text:
Queenstown, New Zealand

Queenstown (Tāhuna) is a resort town in Otago in the south-west of New Zealand's South Island. It is the seat and largest town in the Queenstown-Lakes District.

The town located on the northwestern edge of Lake Wakatipu, a long, thin, Z-shaped lake formed by glacial processes, and has views of nearby mountains such as The Remarkables, Cecil Peak, Walter Peak and just above the town, Ben Lomond and Queenstown Hill. Queenstown is known for its tourism businesses, especially adventure and ski tourism.

Toponymy
Tāhuna, the te reo name for Queenstown, means "shallow bay".

There are various apocryphal accounts of how Queenstown gained its name, of which the following appears to be the most likely: "When William Rees first arrived in the area and built his homestead, the area was known as The Station although miners soon referred to it as The Camp from 1860 to 1862. The miners, and especially the Irish, had taken an interest in the ceremony held for a town called Cobh in Ireland (then part of the United Kingdom) which was renamed Queenstown in honour of Queen Victoria in 1850.

There was then a public meeting to name the township on the lake in January 1863 (probably the weekend of the 3rd and 4th) in which the town was officially given the name of Queenstown in reference to Ireland's Queenstown. By 9–10 January 1863, the town was being reported with the name of Queenstown in several reports written by a correspondent in the Otago Witness on 5 and 6 January.

Māori settlement and presence
The area was discovered and first settled by Māori. Kāi Tahu say that the lake was dug by the Waitaha ancestor, Rākaihautū, with his kō (digging stick) named Tūwhakaroria. After arriving at Whakatū Nelson in the waka Uruao, Rākaihautū divided his crew into two. He led one group through the interior of Te Waipounamu, digging the freshwater lakes of the island. After digging the lakes Hāwea, Wānaka, and Whakatipu Waimāori, he travelled through the Greenstone and Hollyford valleys before finally digging Whakatipu Waitai (Lake McKerrow).

The first non-Māori to see Lake Wakatipu was European Nathanael Chalmers who was guided by Reko, the chief of the Tuturau, over the Waimea Plains and up the Mataura River in September 1853. Evidence of stake nets, baskets for catching eels, spears and ashes indicated the Glenorchy area was visited by Māori. It is likely Ngāi Tahu Māori visited Queenstown en route to collect Pounamu (greenstone). A settlement called Te Kirikiri Pa was occupied by the tribe of Kāti Māmoe which was situated where the Queenstown Gardens are today, but by the time European migrants arrived in the 1860s this settlement was no longer being used.

European settlement c. 1860
European explorers William Gilbert Rees and Nicholas von Tunzelmann were the first non-Māori to settle the area. Rees established a high country farm in the location of Queenstown's current town centre in 1860, but the discovery of gold in the Arrow River in 1862 encouraged Rees to convert his wool shed into a hotel named the Queen's Arms, now known as Eichardt's.

Many Queenstown streets bear names from the gold mining era (such as Camp Street) and some historic buildings remain. William's Cottage, the Lake Lodge of Ophir (now Artbay Gallery), Queenstown Police Station, and St Peter's Anglican Church lie close together in a designated historic precinct.

1999 flooding
There was a severe weather event in the South Island in November 1999, bringing torrential rainfall in the catchments of Lake Wakatipu. The level of the lake rose from 310.5 m to 312.77 m, leading to the most severe flooding in the recorded history of Queenstown. Properties in central Queenstown close to the lakeshore were flooded up to 1 m deep, causing major damage. Total insurance claims were around $50 million. Properties in Glenorchy and Kingston were also flooded, and the road from Queenstown to Glenorchy was damaged by washouts.

Geography
Queenstown is situated on the shore of Lake Wakatipu, the third largest lake by surface area in New Zealand. The town is located close to the lake's northeastern bend, at which point a small arm, the Frankton Arm, joins the lake with its principal outflow, the Kawarau River. The centre of the town is on the north shore at the point where the Frankton Arm links with the main body of the lake, but also extends to the major suburb of Frankton at the eastern end of the arm, and across to Kelvin Heights on the Kelvin Peninsula, which forms the Frankton Arm's southern shore.

