partnership with Sephora. The product line, named Sephora + Pantone Universe collection, features Tangerine Tango–embellished false lashes, nail lacquers, cream, glitters, and high-pigment lip glosses. 2013 Emerald color was reported to be out of sRGB gamut. Also new Very Peri color of 2022 is present in TCX (dyed cotton reference) and TPG (Textile Paper – “Green”) form, here TCX for sRGB hex values are mentioned.


title: Pantone

text: The person behind Pantone's Color of the Year, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute Leatrice Eiseman, explained in an interview how 2014's Color of the Year, Radiant Orchid, was chosen:


title: Pantone

text: Pantone has said that color "has always been an integral part of how a culture expresses the attitudes and emotions of the times."


title: Pantone

text: Pantone asserts that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed. This is frequently held as a reason Pantone colors cannot be supported in open-source software and are not often found in low-cost proprietary software. Pantone has been accused of "being intentionally unclear" about its exact legal claims, but it is acknowledged that "the simplest claim would be trademark misappropriation or dilution towards someone who produced a color palette marketed as compatible with Pantone's".


title: Pantone

text: By contrast, intellectual property scholar Aaron Perzanowski claims that Pantone has no intellectual property rights over individual colors or color libraries.


title: Pantone

text: In 2022, a dispute between Pantone and Adobe resulted in the removal of Pantone color coordinates from Photoshop and Adobe's other design software, causing colors in graphic artists' digital documents to be replaced with black unless artists paid Pantone a separate $15 monthly subscription fee. Artists accused Adobe and Pantone of holding their work hostage, and UK artist Stuart Semple responded by releasing Freetone, a freeware clone of Pantone's color lists for use with Adobe software.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl (from Black Speech , "ring", and , "wraith, spirit"), introduced as Black Riders and also called Ringwraiths, Dark Riders, the Nine Riders, or simply the Nine, are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. They were nine Men who had succumbed to Sauron's power through wearing Rings of Power, which gave them immortality but reduced them to invisible wraiths, servants bound to the power of the One Ring and completely under Sauron's control.


title: Nazgûl

text: "The Lord of the Rings" calls them Sauron's "most terrible servants". Their leader, known as the Lord of the Nazgûl or the Witch-king of Angmar, had once been the King of Angmar in the north of Eriador. At the end of the Third Age, their main stronghold was the city of Minas Morgul at the entrance to Sauron's realm, Mordor. They dress entirely in black. In their early forays, they ride on black horses; later they ride flying monsters, which Tolkien described as "pterodactylic". Their main weapon is terror, though in their pursuit of the Ring-bearer Frodo, their leader uses a Morgul-knife which would reduce its victim to a wraith, and they carry ordinary swords. In his final battle, the Lord of the Nazgûl attacks Éowyn with a mace. The hobbit Merry stabs him with an ancient enchanted Númenórean blade, allowing Éowyn to kill him with her sword.


title: Nazgûl

text: Commentators have written that the Nazgûl serve on the ordinary level of story as dangerous opponents; at the romantic level as the enemies of the heroic protagonists; and at the mythic level, where the Lord of the Nazgûl calls himself Death and bursts the gates of Minas Tirith with magical spells. The prophecy that the Lord of the Nazgûl would not die by the hand of man echoes that made of Macbeth in Shakespeare's play.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl appear in numerous adaptations of Tolkien's writings, including animated and live-action films and computer games. Species of several different kinds of animal, including an ant, a crustacean, and a parasitoid wasp, have been named after them.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl or Ringwraiths (Quenya plural: "Úlairi") first appeared in the Second Age, according to the "Akallabêth" in "The Silmarillion". The Dark Lord Sauron gave nine of the Rings of Power to powerful mortal men, including "it is said" three lords of the once-powerful island realm of Númenor, along with kings of countries in Middle-earth.


title: Nazgûl

text: "The Silmarillion" states in "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" that the rings enslaved their bearers to the power of Sauron's Ring, into which he had put much of his own power. The corrupting effect of the rings extended the bearers' earthly lives far beyond their normal lifespans.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl had a sharp sense of smell. "The Lord of the Rings" states that their sight worked differently, too: "They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us: then they are most to be feared." Their chief weapon was terror; it was so powerful that Sauron faced one disadvantage when using them: they could not easily travel in secret. Tolkien added, in "Unfinished Tales", that the terror they spread was greater when they were unclad and invisible; and when they were gathered together.


title: Nazgûl

text: Few of the Nazgûl are named or identified individually in Tolkien's works. Their chief, also known as the Lord of the Nazgûl and the Black Captain, appears as the Witch-king of Angmar during the Third Age, instrumental in the destruction of the North-kingdom of Arnor. In "Unfinished Tales", his second-in-command is named as Khamûl, the "Black Easterling" or the "Shadow of the East". Three of the Nazgûl were great Númenórean lords; in his notes for translators, Tolkien speculated that the Witch-king of Angmar, ruler of a northern kingdom with its capital at Carn Dûm, was of Númenórean origin.


title: Nazgûl

text: The nine, as Nazgûl, were soon established as Sauron's principal servants. They were dispersed after the first overthrow of Sauron late in the Second Age at the hands of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, but their survival was assured by the power of the One Ring.


title: Nazgûl

text: The appendices to "The Lord of the Rings" state that the Nazgûl re-emerged over a thousand years later in the Third Age, when the Lord of the Nazgûl led Sauron's forces against the successor kingdoms of Arnor: Rhudaur, Cardolan, and Arthedain. He effectively destroyed all of these, but was eventually defeated by the Elf-lord Glorfindel, who put him to flight, and made the prophecy that "not by the hand of man will he fall". He escaped, and returned to Mordor. There, he gathered the other Nazgûl in preparation for the return of Sauron to that realm.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl besieged Minas Ithil, a fortress located in a valley in the Ephel Duath once belonging to the kingdom of Gondor, and, after two years, captured it and acquired its "palantír" for Sauron. The city thereafter became Minas Morgul, the stronghold of the Nazgûl, and the valley was henceforth known as Morgul Vale (Imlad Morgul). Sauron returned from Dol Guldur in Mirkwood to Mordor late in the Third Age and declared himself openly. He sent two or three of the Nazgûl to garrison Dol Guldur.


title: Nazgûl

text: By the time of the main narrative of "The Lord of the Rings", Sauron had already learned from Gollum that a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins of the Shire, had acquired the One Ring. Sauron entrusted its recovery to the Nazgûl. They reappeared "west of the River", riding black horses that were bred or trained in Mordor to endure their terror. They learned that the Ring had passed to Bilbo's heir, Frodo, and hunted him and his companions across the Shire; the hobbits heard what seemed to be snuffling, and sometimes saw them crawling or crouching. The hobbits escaped, via Tom Bombadil's realm of the Old Forest where they were not pursued, to Bree. A Ranger of the North, Aragorn, arrived ahead of them and for some days led the hobbits on paths not closely followed by the Ringwraiths.


title: Nazgûl

text: Five of the Nazgûl cornered Frodo and his company at Weathertop, where the Witch-king stabbed Frodo in the shoulder with the Morgul-knife, breaking off a piece of it in the Hobbit's flesh. During their assault, they mentally commanded Frodo to put on the One Ring; while wearing it, he saw them as pale figures robed in white, with "haggard hands", helmets and swords. The Witch-king was taller than the others, with "long and gleaming" hair and a crown on his helmet.


title: Nazgûl

text: When all Nine were swept away by the waters of the river Bruinen, their horses were drowned, and the Ringwraiths were forced to return to Mordor to regroup.


title: Nazgûl

text: The nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring left Rivendell as the "Nine Walkers", in opposition to the Nazgûl, the "Nine Riders". The latter reappeared mounted on hideous flying beasts.


title: Nazgûl

text: During the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Lord of the Nazgûl used magic, including Grond, a battering-ram engraved with evil spells, to break the gates of Minas Tirith. He was faced by Éowyn, a noblewoman of Rohan; and not far away, Merry, a hobbit of the Fellowship. Éowyn boldly called the Nazgûl a "dwimmerlaik", telling him to go if he was not deathless. He cast back his hood to reveal a crown, but the head that wore it was invisible. Merry's surreptitious stroke with an enchanted Barrow-blade brought the Nazgûl to his knees, allowing Éowyn, the niece of Théoden, to drive her sword between his crown and mantle. Thus was the Witch-king destroyed by a woman and a Hobbit, fulfilling Glorfindel's prophecy. Both weapons that pierced him disintegrated, and both assailants were stricken with the Black Breath.


