Combat effectiveness is the capacity or performance of a military force to succeed in undertaking an operation, mission or objective. Determining optimal combat effectiveness is crucial in the armed forces, whether they are deployed on land, air or sea. Combat effectiveness is an aspect of military effectiveness and can be attributed to the strength of combat support including the quality and quantity of logistics, weapons and equipment as well as military tactics, the psychological states of soldiers, level of influence of leaders, skill and motivation that can arise from nationalism to survival are all capable of contributing to success on the battlefield. Quantitative measures Philip Hayward proposes a measure for combat effectiveness, concentrating on the "probability of success" in a combat environment in relation to factors such as manpower and military stratagem. Combat effectiveness can be represented as a real and continuous function, ...

A mute is a device attached to a musical instrument which changes the instrument's tone quality (timbre) or lowers its volume. Mutes are commonly used on string and brass instruments, especially the trumpet and trombone, and are occasionally used on woodwinds. Their effect is mostly intended for artistic use, but they can also allow players to practice discreetly. Muting can also be done by hand, as in the case of palm muting a guitar or grasping a triangle to dampen its sound. Mutes on brass instruments are typically inserted into the flared end of the instrument (bell). They can also be held in front of or clipped onto the bell. Of brass mutes, the "straight mute" is the most common and is frequently used in classical and jazz music, but a wide variety are available. On string instruments of the violin family, mutes are usually attached to the bridge, the piece of wood that supports the strings. Palm muting a guitar involves placing the side of the hand across the strings...

Pyrex is a programming language for creating Python modules. Its syntax is very close to Python and it makes it easy for Python programmers to write non-Python supporting code for interfacing modules in a language which is as close to Python as possible. Python itself only provides a C API to write extension modules, which allows writing of functions and datatypes in C. These can then be accessed from Python. It is possible to wrap the functions and datatypes of existing C libraries as Python objects and therefore make them available to Python.Pyrex allows the user to write extension modules in a Python-like language which may directly access the external C code. The similarity of Pyrex's syntax to Python's makes it easy to write Python modules, but there are some functional limitations. The programmer must specify the name of C-header files, enumerations, datatypes and functions needing to be accessed in the module, then they can be used as if they were Python objects. The Pyrex compiler will generate the necessary glue code automatically and compile the Pyrex code into a working Python module.There are tools like SWIG or...

A monochromator is an optical device that transmits a mechanically selectable narrow band of wavelengths of light or other radiation chosen from a wider range of wavelengths available at the input. The name is from the Greek roots mono-, "single", and chroma, "colour", and the Latin suffix -ator, denoting an agent. Uses A device that can produce monochromatic light has many uses in science and in optics because many optical characteristics of a material are dependent on wavelength. Although there are a number of useful ways to select a narrow band of wavelengths (which, in the visible range, is perceived as a pure color), there are not as many other ways to easily select any wavelength band from a wide range. See below for a discussion of some of the uses of monochromators. In hard X-ray and neutron optics, crystal monochromators are used to define wave conditions on the instruments. Techniques A monochromator can use either the phenomenon of optical dispersion in a prism, or that of diffraction using a diffraction grating, to...