The town is at a relatively low altitude for a ski and snowboarding centre, at 310 m above sea level at the lake shore, but is nestled among mountains, most notably the scenic attraction of The Remarkables, to the town's southeast. Below the lake lies the deep Kawarau Gorge, and there are nearby plains suitable for agriculture and viticulture. Queenstown lies close to the heart of the Central Otago wine region.

Suburbs
Central Queenstown contains many businesses, apartments and homes but is near many suburbs or large areas of housing: Fernhill, Sunshine Bay, Queenstown Hill, Goldfield Heights, Marina Heights, Kelvin Heights, Arthurs Point and Frankton.

Just outside Queenstown are the areas of: Arrowtown, Closeburn, Dalefield, Gibbston, Jack's Point, Hanley's Farm, Hayes Creek, Lake Hayes Estate, Shotover Country and Quail Rise.

Climate
Because of its relatively moderate altitude (310 metres) and high mountain surroundings, Queenstown has an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification Cfb). Summer has long warm days with temperatures that can reach 30 °C while winters are cold with temperatures often in single digits with frequent snowfall, although there is no permanent snow cover during the year. As with the rest of Central Otago, Queenstown lies within the rain shadow of the Southern Alps, but being closer to the west coast the town is more susceptible to rain-bearing fronts than nearby Cromwell, Wānaka and Alexandra. The hottest recorded temperature in Queenstown is 35.2 °C and the coldest is −8.4 °C, while for Queenstown Airport the hottest is 33.4 °C and the coldest is −12.2 °C.

Flood risk
Low-lying areas of Queenstown that are close to Lake Wakatipu are at risk of flooding because during heavy rain and snowmelt, the outflows of the lake via the Kawarau River are less than the inflows and the lake level can rise significantly. Further, the outflow down the Kawarau River is impeded by the large delta of the Shotover River – a major tributary. There is also a narrow gorge that restricts flow in the Kawarau river. As a consequence, Queenstown has been flooded several times since its establishment, and there is an on-going risk of flooding in low-lying areas. As the lake level rises, backflow through the town's stormwater system leads to flooding in some Queenstown streets when the lake level reaches 311.3 m. This has occurred around 20 times since 1878. In any one year, there is a 13 percent chance that the lake will reach this level, and a 75 percent chance of at least one event that exceeds this level in a 10 year period.

Demography
Queenstown is described by Statistics New Zealand as a medium urban area with an area of 86.61 km2. It had an urban population of making it the 24th-largest urban area in New Zealand. In 2016, Queenstown overtook Oamaru to become the second-largest urban area in Otago, behind Dunedin. Prior to 2023, the Queenstown urban area as defined by Statistics New Zealand didn't include Lake Hayes or Arthurs Point, which are contiguous with Queenstown but were designated as separate urban areas.

Before the 2023 census, the town had a smaller boundary, covering 28.40 km2. Using that boundary, the Queenstown urban area had a population of 13,539 at the 2018 New Zealand census, an increase of 2,205 people (19.5%) since the 2013 census, and an increase of 3,111 people (29.8%) since the 2006 census. There were 4,254 households. There were 7,089 males and 6,447 females, giving a sex ratio of 1.1 males per female, with 1,341 people (9.9%) aged under 15 years, 4,887 (36.1%) aged 15 to 29, 6,264 (46.3%) aged 30 to 64, and 1,041 (7.7%) aged 65 or older.

Ethnicities were 71.2% European/Pākehā, 4.5% Māori, 1.2% Pacific peoples, 17.8% Asian, and 10.5% other ethnicities (totals add to more than 100% since people could identify with multiple ethnicities).

The proportion of people born overseas was 58.3%, compared with 27.1% nationally.

Although some people objected to giving their religion, 58.5% had no religion, 29.1% were Christian, 2.8% were Hindu, 0.6% were Muslim, 1.7% were Buddhist and 3.4% had other religions.