title: Nazgûl

text: After the fall of the Lord of the Nazgûl, command of Mordor's army in the field fell to Gothmog, the "lieutenant of Morgul", of unspecified race.


title: Nazgûl

text: The remaining eight Ringwraiths attacked the Army of the West during the Battle of the Morannon. When Frodo claimed the Ring for his own in Mount Doom, Sauron, finally realizing his peril, ordered the remaining eight Nazgûl to fly to intercept him. They arrived too late: Gollum seized the Ring and fell into the Cracks of Doom, destroying the Ring. That ended Sauron's power and everything he had brought into being using it, including the Nazgûl.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl's flying steeds are given various descriptions but no name. Beregond calls them "Hell Hawks". Tolkien describes them as "fell beasts", though he also applies the adjective "fell" ("fierce, cruel") to other creatures throughout "The Lord of the Rings" – even at one point to the wizard Gandalf. In a letter, he calls the winged mounts "Nazgûl-birds". In the absence of a proper name, derivative works sometimes press "fellbeast" or "fell-beast" into service.


title: Nazgûl

text: In the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where the Lord of the Nazgûl rode one of the flying beasts against King Théoden of Rohan, his mount is described as:


title: Nazgûl

text: It is said to attack with "beak and claw". Tolkien wrote that he "did not intend the steed of the Witch-king to be what is now called a 'pterodactyl'", while acknowledging "obviously it is "pterodactylic"" and owed much to the "new ... mythology" [of the "Prehistoric"], and might even be "a last survivor of older geological eras."


title: Nazgûl

text: The medievalist Marjorie Burns compares the fell beast to the "Poetic Edda"s flying steed Sleipnir, "Odin's eight-legged otherworldly horse". She writes that whereas Gandalf's horse Shadowfax resembles Sleipnir in his miraculous speed and in almost seeming to fly, the Nazgûl's mount actually flies but is a "negative image" of Odin's steed; and, she notes, both Odin and the Nazgûl can cause blindness.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the Lord of the Nazgûl hovers close to being an abstraction, "a vast menace of despair ... a huge shadow", actually calling himself Death: "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it?" The scene forms, too, a picture of the "unexistence of evil", based on the Boethian philosophy that God is all-powerful, so evil is not the equal and opposite of good, but simply its absence: he forms "a huge shadow".


title: Nazgûl

text: The Episcopal priest and theologian Fleming Rutledge writes that whereas the "pale king", the invisible Witch-king of Angmar, is striving to kill Frodo, the real king, Aragorn, who has been out of sight, in disguise as a Ranger, is doing all he can to heal him: the two kings are opposites. She writes also that while the enemy visible to Gondor are the Men of Harad and the Easterlings, the real enemy is personified by the Witch-king.


title: Nazgûl

text: Julaire Andelin, in "The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia", writes that prophecy in Middle-earth depended on characters' understanding of the Music of the Ainur, the divine plan for Arda, and was often ambiguous. Thus, Glorfindel's prophecy "not by the hand of man will [the Lord of the Nazgûl] fall" did not lead the Lord of the Nazgûl to suppose that he would die at the hands of a woman and a hobbit.


title: Nazgûl

text: Shippey states that the prophecy, and the Witch-king's surprise at finding Dernhelm to be a woman, parallel the witches' statement to Macbeth that he may "laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" (Act 4, scene 1), and Macbeth's shock at learning that Macduff "was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd" (as Macduff was born by Caesarean section: Act 5, scene 8). Thus, Shippey notes, despite Tolkien's stated dislike of Shakespeare's treatment of myth, he read "Macbeth" closely.


title: Nazgûl

text: Tolkien began writing "The Lord of the Rings" with no conception of Black Riders at all. The horseman in dark clothes in the early chapter "Three is Company" was originally Gandalf; in 1938, Tolkien called the figure's transformation into a Black Rider "an unpremeditated turn". Frodo's ring, too, was simply a magic ring conferring invisibility, both in "The Hobbit" and early drafts of "The Lord of the Rings", with no link to Sauron. However, Tolkien was at the time starting to consider the true nature of the Ring, and the idea that it had been made by the Necromancer, and drew itself or its bearer back to him. The Black Riders became Ringwraiths when the hobbit, at that time called Bingo rather than Frodo, discussed the Riders with the Elf Gildor, later in the same chapter. Over the next three years, Tolkien gradually developed the connections between the Nazgûl, the One Ring, Sauron, and all the other Rings of Power. The pieces finally all came together when Tolkien wrote "The Mirror of Galadriel", some hundreds of pages later, around the autumn of 1941.


title: Nazgûl

text: Shippey writes that the Nazgûl function at different stylistic levels or modes (as categorised by Northrop Frye in his "Anatomy of Criticism") in the story. At one level, they serve simply as story elements, dangerous opponents. But, Shippey notes, the level rises from the romantic, with heroes taking on the black riders, to the mythic, giving as example the assault of Minas Tirith. The leader of the Nazgûl directs the attack on the Great Gate; he bursts the gate using both the battering-ram Grond, written with "spells of ruin", and with "words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone".


title: Nazgûl

text: Despite his shadowiness and invisibility, Shippey writes, the Nazgûl on the Pelennor Fields also comes as close as he ever does to seeming human, having human form inside his black robes, carrying a sword, and laughing to reveal his power when he throws back his hood, revealing a king's crown on his invisible head.


title: Nazgûl

text: Yvette Kisor, a scholar of literature, writes that while the Ringwraiths and others (like Frodo) who wear Rings of Power become invisible, they do not lose any of their corporeality, being present as physical bodies. They require, she writes, physical steeds to carry them about, and they can wield swords. She notes that only a person in a body can wield the One Ring, so the invisibility is just "a trick of sight". When Frodo, wearing the Ring, saw the Nazgûl in the "twilight world", they appeared solid, not shadowy. He also saw Glorfindel in that world, as a figure of white flame; and Gandalf explains later that the Ringwraiths were "dismayed" to see "an Elf-lord revealed in his wrath". Frodo is in danger of "fading" permanently into invisibility and the twilight world, as the Ringwraiths have done, living "in another mode of reality". She writes, too, that Merry's sword, with the special power to sever the Witch-king's "undead flesh" and in particular to overcome the "spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will", has in fact to cut through real, but invisible, sinews and flesh.


title: Nazgûl

text: Steve Walker, a Tolkien scholar, writes that the story gives the Ringwraiths credibility through a "gradual incarnation of bodiless presence". Little by little, in his view, Tolkien increases the reader's insight into their nature, starting with Black Riders who are "spies more human than diabolical", rather than developing their character. Walker sees this as appropriate in psychological terms: the Nazgûl's main weapons are psychological, namely fear and despair. He writes that the progressive revelation of their capabilities, and their "escalation of steeds" from horses to fell beasts, builds up in the reader's mind an "increasingly infernal vision".


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl are featured in adaptations of "The Lord of the Rings" on radio, film, and stage. In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film version of "The Lord of the Rings", the Nazgûl "shamble and limp like zombies". They hack and slash the Hobbits' beds at "The Prancing Pony" inn, whereas Tolkien does not identify the assailants.


title: Nazgûl

text: In the Rankin-Bass adaptation of "The Return of the King", the Nazgûl are robed skeletons with white hair. They ride winged horses, although the Witch-king rides a creature more in line with the book when he confronts Éowyn. The 1981 BBC Radio serial of "The Lord of the Rings" has the Nazgûl chant the Ring-inscription in the Black Speech of Mordor. The 1991 Russian television play "Khraniteli" features a group of Nazgûl galloping through a snowy pine forest; they wear black cloaks, with glimpses of red equipment.


title: Nazgûl

text: In "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy (2001–2003) by Peter Jackson, the Nazgûl are almost always concealed by cloaks; they attack the inn at Bree themselves. During the siege of Minas Tirith, the Witch-king wears a distinctive helmet over his hood resembling a mask and a crown, rather than the crown worn underneath his hood in the book. Their shrieks are distorted recordings of producer and screenwriter Fran Walsh's scream.