Of those at least 15 years old, 3,234 (26.5%) people had a bachelor or higher degree, and 759 (6.2%) people had no formal qualifications. 1,692 people (13.9%) earned over $70,000 compared to 17.2% nationally. The employment status of those at least 15 was that 9,165 (75.1%) people were employed full-time, 1,263 (10.4%) were part-time, and 138 (1.1%) were unemployed.

Economy
The economy of Queenstown is a major contributor to the economy of the Queenstown Lakes District, although the district covers a much wider area than Queenstown, and includes the towns of Wānaka to the north-east, Glenorchy to the north-west and Kingston to the south.

Housing
Residential housing in the Queenstown area is expensive due to factors such as the town being a tourist destination, its lack of land and its desirability to foreigners and investors. Queenstown is rated the least affordable place in New Zealand to buy a property, overtaking Auckland at the start of 2017. In December 2016 the average house price in the Queenstown area rose to $1 million NZD. Between 2016 and 2019, average rents in Queenstown rose progressively; reaching 10.8% in 2016, 16% in 2017, and 7.4% in 2018, and 9.6% in 2019. 2018 census data showed 27 percent of Queenstown homes were marked as unoccupied.

During the early 2020s, Queenstown experienced a decline in rental housing. Between December 2021 and December 2022, the online auction platform Trade Me reported a 49% decline in rental listings across the Queenstown-Lakes District. Similarly, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) reported that the number of rental houses in the District had dropped by 100 between November 2021 and November 2022. Despite a building boom in 2022, Stuff reported that 27% of homes in the Lakes District were unoccupied since their owners preferred to use them as holiday homes or short-term accommodation rather than rentals By November 2022, Radio New Zealand reported that the average home in the Lakes District cost NZ$1.7 million while a three-bedroom rental cost a minimum of NZ$800 per week and a single bedroom rental NZ$500 or more per week.

In October 2022, Environment Minister David Parker confirmed that the New Zealand Government had fast-tracked the Te Pūtahi project at Lake Hayes Estate to build 748 more homes, a public transport area, and a possible school.

By early 2023, Stuff, Radio New Zealand, and The New Zealand Herald reported that a shortage of rental housing had forced many workers and businesspeople to sleep in cars, couches, tents, visitor hostels, and others to leave the town. In addition, the housing shortage had contributed to a worker shortage among local businesses since they had trouble attracting foreign visa workers or those from outside Queenstown. The Herald also reported that some workers in Queenstown were asking local rental agents if they could stay in vacant properties being sold. In late March 2023, 100 people participated in a protest at Queenstown's waterfront to raise awareness of the resort town's acute rental housing shortage. The protest was attended by National Party Southland electorate Member of Parliament Joseph Mooney and Queenstown Lakes District Councillor Craig Ferguson.

Employment
The area’s growth rate is one of the fastest in the country with the population growing 7.1% from 2015 to 2016 in a 12-month period. Most jobs in Queenstown are tourism- or accommodation-related. Employment growth was also the highest of any area in New Zealand at 10.3% in the March 2016 year.

Retail
Queenstown has a tourist-focused shopping area, centred around the Queenstown Mall. The public pedestrian street opened in 1990, and includes Reading Cinemas.

O'Connells Shopping Centre also opened in 1990, and is due to undergo an upgrade in 2021.

In 1986, Queenstown was granted an exemption to allow shops to open every day of the year except Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and before 12 noon on Anzac Day (at the time, shops in New Zealand were required to close on Sundays and public holidays). The exemption was extended in 1990 allow shops to open on Easter Sunday. The exemption applies to all shops within a 35 km radius of the intersection of Camp Street and Ballarat Street (the location of the Queenstown post office in 1986), and makes Queenstown and the Lake Wakatipu basin one of only three areas in New Zealand where shops may open on Good Friday (the other two are Picton and Paihia).