title: Nazgûl

text: Minas Morgul is shown first in "The Fellowship of the Ring", when the Nazgûl leave the city and ride towards the Shire to pursue the One Ring. It features again when Frodo and Sam make their way towards Cirith Ungol. These sets were designed by the illustrator John Howe. All nine Nazgûl are shown riding winged monsters. Jackson's monsters explicitly differ from Tolkien's description in that they have teeth instead of beaks. The Nazgûl use them in battle more extensively than in the book. In the film the Witch-king's mount is largely responsible for the death of Théoden and his horse Snowmane, a departure from the book. As confirmed in the films' audio commentary, the design of the monsters was based largely on illustrations by John Howe.


title: Nazgûl

text: The fan-made 2009 film "The Hunt for Gollum" features Aragorn fighting a Ringwraith on the borders of Mirkwood.


title: Nazgûl

text: In Jackson's 2012–2014 "The Hobbit" film trilogy, the men who became the Nazgûl are said to have been buried and sealed within the invented High Fells of Rhudaur. In the first film, Radagast briefly encounters the Witch-king while investigating Dol Guldur, and gives the Nazgûl's Morgul dagger to Gandalf to present at the White Council as proof of their return. In the second film, at Galadriel's behest, Gandalf heads to the High Fells and finds that all the Nazgûl have left the tomb. This confirms the Necromancer's identity as Sauron, as the Nazgûl appear alongside their master in the third film in spectral forms wearing Morgul armour and fight Elrond and Saruman before being driven away by Galadriel.


title: Nazgûl

text: The Nazgûl are featured in the video game "" and its sequel "". In the latter, Isildur is revealed to be one of the Nazgûl before he is killed by the game's protagonist, Talion. Talion takes Isildur's ring to prolong his life and eventually became Isildur's replacement until the demise of the Nazgûl in the "Return of the King".


title: Nazgûl

text: For the expansion to its real-time strategy game "", "", Electronic Arts invented the name "Morgomir" for one of the Nazgûl.


title: Nazgûl

text: In taxonomy, the black ant species "Tetramorium nazgul" is named for Tolkien's Ringwraiths, as are the stink bug "Acledra nazgul", the marine crustacean "Potamalpheops nazgul", and the amphibian "Abavorana nazgul". The genus of parasitoid wasps "Nazgulia", type species "N. petiolata", has the same origin.


title: Nazgûl

text: The fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin's 1983 "The Armageddon Rag" tells the tale of a rock promoter who had managed a band named the Nazgûl, and was found ritually murdered on the 10th anniversary of the band's breakup.


title: Nazgûl

text: Gothic rock band Trivalia released several of their albums through their own independent record label Black Rider and for a period of time issued a fanzine titled "Black Rider", inspired by "The Lord of the Rings".


title: Steganography

text: Steganography ( ) is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the information is not evident to human inspection. In computing/electronic contexts, a computer file, message, image, or video is concealed within another file, message, image, or video. The word "steganography" comes from Greek "steganographia", which combines the words "steganós" (), meaning "covered or concealed", and "-graphia" () meaning "writing".


title: Steganography

text: The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his "Steganographia", a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic. Generally, the hidden messages appear to be (or to be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. For example, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter. Some implementations of steganography that lack a shared secret are forms of security through obscurity, and key-dependent steganographic schemes adhere to Kerckhoffs's principle.


title: Steganography

text: The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable they are, arouse interest and may in themselves be incriminating in countries in which encryption is illegal.


title: Steganography

text: Whereas cryptography is the practice of protecting the contents of a message alone, steganography is concerned with concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent and its contents.


title: Steganography

text: Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program, or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. For example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every hundredth pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet. The change is so subtle that someone who is not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice the change.


title: Steganography

text: The first recorded uses of steganography can be traced back to 440 BC in Greece, when Herodotus mentions two examples in his "Histories". Histiaeus sent a message to his vassal, Aristagoras, by shaving the head of his most trusted servant, "marking" the message onto his scalp, then sending him on his way once his hair had regrown, with the instruction, "When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon." Additionally, Demaratus sent a warning about a forthcoming attack to Greece by writing it directly on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying its beeswax surface. Wax tablets were in common use then as reusable writing surfaces, sometimes used for shorthand.


title: Steganography

text: In his work "Polygraphiae," Johannes Trithemius developed his so-called "Ave-Maria-Cipher" that can hide information in a Latin praise of God. ""Auctor Sapientissimus Conseruans Angelica Deferat Nobis Charitas Potentissimi Creatoris"" for example contains the concealed word "VICIPEDIA".


title: Steganography

text: An image or a text can be converted into a soundfile, which is then analysed with a spectrogram to reveal the image. Various artists have used this method to conceal hidden pictures in their songs, such as Aphex Twin in "Windowlicker" or Nine Inch Nails in their album "Year Zero".


title: Steganography

text: In communities with social or government taboos or censorship, people use cultural steganography—hiding messages in idiom, pop culture references, and other messages they share publicly and assume are monitored. This relies on social context to make the underlying messages visible only to certain readers. Examples include:


title: Steganography

text: Since the era of evolving network applications, steganography research has shifted from image steganography to steganography in streaming media such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).


title: Steganography

text: In 2003, Giannoula et al. developed a data hiding technique leading to compressed forms of source video signals on a frame-by-frame basis.


title: Steganography

text: In 2008, Yongfeng Huang and Shanyu Tang presented a novel approach to information hiding in low bit-rate VoIP speech stream, and their published work on steganography is the first-ever effort to improve the codebook partition by using Graph theory along with Quantization Index Modulation in low bit-rate streaming media.


title: Steganography

text: In 2011 and 2012, Yongfeng Huang and Shanyu Tang devised new steganographic algorithms that use codec parameters as cover object to realise real-time covert VoIP steganography. Their findings were published in "IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security".


title: Steganography

text: Academic work since 2012 demonstrated the feasibility of steganography for cyber-physical systems (CPS)/the Internet of Things (IoT). Some techniques of CPS/IoT steganography overlap with network steganography, i.e. hiding data in communication protocols used in CPS/the IoT. However, specific techniques hide data in CPS components. For instance, data can be stored in unused registers of IoT/CPS components and in the states of IoT/CPS actuators.


title: Steganography

text: Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the "plaintext", may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a "ciphertext". Then, an innocuous "cover text" is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the "stegotext". For example, the letter size, spacing, typeface, or other characteristics of a cover text can be manipulated to carry the hidden message. Only a recipient who knows the technique used can recover the message and then decrypt it. Francis Bacon developed Bacon's cipher as such a technique.


title: Steganography

text: The ciphertext produced by most digital steganography methods, however, is not printable. Traditional digital methods rely on perturbing noise in the channel file to hide the message, and as such, the channel file must be transmitted to the recipient with no additional noise from the transmission. Printing introduces much noise in the ciphertext, generally rendering the message unrecoverable. There are techniques that address this limitation, one notable example being ASCII Art Steganography.


title: Steganography

text: Although not classic steganography, some types of modern color laser printers integrate the model, serial number, and timestamps on each printout for traceability reasons using a dot-matrix code made of small, yellow dots not recognizable to the naked eye — see printer steganography for details.


title: Steganography

text: The art of concealing data in a puzzle can take advantage of the degrees of freedom in stating the puzzle, using the starting information to encode a key within the puzzle/puzzle image.


title: Steganography

text: For instance, steganography using sudoku puzzles has as many keys as there are possible solutions of a Sudoku puzzle, which is .


title: Steganography

text: In 1977, Kent concisely described the potential for covert channel signaling in general network communication protocols, even if the traffic is encrypted (in a footnote) in "Encryption-Based Protection for Interactive User/Computer Communication," Proceedings of the Fifth Data Communications Symposium, September 1977.


title: Steganography

text: In 1987, Girling first studied covert channels on a local area network (LAN), identified and realised three obvious covert channels (two storage channels and one timing channel), and his research paper entitled “Covert channels in LAN’s” published in "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering", vol. SE-13 of 2, in February 1987.


title: Steganography

text: In 1989, Wolf implemented covert channels in LAN protocols, e.g. using the reserved fields, pad fields, and undefined fields in the TCP/IP protocol.


title: Steganography

text: In 1997, Rowland used the IP identification field, the TCP initial sequence number and acknowledge sequence number fields in TCP/IP headers to build covert channels.


title: Steganography

text: In 2005, Steven J. Murdoch and Stephen Lewis contributed a chapter entitled "Embedding Covert Channels into TCP/IP" in the ""Information Hiding"" book published by Springer.


title: Steganography

text: All information hiding techniques that may be used to exchange steganograms in telecommunication networks can be classified under the general term of network steganography. This nomenclature was originally introduced by Krzysztof Szczypiorski in 2003. Contrary to typical steganographic methods that use digital media (images, audio and video files) to hide data, network steganography uses communication protocols' control elements and their intrinsic functionality. As a result, such methods can be harder to detect and eliminate.


title: Steganography

text: Typical network steganography methods involve modification of the properties of a single network protocol. Such modification can be applied to the protocol data unit (PDU), to the time relations between the exchanged PDUs, or both (hybrid methods).


title: Steganography

text: Moreover, it is feasible to utilize the relation between two or more different network protocols to enable secret communication. These applications fall under the term inter-protocol steganography. Alternatively, multiple network protocols can be used simultaneously to transfer hidden information and so-called control protocols can be embedded into steganographic communications to extend their capabilities, e.g. to allow dynamic overlay routing or the switching of utilized hiding methods and network protocols.


title: Steganography

text: In 2015, a taxonomy of 109 network hiding methods was presented by Steffen Wendzel, Sebastian Zander et al. that summarized core concepts used in network steganography research. The taxonomy was developed further in recent years by several publications and authors and adjusted to new domains, such as CPS steganography.


title: Steganography

text: Discussions of steganography generally use terminology analogous to and consistent with conventional radio and communications technology. However, some terms appear specifically in software and are easily confused. These are the most relevant ones to digital steganographic systems:


title: Steganography

text: The "payload" is the data covertly communicated. The "carrier" is the signal, stream, or data file that hides the payload, which differs from the "channel", which typically means the type of input, such as a JPEG image. The resulting signal, stream, or data file with the encoded payload is sometimes called the "package", "stego file", or "covert message". The proportion of bytes, samples, or other signal elements modified to encode the payload is called the "encoding density" and is typically expressed as a number between 0 and 1.


title: Steganography

text: In a set of files, the files that are considered likely to contain a payload are "suspects". A "suspect" identified through some type of statistical analysis can be referred to as a "candidate".


title: Steganography

text: Detecting physical steganography requires a careful physical examination, including the use of magnification, developer chemicals, and ultraviolet light. It is a time-consuming process with obvious resource implications, even in countries that employ many people to spy on their fellow nationals. However, it is feasible to screen mail of certain suspected individuals or institutions, such as prisons or prisoner-of-war (POW) camps.


title: Steganography

text: During World War II, prisoner of war camps gave prisoners specially-treated paper that would reveal invisible ink. An article in the 24 June 1948 issue of "Paper Trade Journal" by the Technical Director of the United States Government Printing Office had Morris S. Kantrowitz describe in general terms the development of this paper. Three prototype papers ("Sensicoat", "Anilith", and "Coatalith") were used to manufacture postcards and stationery provided to German prisoners of war in the US and Canada. If POWs tried to write a hidden message, the special paper rendered it visible. The US granted at least two patents related to the technology, one to Kantrowitz, , "Water-Detecting paper and Water-Detecting Coating Composition Therefor," patented 18 July 1950, and an earlier one, "Moisture-Sensitive Paper and the Manufacture Thereof," , patented 20 July 1948. A similar strategy issues prisoners with writing paper ruled with a water-soluble ink that runs in contact with water-based invisible ink.


title: Steganography

text: In computing, steganographically encoded package detection is called steganalysis. The simplest method to detect modified files, however, is to compare them to known originals. For example, to detect information being moved through the graphics on a website, an analyst can maintain known clean copies of the materials and then compare them against the current contents of the site. The differences, if the carrier is the same, comprise the payload. In general, using extremely high compression rates makes steganography difficult but not impossible. Compression errors provide a hiding place for data, but high compression reduces the amount of data available to hold the payload, raising the encoding density, which facilitates easier detection (in extreme cases, even by casual observation).


title: Steganography

text: There are a variety of basic tests that can be done to identify whether or not a secret message exists. This process is not concerned with the extraction of the message, which is a different process and a separate step. The most basic approaches of steganalysis are visual or aural attacks, structural attacks, and statistical attacks. These approaches attempt to detect the steganographic algorithms that were used. These algorithms range from unsophisticated to very sophisticated, with early algorithms being much easier to detect due to statistical anomalies that were present. The size of the message that is being hidden is a factor in how difficult it is to detect. The overall size of the cover object also plays a factor as well. If the cover object is small and the message is large, this can distort the statistics and make it easier to detect. A larger cover object with a small message decreases the statistics and gives it a better chance of going unnoticed.


title: Steganography

text: Steganalysis that targets a particular algorithm has much better success as it is able to key in on the anomalies that are left behind. This is because the analysis can perform a targeted search to discover known tendencies since it is aware of the behaviors that it commonly exhibits. When analyzing an image the least significant bits of many images are actually not random. The camera sensor, especially lower-end sensors are not the best quality and can introduce some random bits. This can also be affected by the file compression done on the image. Secret messages can be introduced into the least significant bits in an image and then hidden. A steganography tool can be used to camouflage the secret message in the least significant bits but it can introduce a random area that is too perfect. This area of perfect randomization stands out and can be detected by comparing the least significant bits to the next-to-least significant bits on an image that hasn't been compressed.


title: Steganography

text: Generally, though, there are many techniques known to be able to hide messages in data using steganographic techniques. None are, by definition, obvious when users employ standard applications, but some can be detected by specialist tools. Others, however, are resistant to detection—or rather it is not possible to reliably distinguish data containing a hidden message from data containing just noise—even when the most sophisticated analysis is performed. Steganography is being used to conceal and deliver more effective cyber attacks, referred to as "Stegware". The term Stegware was first introduced in 2017 to describe any malicious operation involving steganography as a vehicle to conceal an attack. Detection of steganography is challenging, and because of that, not an adequate defence. Therefore, the only way of defeating the threat is to transform data in a way that destroys any hidden messages, a process called Content Threat Removal.


title: Steganography

text: Some modern computer printers use steganography, including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox brand color laser printers. The printers add tiny yellow dots to each page. The barely-visible dots contain encoded printer serial numbers and date and time stamps.


title: Steganography

text: The larger the cover message (in binary data, the number of bits) relative to the hidden message, the easier it is to hide the hidden message (as an analogy, the larger the "haystack", the easier it is to hide a "needle"). So digital pictures, which contain much data, are sometimes used to hide messages on the Internet and on other digital communication media. It is not clear how common this practice actually is.


title: Steganography

text: For example, a 24-bit bitmap uses 8 bits to represent each of the three color values (red, green, and blue) of each pixel. The blue alone has 2 different levels of blue intensity. The difference between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye. Therefore, the least significant bit can be used more or less undetectably for something else other than color information. If that is repeated for the green and the red elements of each pixel as well, it is possible to encode one letter of ASCII text for every three pixels.


title: Steganography

text: Stated somewhat more formally, the objective for making steganographic encoding difficult to detect is to ensure that the changes to the carrier (the original signal) because of the injection of the payload (the signal to covertly embed) are visually (and ideally, statistically) negligible. The changes are indistinguishable from the noise floor of the carrier. All media can be a carrier, but media with a large amount of redundant or compressible information is better suited.


title: Steganography

text: From an information theoretical point of view, that means that the channel must have more capacity than the "surface" signal requires. There must be redundancy. For a digital image, it may be noise from the imaging element; for digital audio, it may be noise from recording techniques or amplification equipment. In general, electronics that digitize an analog signal suffer from several noise sources, such as thermal noise, flicker noise, and shot noise. The noise provides enough variation in the captured digital information that it can be exploited as a noise cover for hidden data. In addition, lossy compression schemes (such as JPEG) always introduce some error to the decompressed data, and it is possible to exploit that for steganographic use, as well.


title: Steganography

text: Although steganography and digital watermarking seem similar, they are not. In steganography, the hidden message should remain intact until it reaches its destination. Steganography can be used for digital watermarking in which a message (being simply an identifier) is hidden in an image so that its source can be tracked or verified (for example, Coded Anti-Piracy) or even just to identify an image (as in the EURion constellation). In such a case, the technique of hiding the message (here, the watermark) must be robust to prevent tampering. However, digital watermarking sometimes requires a brittle watermark, which can be modified easily, to check whether the image has been tampered with. That is the key difference between steganography and digital watermarking.