Local
Queenstown lies in the Queenstown-Lakes District territorial authority. It is also part of the Otago region, administered by the Otago Regional Council.

National
For the New Zealand Parliament, Queenstown is covered by one general electorate, Southland, and one Maori electorate, Te Tai Tonga. As of the 2023 general election, Southland is represented by Joseph Mooney (National) and Te Tai Tonga is represented by Tākuta Ferris (Te Pāti Māori).

Tourism
Tourism is a large component of the Queenstown economy, particularly outdoor and adventure tourism activities including skiing and snowboarding, jet boating, whitewater rafting, bungy jumping, mountain biking, skateboarding, tramping, paragliding, sky diving and fly fishing.

Queenstown is a major centre for snow sports in New Zealand, with four main mountain ski fields: Cardrona Alpine Resort, Coronet Peak, The Remarkables and Treble Cone. Cross country skiing is also available at the Waiorau Snow Farm, near Cardrona village.

A heritage steamship, the twin screw coal fired steamer TSS Earnslaw operates on Lake Wakatipu.

Queenstown lies close to the centre of the world's southernmost wine region, the Central Otago wine region, which has a growing international reputation for its quality Pinot Noir. The Two Paddocks vineyard is owned by internationally known New Zealand actor Sam Neill, and neighbouring, historic Arrowtown features restaurants and bars.

Other tourist activities include Ben Lomond, a nearby mountain with a panoramic outlook on Bob's Peak, and its Skyline Queenstown gondola. Queenstown hosts the Kiwi Park wildlife sanctuary, and Paradise is a nearby rural location known for its paradise duck population (Tadorna variegata). The Queenstown Trail and Skippers Road are popular walking, running, and mountain-biking tracks.

Festivals
Queenstown has many festivals. Examples include the ten-day Bike Festival held in January, Winter Festival (June), Jazz Festival (October), and Winter Pride (August–September) which is the largest winter pride event in the Southern Hemisphere.

Locations for television and film
Jane Campion's six-part drama mystery Top of the Lake was shot during 2012 for pay TV release in 2013. The lakes of the Wakatipu appear ominous, and the Southern Alps spectacular. The main location is Moke Lake and scenes were shot on Lower Beach Street and Coronation Drive, and at a supermarket and bottle store on Shotover Street.

In 2010, Cycle 14 of America's Next Top Model, was, in part filmed in Queenstown and was as won by Krista White. Raina Hein was runner-up.

Queenstown and the surrounding area contain many locations used in the filming of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Locations used include Paradise near Glenorchy, at the head of Lake Wakatipu.

Queenstown became popular in South Asia after the release of Bollywood blockbuster Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai, which was partially shot there. Starring sensational debuts by Hrithik Roshan and Amisha Patel it was this film that opened the doors for both tourists and filmmakers from India to New Zealand with Queenstown being the most sought-after destination. Queenstown featured for 17 minutes in I Hate Luv Storys, a 2010 Bollywood romantic comedy. Queenstown and the surrounding areas were also used in the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine film. Mee-Shee: The Water Giant was shot in Queenstown in 2005, and released to DVD in the same year. Queenstown was also used to film most of the 1988 The Rescue. Queenstown was the base for filming the George Lucas 1988 fantasy film Willow.

Filming of the 1981 film Race for the Yankee Zephyr took place in and around Queenstown, the first major motion picture production for the area.

A 1989 TV Commercial for the Toyota Hilux starring Barry Crump and Lloyd Scott in which the two drive off the cliff was filmed at nearby Queenstown Hill.

The first and last episodes of the fifth season of The Mole were filmed in Queenstown.

The 2017 Filipino drama film Northern Lights was shot entirely on location in Queenstown substituting for the setting of Alaska.

In 2017 the Korean variety show Running Man shot an episode in Queenstown, where Haha and Yang-Se Chan took a penalty at the Nevis Swing.

The 2020 crime drama One Lane Bridge was filmed in Queenstown. The series focuses on events that take place at a bridge over the Dart River / Te Awa Whakatipu.