title: Steganography

text: In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleged that the Russian foreign intelligence service uses customized steganography software for embedding encrypted text messages inside image files for certain communications with "illegal agents" (agents without diplomatic cover) stationed abroad.


title: Steganography

text: On April 23, 2019 the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Xiaoqing Zheng, a Chinese businessman and former Principal Engineer at General Electric, with 14 counts of conspiring to steal intellectual property and trade secrets from General Electric. Zheng had allegedly used steganography to exfiltrate 20,000 documents from General Electric to Tianyi Aviation Technology Co. in Nanjing, China, a company the FBI accused him of starting with backing from the Chinese government.


title: Steganography

text: There are distributed steganography methods, including methodologies that distribute the payload through multiple carrier files in diverse locations to make detection more difficult. For example, by cryptographer William Easttom (Chuck Easttom).


title: Steganography

text: The puzzles that are presented by Cicada 3301 incorporate steganography with cryptography and other solving techniques since 2012. Puzzles involving steganography have also been featured in other alternate reality games.


title: Steganography

text: The communications of The May Day mystery incorporate steganography and other solving techniques since 1981.


title: Steganography

text: Stegoanalytical algorithms can be cataloged in different ways, highlighting: according to the available information and according to the purpose sought.


title: Steganography

text: There is the possibility of cataloging these algorithms based on the information held by the stegoanalyst in terms of clear and encrypted messages. It is a technique similar to cryptography, however, they have several differences:


title: Steganography

text: The principal purpose of steganography is to transfer information unnoticed, however, it is possible for an attacker to have two different pretensions:


title: Ashok Selvan

text: Ashok Selvan is an Indian actor who works predominantly in Tamil cinema. He made his breakthrough playing one of the lead roles in "Soodhu Kavvum" (2013), before gaining critical acclaim for his performances in C. V. Kumar's productions " (2013)" and "Thegidi" (2014). His recent blockbuster is "Oh My Kadavule" (2020).


title: Ashok Selvan

text: Ashok was born to Panneerselvam and Malar on 8 November 1989 in Chennimalai, Erode, Tamil Nadu, India. He moved to Chennai at age three, and completed his schooling at Santhome Higher Secondary School, Chennai before graduating in Visual Communication from Loyola College. In college, Ashok Selvan participated in short films, completing a dozen short films as an actor as well as directing a few, including "Green", which won Best Film at the 2012 International Tamil Thoth Conference held in Singapore.


title: Ashok Selvan

text: After graduating from college, Ashok sought opportunities in films as an actor and auditioned for roles including in Prakash Raj's production "Inidhu Inidhu" and Bharat Bala's "19th Step" but was rejected. During the period, he applied to work as an assistant director to S. J. Surya and was given the opportunity to feature in a few scenes as Suriya's friend in the director's venture "7aam Arivu", though his scenes did not make the final version. He was also featured in the title card of Chakri Toleti's "Billa 2", with a childhood picture of Ashok Selvan used to represent a younger version of Ajith Kumar's titular character. He then also auditioned unsuccessfully for a role in "Pizza", before Nalan Kumarasamy offered him the role of Kesavan in his black comedy film, "Soodhu Kavvum" (2013) after seeing him in a commercial. Featuring alongside an ensemble cast including Vijay Sethupathi, Bobby Simha and Sanchita Shetty, "Soodhu Kavvum" became a commercial success, with Ashok being described as "fantastic" in his role of an unemployed graduate.


title: Ashok Selvan

text: Ashok was then selected to replace Vaibhav Reddy in Deepan Chakravarthy's psychological thriller "", a second film in C. V. Kumar's "Pizza" franchise. Portraying an English novel writer in the film, the film told the story of eerie happenings in a villa owned by Ashok's character. In order to portray the role of a 30-year-old writer, he gained weight and grew a beard within two weeks. The film opened to positive reviews and above average box office collections, with a critic noting that "Ashok delivers an outstanding performance". He collaborated with C. V. Kumar again in his third film, "Thegidi", a murder mystery story directed by another newcomer P.Ramesh. Portraying a detective, Ashok featured opposite Janani Iyer, and won positive reviews for his acting in the film. A critic from Sify.com noted he "is subtle and conveys a lot through his body language and pleasing face", while another reviewer wrote "he seems to be quite proficient". His recently released movies are "Kootathil Oruthan" and "Sila Samayangalil". "Kootathil Oruthan" deals with the love story of a middle bencher and its trailer has had a very positive reaction from the audience and the media. "Sila Samayangalil" directed by Priyadharshan was released in Netflix and made its way to the final round at Golden Globes. The film tells the story of eight characters who arrive at a pathology lab at 9a.m. to give their blood for an AIDS test. However, it all ends at 5p.m. when the results arrive. The film has been lapping appreciations in many festival circuits and in the recently held 9th annual Jaipur International Film Festival, "Sila Samayangalil" won awards for Best Film with a Global Message, Best Upcoming Release and the overall Best Film from the Asian Continent award. He is acting in a movie titled "Oxygen" directed by Ananda Krishnan and "Nenjamellam Kadhal" directed by Nirman. "Oh My Kadavule" was released on 14 Feb 2020 and was produced by his own banner Happy High Pictures in association with Axess Film Factory. "Oh My Kadavule" received positive reviews from critics and was a blockbuster hit at the box office. The movie star cast also includes Ritika Singh and Vani Bhojan.


title: Ashok Selvan

text: Ashok made his Telugu cinema debut with the film "Ninnila Ninnila" along directed by Ani. I. V. Sasi in 2021. The movie star cast also includes Ritu Varma, Nithya Menen. He made his Malayalam cinema debut with an antagonistic role through "" in 2021.


title: Pizza Margherita

text: Pizza Margherita (more commonly known in English as Margherita pizza) is a typical Neapolitan pizza, made with San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, salt, and extra-virgin olive oil.


title: Pizza Margherita

text: In June 1889 the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito, Pizzeria Brandi's chef, invented a dish called ""Pizza Margherita" in honor of the Queen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, and the Italian unification, since toppings are tomato (red), mozzarella (white) and basil (green), ingredients inspired by the colors of the national flag of Italy.


title: Pizza Margherita

text: The origins of "Pizza Margherita" came from mixing similar toppings that were already present in Naples between 1796 and 1810. In 1849 Emanuele Rocco recorded different pizza toppings like basil, tomatoes and thin slices of mozzarella; the mozzarella was thinly sliced, and added to the toppings already present.


title: Pizza Margherita

text: In 1866, Francesco De Bourcard, writing about the Naples traditions, described the most commonly used pizza toppings at that time as well as the possible origin of "calzone":


title: Shakira Caine

text: Shakira, Lady Caine, (née Baksh; born 23 February 1947) is a Guyanese former actress and fashion model. She is married to English actor Michael Caine.


title: Shakira Caine

text: Shakira was born on 23 February 1947 in British Guiana (present-day Guyana) to Muslim Indian parents. Her mother was a dressmaker, and she aspired to follow in her footsteps and became a fashion designer.


title: Shakira Caine

text: At the age of 19, while working as a secretary, she was urged by her employer to enter the 1967 Miss Guyana contest, which she won. She later earned third-place in the 1967 Miss World contest held in London, where she decided to stay to launch a career in modelling.


title: Shakira Caine

text: Baksh appeared in several films, including "Some Girls Do" (1969), "Carry On Again Doctor" (1969), "Toomorrow" (1970), "Son of Dracula" (1974) and, with her husband, "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975). She also appeared in two episodes of the science fiction TV series "UFO". She auditioned for the part of the "Doctor Who" companion Jo Grant, alongside third Doctor Jon Pertwee in June 1970.


title: Shakira Caine

text: After seeing Baksh in a British television advertisement for Maxwell House coffee in 1971, Michael Caine became obsessed with finding the woman he considered to be "the most beautiful... he had ever seen." From a friend in the advertising business, he discovered that she lived only a few miles from him in London. The couple were married in Las Vegas on 8 January 1973, and have one daughter, Natasha.


title: Shakira Caine

text: Baksh is a Muslim, while her husband is a Christian. He reflected to "The Guardian" in 2009: "My wife is a Muslim and she does Muslim stuff; I'm a Christian and I do Christian stuff, and no questions ever come up. The media view of Muslims is different from mine, which is very benign and peaceful."


title: 1998 FIFA World Cup squads

text: The 1998 FIFA World Cup was the 16th FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial football tournament contested by the senior men's teams of the national associations affiliated to FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football). The tournament was played in France from 10 June to 12 July 1998 and featured 32 teams divided into eight groups of four. Each team was required to submit a squad of 22 players – numbered sequentially from 1 to 22 – from whom they would select their teams for each match at the tournament, with the final squads to be submitted by 1 June 1998. In total, 704 players were selected for the tournament.


title: 1998 FIFA World Cup squads

text: It featured players born in four different decades, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. The only other times this has happened at a World Cup was in the 1958, 1970 and 1990 editions.


title: 1998 FIFA World Cup squads

text: Head coach: Carlos Alberto Parreira (fired after two matches, replaced by Mohammed Al-Kharashy for the final match)


title: 1998 FIFA World Cup squads

text: The English, Spanish, Japanese and Saudi Arabian squads were made up entirely of players from the respective countries' domestic leagues. The Nigeria squad was made up entirely of players employed by foreign clubs. Only three teams, Japan, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, had no players from European clubs.


title: 1998 FIFA World Cup squads

text: Although Turkey and Portugal failed to qualify for the finals, their domestic leagues were represented by 18 and 9 players, respectively. Altogether, there were 38 national leagues who had players in the tournament.


title: Trisha filmography

text: Trisha is an Indian actress and model, active primarily in Tamil and Telugu films. She was first seen in 1999 in a supporting role in "Jodi", then in the music video of Falguni Pathak's song "Meri Chunar Udd Udd Jaye". The first project she accepted as a lead actress was Priyadarshan's "Lesa Lesa", but a delay in the film's release meant that her first appearance in a lead role was in Ameer's directorial debut "Mounam Pesiyadhe" in 2002, which was a commercial success. The following year, she appeared as a terminally ill woman in "Manasellam", which was a commercial failure.


title: Trisha filmography

text: Trisha's next release in 2003 was Hari's action film, "Saamy" in which she played a soft-spoken Brahmin girl and attracted praise for her performance. The film became a major commercial success, resulting in Trisha receiving new offers, including those from several high-budget productions. "Lesa Lesa", which was to have been her debut as a lead actress, was released next. This romantic musical, based on the 1998 Malayalam film "Summer in Bethlehem", earned her the ITFA Best New Actress Award. Following "Lesa Lesa", she starred in "Alai" and "Enakku 20 Unakku 18" both of which were commercial failures. She made her debut in Telugu cinema in the same year with "Nee Manasu Naaku Telusu", which was also unsuccessful. Her next Telugu release was "Varsham" in 2004. It was a major success, and won her the Filmfare Best Actress Award (Telugu). It also resulted in her receiving more offers for roles in Telugu films.


title: Trisha filmography

text: Later in 2004, Trisha played the role of a helpless girl a kabaddi player tries to save from a corrupt politician who wants to marry her in "Ghilli". It was a major commercial success. She appeared in Mani Ratnam's political drama "Aaytha Ezhuthu" (2004), starring as part of an ensemble cast that included Siddharth, R. Madhavan and Suriya. The Telugu romantic comedy "Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana" (2005) featured Trisha as a village girl and was a commercial success. It earned her another Filmfare Award and her first Nandi Award for Best Actress. She reprised the role in the Tamil remake "Unakkum Enakkum" (2006) which was also successful. Selvaraghavan's Telugu film "Aadavari Matalaku Arthale Verule" (2007) won Trisha her third Filmfare Award. The same year she featured opposite Ajith Kumar in A. L. Vijay's "Kireedam". In 2008, her releases "Bheemaa" and "Kuruvi" both failed commercially, while "Abhiyum Naanum" and "Krishna" earned her Filmfare nominations for Best Actress in the Tamil and Telugu categories respectively.


title: Trisha filmography

text: Trisha starred in two films released in 2009: "Sarvam" and "Sankham". The former was commercially unsuccessful, while the latter was critically derided. The following year, she played a Kerala Christian girl in Gautham Vasudev Menon's romance "Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa". It was a major commercial success and, as well as being a breakthrough film in her career, earned her a Filmfare nomination for Best Actress (Tamil). The same year, she made her Hindi cinema debut with "Khatta Meetha". Although a critical and commercial failure, it earned her nomination for a Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut. Her sole Telugu release that year was "Namo Venkatesa". Both her 2011 releases – "Teen Maar" and "Mankatha" – were successful. She had two releases in 2012: "Bodyguard" (a Telugu remake of the 2010 Malayalam film of the same name) and "Dammu". She appeared in two Tamil films in 2013: the mystery thriller "Samar", and "Endrendrum Punnagai," which earned her a Filmfare nomination. Her sole release in 2014 was "Power", which marked her debut in Kannada cinema. Trisha's 2015 films included the crime thriller "Yennai Arindhaal", the comedy "Sakalakala Vallavan", the Tamil-Telugu bilingual thriller "Thoongaa Vanam / Cheekati Rajyam", and the sports drama "Bhooloham". In 2016, she appeared in the comedy horror films "Aranmanai 2" and the Tamil-Telugu bilingual "Nayaki" (spelt "Nayagi" in Tamil), followed by the political thriller "Kodi", which earned her the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress – Tamil. Trisha won her first Filmfare Award for Best Actress (Tamil) for "'96" (2018), and in the same year made her debut in Malayalam cinema in "Hey Jude".


title: Azimuth

text: An azimuth (; from ) is an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system. More specifically, it is the horizontal angle from a cardinal direction, most commonly north.


title: Azimuth

text: Mathematically, the relative position vector from an observer (origin) to a point of interest is projected perpendicularly onto a reference plane (the horizontal plane); the angle between the projected vector and a reference vector on the reference plane is called the azimuth.


title: Azimuth

text: When used as a celestial coordinate, the azimuth is the horizontal direction of a star or other astronomical object in the sky. The star is the point of interest, the reference plane is the local area (e.g. a circular area with a 5 km radius at sea level) around an observer on Earth's surface, and the reference vector points to true north. The azimuth is the angle between the north vector and the star's vector on the horizontal plane.


title: Azimuth

text: Azimuth is usually measured in degrees (°). The concept is used in navigation, astronomy, engineering, mapping, mining, and ballistics.


title: Azimuth

text: The word azimuth is used in all European languages today. It originates from medieval Arabic السموت ("al-sumūt", pronounced "as-sumūt"), meaning "the directions" (plural of Arabic السمت "al-samt" = "the direction"). The Arabic word entered late medieval Latin in an astronomy context and in particular in the use of the Arabic version of the astrolabe astronomy instrument. Its first recorded use in English is in the 1390s in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe". The first known record in any Western language is in Spanish in the 1270s in an astronomy book that was largely derived from Arabic sources, the "Libros del saber de astronomía" commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile.


title: Azimuth

text: In the horizontal coordinate system, used in celestial navigation, azimuth is one of the two coordinates. The other is "altitude", sometimes called elevation above the horizon.


title: Azimuth

text: In land navigation, azimuth is usually denoted alpha, "α", and defined as a horizontal angle measured clockwise from a north base line or "meridian". "Azimuth" has also been more generally defined as a horizontal angle measured clockwise from any fixed reference plane or easily established base direction line.


title: Azimuth

text: Today, the reference plane for an azimuth is typically true north, measured as a 0° azimuth, though other angular units (grad, mil) can be used. Moving clockwise on a 360 degree circle, east has azimuth 90°, south 180°, and west 270°. There are exceptions: some navigation systems use south as the reference vector. Any direction can be the reference vector, as long as it is clearly defined.


title: Azimuth

text: Quite commonly, azimuths or compass bearings are stated in a system in which either north or south can be the zero, and the angle may be measured clockwise or anticlockwise from the zero. For example, a bearing might be described as "(from) south, (turn) thirty degrees (toward the) east" (the words in brackets are usually omitted), abbreviated "S30°E", which is the bearing 30 degrees in the eastward direction from south, i.e. the bearing 150 degrees clockwise from north. The reference direction, stated first, is always north or south, and the turning direction, stated last, is east or west. The directions are chosen so that the angle, stated between them, is positive, between zero and 90 degrees. If the bearing happens to be exactly in the direction of one of the cardinal points, a different notation, e.g. "due east", is used instead.