Sports and recreation

 * Queenstown Events Centre and stadium
 * Paragliding or Hang Gliding
 * Aerobatics with the Wakatipu Aero Club at Queenstown Airport at Frankton
 * Golf at Millbrook Resort, Jack's Point, or Queenstown Golf Club
 * Disc golf at the Queenstown Gardens
 * Tennis at the Queenstown Tennis Club in Queenstown Gardens
 * Cricket at the Queenstown Cricket Club
 * Netball at the Wakatipu Netball Centre
 * Rugby league and Rugby union at the Wakatipu Rugby League Club Memorial Park
 * Touch rugby during the summer season
 * Scuba diving or snorkeling in a river, bridge wreck, or in Lake Wakatipu
 * Adventure sport, canyon-swing, parachute, jetboat, bungy jump, river-surf, or kitesurf

In the area

 * Central Otago region
 * Central Otago wine region
 * History of the Central Otago Gold Rush
 * Fiordland National Park, including the Milford Road and Homer Tunnel to Milford Sound / Piopiotahi, as well as the Fiordland Lakes and Doubtful Sound / Patea
 * Tramping track near Glenorchy
 * Routeburn, one of the New Zealand Great Walks

Primary schools
Queenstown Primary School is a co-educational state primary school for Year 1 to 8 students, with a roll of  as of.

St Joseph's School is a co-educational Catholic state-integrated primary school for Year 1 to 8 students, with a roll of.

There are also two primary schools in Frankton and a school in Shotover Country.

Secondary schools
Wakatipu High School, a state secondary school for Year 9 to 13 students, is located in Frankton.

Tertiary education
Southern Institute of Technology (SIT), based in Invercargill, has a campus in Queenstown.

Queenstown Resort College is a tertiary education provider focussing on tourism. The college actively supports events for international travel agents.

ACE Wakatipu has a community focus, and provides links to many adult training opportunities.

Saint Andrew's church
Saint Andrew's Presbyterian church was completed in 1968 to replace the previous church which was sold and demolished to reuse the land. The church is designed to seat 350 parishioners. The Presbyterian church has been active in the Wakatipu area since 1865.

Saint Peter's church
Saint Peter's Anglican church was built in 1932 for a cost of 2862 pounds, it was consecrated on 23 November 1932. It replaced the previous wooden church which was built in 1863.

Saint Joseph's church
Saint Joseph's Catholic church was built in 1898, it replaced the first catholic church built in Queenstown in 1863. It is built from schist sourced from Arthur's Point. Built in the Gothic Revival style, it was designed by the architect Francis Petre. It is a category two historic place.

Transport
Queenstown is accessible by road and air but not by rail (similar to Kaitaia, Taupō and Nelson).

As a resort centre, many bus services operate into Queenstown, mostly for package tours, but daily services for locals and others are available to and from Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch, the main cities closest to Queenstown. Bee Cards replaced GoCards on local buses on 15 September 2020.

Queenstown Airport takes flights from Australia by airlines Air New Zealand, Qantas, Virgin Australia and Jetstar and has destinations that include Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne and Sydney (the frequency is much increased over the ski season and during summer). Domestic flights fly to Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. Queenstown Airport is New Zealand's busiest helicopter base, also the fourth-busiest airport by passenger traffic, and is also heavily used for tourist 'flightseeing', especially to Milford Sound / Piopiotahi and Aoraki / Mount Cook, using both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft.

The primary road access to the Queenstown area is via (SH6), from Cromwell through the Kawarau Gorge to Frankton, where a 9 km spur (SH6A) leads to the CBD and connects with the Glenorchy Road. SH6 continues south, crossing the Kawarau river before heading down the eastern side of Lake Wakatipu to Kingston before crossing the provincial boundary and emerging on the plains of Southland, terminating in the city of Invercargill. A difficult road over the Crown Range leads to Cardrona skifield and Wānaka, and is New Zealand's highest paved public road pass.