title: Azimuth

text: We are standing at latitude formula_1, longitude zero; we want to find the azimuth from our viewpoint to Point 2 at latitude formula_2, longitude "L" (positive eastward). We can get a fair approximation by assuming the Earth is a sphere, in which case the azimuth "α" is given by


title: Azimuth

text: A better approximation assumes the Earth is a slightly-squashed sphere (an "oblate spheroid"); "azimuth" then has at least two very slightly different meanings. Normal-section azimuth is the angle measured at our viewpoint by a theodolite whose axis is perpendicular to the surface of the spheroid; geodetic azimuth (or geodesic azimuth) is the angle between north and the ellipsoidal geodesic (the shortest path on the surface of the spheroid from our viewpoint to Point 2). The difference is usually negligible: less than 0.03 arc second for distances less than 100 km.


title: Azimuth

text: To calculate the azimuth of the sun or a star given its declination and hour angle at our location, we modify the formula for a spherical earth. Replace "φ" with declination and longitude difference with hour angle, and change the sign (since the hour angle is positive westward instead of east).


title: Azimuth

text: The cartographical azimuth or grid azimuth (in decimal degrees) can be calculated when the coordinates of 2 points are known in a flat plane (cartographical coordinates):


title: Azimuth

text: Remark that the reference axes are swapped relative to the (counterclockwise) mathematical polar coordinate system and that the azimuth is clockwise relative to the north.


title: Azimuth

text: The opposite problem occurs when the coordinates ("X", "Y") of one point, the distance "D", and the azimuth "α" to another point ("X", "Y") are known, one can calculate its coordinates:


title: Azimuth

text: This is typically used in triangulation and azimuth identification (AzID), especially in radar applications.


title: Azimuth

text: There is a wide variety of azimuthal map projections. They all have the property that directions (the azimuths) from a central point are preserved. Some navigation systems use south as the reference plane. However, any direction can serve as the plane of reference, as long as it is clearly defined for everyone using that system.


title: Azimuth

text: If, instead of measuring from and along the horizon, the angles are measured from and along the celestial equator, the angles are called right ascension if referenced to the Vernal Equinox, or hour angle if referenced to the celestial meridian.


title: Azimuth

text: In mathematics, the azimuth angle of a point in cylindrical coordinates or spherical coordinates is the anticlockwise angle between the positive "x"-axis and the projection of the vector onto the "xy"-plane. The angle is the same as an angle in polar coordinates of the component of the vector in the "xy"-plane and is normally measured in radians rather than degrees. As well as measuring the angle differently, in mathematical applications theta, "θ", is very often used to represent the azimuth rather than the representation of symbol phi "φ".


title: Azimuth

text: In sound localization experiments and literature, the "azimuth" refers to the angle the sound source makes compared to the imaginary straight line that is drawn from within the head through the area between the eyes.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Songs in the Key of Life is the eighteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter and musician Stevie Wonder. A double album, it was released on September 28, 1976, by Tamla Records, a division of Motown. It was recorded primarily at Crystal Sound studio in Hollywood, with some sessions recorded at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the Record Plant in Sausalito, and The Hit Factory in New York City; final mixing was conducted at Crystal Sound. The album has been regarded by music journalists as the culmination of Wonder's "classic period" of recording.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: By 1974, Wonder was one of the most successful figures in popular music; his previous albums "Music of My Mind", "Talking Book", "Innervisions", and "Fulfillingness' First Finale" were all back-to-back critical successes. However, by the end of 1975, Wonder seriously considered quitting the music industry and emigrating to Ghana to work with disabled children. When plans for a farewell concert had already begun, Wonder changed his mind and signed a new contract with Motown on August 5, 1975. This outlined a seven-year, seven-album, $37 million deal with full artistic control. At the time, it was the biggest recording deal in history.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: "Songs in the Key of Life" was released as a double LP with a four-song bonus EP. It debuted at number one on the "Billboard" Pop Albums Chart, becoming only the third album to achieve that feat, and the first by an American artist. Both the lead single "I Wish" and follow-up single "Sir Duke" reached number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The album spent thirteen consecutive weeks at number one on the "Billboard" 200, becoming the album with the most weeks at number one during the year, and was the second best-selling album of 1977 in the US. In 2005, the album was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), indicating sales of 5 million units for a double album.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: The album won Album of the Year at the 19th Grammy Awards and is the best-selling and most critically acclaimed album of Wonder's career. Widely regarded as his magnum opus and one of the greatest albums in the history of recorded music, many musicians have remarked on the quality of the album and its influence on their own work; indeed, some notable musicians have named it as the greatest album of all time. It was voted number 89 in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums" and ranked number 4 on "Rolling Stone"'s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2002, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2005 it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, which deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: By 1976, Stevie Wonder had become one of the most popular figures in R&B and pop music, not only in the U.S., but worldwide. Within a short space of time, the albums "Talking Book", "Innervisions" and "Fulfillingness' First Finale" were all back-to-back-to-back top five successes, with the latter two winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1974 and 1975, respectively. In 1975, Wonder became serious about quitting the music industry and emigrating to Ghana to work with handicapped children. He had expressed his anger with the way the U.S. government was running the country.<ref name="Lundy pp. 14/15">Lundy, Zeth, "33 Songs in the Key of Life", pp. 14/15.</ref> A farewell concert was being considered as the best way to bring down the curtain on his career. Wonder changed his mind and signed a new contract with Motown on August 5, 1975, thinking he was better off making the most of his career. At the time, rival labels such as Arista and Epic were also interested in him. The contract was laid out as a seven-year, seven LP, $37 million deal ($ in dollars) and gave Wonder full artistic control, making this the largest deal made with a recording star up to that point. Shortly after signing the contract, Wonder took a year off from music.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: There was huge anticipation for the new album, which was initially scheduled for release around October 1975. It was delayed on short notice when Wonder felt that further remixing was essential. According to him, Motown's marketing campaign decided to take advantage of the delay by producing "We're almost finished" T-shirts. Work on the new album continued into early 1976. The working title was "Let's See Life the Way It Is", before Wonder settled on "Songs in the Key of Life". The title would represent the formula of a complex "key of life" and the proposals for indefinite success.<ref name="Lundy pp. 8/9">Lundy, "33 Songs in the Key of Life", pp. 8/9.</ref> The album was released on September 28, 1976, after a two-year wait as a double LP album plus a bonus 7" EP titled "A Something's Extra" (which featured "Saturn", "Ebony Eyes", "All Day Sucker", and "Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)"), and included a 24-page lyric and credit booklet.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Wonder recorded the great majority of the album at Crystal Sounds in Hollywood, with Gary Olazabal and studio owner John Fischbach as engineers. Some material was recorded at the Record Plant in Hollywood and the Record Plant in Sausalito. During a period when Crystal Sounds had a prior obligation to record another artist, the production team traveled to the Hit Factory in New York City to work for about six weeks, but only used one basic track from those sessions. As a perfectionist, Wonder spent long hours in the studio for almost every track he recorded. He was "not eating or sleeping, while everyone around him struggled to keep up." According to Wonder, "If my flow is goin', I keep on until I peak." Bassist Nathan Watts remembered getting home at 3 am after very long hours in the studio, only to have Wonder phone to request him return immediately to help with "I Wish".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: A total of 130 people worked on the album, but Wonder's preeminence remains evident. Among the musicians who contributed were some legendary figures of R&B, soul, and jazz music: Herbie Hancock played Fender Rhodes on "As", George Benson played electric guitar on "Another Star", and Minnie Riperton and Deniece Williams added backing vocals on "Ordinary Pain". Mike Sembello is a prominent personality throughout the album, playing guitar on several tracks and also co-writing "Saturn" with Wonder. While Wonder wrote most of the songs on the album himself, some of the album's most socially-conscious songs had co-writers: Wonder wrote "Village Ghetto Land" and "Black Man" with Gary Byrd, and he wrote "Have a Talk with God" with his brother Calvin Hardaway.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: At the time of the album's release, reporters and music critics, and everyone who had worked on it, traveled to Long View Farm, a recording studio in Massachusetts, for a press preview. Everybody received autographed copies of the album and Wonder gave interviews. Critical reception was immediately positive. The album was viewed as a guided tour through a wide range of musical styles and the life and feelings of the artist. It included recollections of childhood, of first love and lost love. It contained songs about faith and love among all peoples and songs about social justice for the poor and downtrodden. "The Village Voice"s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, it was voted as the best album of the year.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: From 1973, Wonder's presence at the Grammy Awards ceremonies was consistent – he attended most of the ceremonies and also often performed on stage – but in 1976 he did not attend and was not nominated for any awards, as he had not released any new material during the previous year. When Paul Simon accepted the award for Album of the Year at the 18th Grammy Awards (for "Still Crazy After All These Years"), he jokingly thanked Stevie for not releasing an album that year, as Wonder had won the award at the two preceding ceremonies (for "Innervisions" and "Fulfillingness’ First Finale"). When, a year later, Wonder was again nominated in the category for "Songs in the Key of Life" (which also received six other nominations), the album was seen as the favorite by many critics to take the award. The other nominees were "Breezin’" by George Benson, "Chicago X" by Chicago, "Silk Degrees" by Boz Scaggs, and the other favorite, Peter Frampton’s "Frampton Comes Alive!", which was also a huge critical and commercial success.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Wonder was again absent from the 19th Grammy Awards ceremony, as he was visiting Africa. In February 1977, he traveled to Nigeria for two weeks, primarily to explore his musical heritage, as he put it. A satellite hook-up was arranged so he could accept his Grammys from across the sea, but when Bette Midler announced the results during the ceremony, the audience was only able to see Wonder at a phone smiling and giving thanks, as the video signal was poor and the audio inaudible. Andy Williams went on to make a public blunder when he asked the blind-since-birth Wonder, “Stevie, can you see us?” In all, Wonder won in four out of the seven categories in which he was nominated at the Grammys that year: Album of the Year, Producer of the Year, Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance (for "I Wish").


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Highly anticipated, the album surpassed all commercial expectations. It debuted at number 1 on the "Billboard" Pop Albums Chart on October 8, 1976, becoming only the third album in history to achieve that feat (after British singer/composer Elton John's albums "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" and "Rock of the Westies", both from 1975), and the first by an American artist. In Canada, it achieved the same feat, entering the "RPM" national albums chart at number one on October 16. The album spent thirteen consecutive weeks at number one in the US, eleven of which were in 1976, making it the album with the most weeks at number one during that year. During those eleven weeks, "Songs in the Key of Life" managed to block four other albums from reaching the top: Boz Scaggs’s "Silk Degrees", Earth, Wind & Fire's "Spirit", Led Zeppelin's soundtrack for "The Song Remains the Same" and Rod Stewart's "A Night on the Town". On January 15, 1977, the album finally dropped to number two behind Eagles' "Hotel California", and it fell to number four the following week, but on January 29 it returned to the top for a fourteenth and final week. By the end of its run, it had spent 35 weeks inside the top ten of the "Billboard" albums chart and was on the chart for a total of 80 weeks. The album also saw longevity atop the "Billboard" R&B/Black Albums chart, spending 20 non-consecutive weeks at number one.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: The album became the second-best selling album of 1977 in the US (behind only Fleetwood Mac's blockbuster "Rumours"), and was the highest selling R&B/Soul album on the "Billboard" Year-End chart that same year. It was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2005, indicating sales of 5 million copies in the US alone (though a Diamond certification is awarded for sales of 10 million units, the RIAA counts each individual record or disc included with an album as a separate unit).


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: "Songs in the Key of Life" was also the most successful of Wonder's albums in terms of singles, the first of which, the upbeat "I Wish", was released in November 1976, over a month after the album was released. On January 15, 1977, the song reached number one on the "Billboard" R&B chart, where it spent five weeks. Seven days after, it also reached the summit of the "Billboard" Hot 100, although it spent only one week at number one. The track became an international top 10 single, and reached number five in the UK. "I Wish" became one of Wonder's standards and remains one of his most sampled songs. The follow-up single, the jazzy "Sir Duke", was released in March 1977 and surpassed the commercial success of "I Wish". It also reached number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100 (where it spent three weeks, starting on May 21) and the R&B chart (for one week, starting on May 28), but it reached number two in the UK, where it was kept from the top spot by the song "Free" by Deniece Williams, who provided backing vocals on Wonder's album.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Released during the second half of 1977, as sales for the album began to decline, the last two singles from "Songs in the Key of Life" failed to match the success of "I Wish" and "Sir Duke". "Another Star" was released in August and reached number 32 on the Hot 100 (number 18 on the R&B chart, and number 29 in the UK), and "As" came out two months later, peaking at number 36 on both the Pop and R&B charts. Though not released as a single, "Isn't She Lovely" received wide radio airplay and became one of Wonder's most popular songs. David Parton's 1977 cover of the song gave him a top 10 hit in the UK.


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Over time, "Songs in the Key of Life" became a standard, and it is considered Wonder's signature album, even by Wonder himself: "Of all the albums," he told "Q" magazine for their April 1995 issue, ""Songs in the Key of Life" I'm most happy about. Just the time, being alive then. To be a father and then… letting go and letting God give me the energy and strength I needed." It is also often cited as one of the greatest albums in popular music history. For example, in 2001, the TV network VH1 named it the seventh greatest album of all time; in 2003, it was ranked number 56 on "Rolling Stone" Magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time (it was number 57 on the 2012 version of the list, and number 4 on the 2020 edition); it was included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die"; and in April 2008, it was voted the "Top Album of All Time" by the Yahoo! Music Playlist Blog, using a formula that combined four parameters – "Album Staying Power Value + Sales Value + Critical Rating Value + Grammy Award Value".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Many musicians have remarked on the quality of the album and its influence on their own work. Elton John said, in his notes about Wonder for "Rolling Stone"s 2003 list of "The Immortals – The Greatest Artists of All Time" (in which Wonder was ranked number 15): "Let me put it this way: wherever I go in the world, I always take a copy of "Songs in the Key of Life". For me, it's the best album ever made, and I'm always left in awe after I listen to it."


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: In an interview with "Ebony" magazine, Michael Jackson called "Songs in the Key of Life" his favorite Stevie Wonder album. Kanye West, in a 2005 interview with "Clash", remarked: "I'm not trying to compete with what's out there now. I'm really trying to compete with "Innervisions" and "Songs in the Key of Life". It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar?" George Michael cited the album as his favorite of all time. He released a live recording of "Love's in Need of Love Today" as a B-side to "Father Figure" in 1987 and performed the song on his Faith tour the next year, performed "Village Ghetto Land" at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988, covered "Pastime Paradise" and "Knocks Me Off My Feet" on his 1991 Cover to Cover tour, and (with Mary J. Blige) had a hit single in 1999 with a cover of "As".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Many R&B singers have praised the album: Mariah Carey generally names it as one of her favorites, and Whitney Houston remarked on its influence on her singing (at Houston's request, the album was played throughout the photo sessions for her compilation album "", as can be seen on the home video release that accompanied that album). Its importance has also been recognized by heavy metal musicians, with singer Phil Anselmo describing a live performance of "Songs in the Key of Life" as "a living, breathing miracle".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: The album's tracks have provided numerous samples for rap and hip-hop artists. "Pastime Paradise", which itself drew on the first eight notes and four chords of J.S. Bach's Prelude No. 2 in C minor (BWV 847), was reworked by Coolio as "Gangsta's Paradise" in 1995. That same year, smooth jazz artist Najee recorded a cover album titled "Najee Plays Songs from the Key of Life", which is based entirely on Wonder's album. In 1999, Will Smith used "I Wish" as the base for his US number-one single "Wild Wild West" (Smith's song repeated the main melody of "I Wish" as a riff and re-formed some of Wonder's lyrics).


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: In December 2013, Wonder did a live concert performance of the entire album at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. The event was his 18th annual House Full of Toys Benefit Concert, and featured some of the singers and musicians that are featured on the original album, as well as several from the contemporary music scene. Then, in November 2014 Wonder began performing the entire album in a series of concert dates in the US and Canada. The start of the tour coincided with the 38th anniversary of the release of "Songs in the Key of Life".


title: Songs in the Key of Life

text: Original LP editions included a bonus 7" EP, titled "A Something's Extra", containing four bonus tracks.