Queenstown is the departure point for a large number of bus day trips to Milford Sound, which entails a return trip of approximately 12 hours. There are scenic flights available to and from Milford Sound. A return flight, including a two-hour cruise, is approximately four hours.

Utilities
In September 2023, there was an outbreak of illness caused by cryptosporidium in Queenstown, with most cases located in the central business area and affecting people under the age of 40. Health officials were unable to immediately link the cases, or identify the source of the outbreak, and described the outbreak as very unusual. A "boil water" notice was issued for all water supplies across Queenstown. The regulator Taumata Arowai issued a compliance order to the Queenstown Lakes District Council for one of its water treatment plants, because it did not have a protozoa barrier to prevent cryptosporidium entering the water supply.

Electricity distribution in Queenstown is the responsibility of two companies, Dunedin-based Aurora Energy and Invercargill-based Powernet. Electricity is supplied from Transpower's national grid at its substation in Frankton, which in turn is fed by a twin-circuit 110,000-volt line from Transpower's Cromwell substation.

Queenstown was one of the last towns in New Zealand with a manual telephone exchange, whereby all calls had to be connected by an operator. The town was upgraded to a fully automatic exchange in 1988. Fibre to the premises was rolled-out in Queenstown as part of the Fifth National Government's Ultra-Fast Broadband programme, with the rollout completed in July 2016.

Notable people

 * Sam Neill (born 1947), actor, has a home in Queenstown
 * Tim Bevan (born 1957), film producer, was born in Queenstown
 * Jaime Passier-Armstrong (born 1981), actress, was born in Queenstown
 * Jane Taylor, lawyer and current Chair of New Zealand Post, lives in Queenstown
 * Kim Dotcom, internet entrepreneur

Sister cities

 * Aspen, Colorado, United States
 * Hangzhou, Zhejiang
 * Hikimi, Shimane (now a part of Masuda), Japan

title: Queenstown, New Zealand


text:
User:Bmchenry

There is a message for you on your talk page

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Bmchenry


text:
Chorology

Chorology (from Greek χῶρος, khōros, "place, space"; and -λογία, -logia) can mean
 * the study of the causal relations between geographical phenomena occurring within a particular region
 * the study of the spatial distribution of organisms (biogeography).

"The goal of the chorological point of view is to know the character of regions and places through comprehension of the existence together and interrelations among different realms of reality and their varied manifestations, and to comprehend the earth surface as a whole in its actual arrangement in continents, larger and smaller regions, and places."

In geography, the term was first used by Strabo. In the twentieth century, Richard Hartshorne worked on that notion again. The term was popularized by Ferdinand von Richthofen.

title: Chorology


text:
User talk:Bmchenry

Hi. Welcome to the Wikipedia. We can always use new contributors around here.

You might want to have a quick look at the policy pages, especially neutral point of view, particularly in reference to your article on the future of cars. Such an article is likely to be very difficult to write in compliance with the policy, which is why we generally try to avoid speculation. --Robert Merkel

Hiya. I'm a comparative newbie, so I'll try and share some advice...
 * Check out redirects - rather than creating topic that say nothing but "see X".
 * Try to add to existing entries rather than creating new ones. In this case smart car, Intelligent transportation system, automated highway system could all do with the touch of an expert on the subject.

Anyway, have fun :) Martin

Also check out What Wikipedia is not, with particular reference to point 9. Mintguy

The pedia is an encyclopedia, not a discussion forum. Articles like "Improving the WikiWeb" aren't approprate, no more so than an op-ed piece in Britanica.

Turds
I know you meant well, but neither the article on, nor links to, the concept of "Wikiturds" is useful. DS 12:24, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Notability of Christopher Allen
Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Christopher Allen, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Christopher Allen seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable. To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Christopher Allen, please affix the template to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that '''this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here''' CSDWarnBot (talk) 09:30, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Nomination of Future car technologies for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Future car technologies is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Future car technologies until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Luke no 94 (tell Luke off here) 11:14, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

title: User talk:Bmchenry


text:
Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo ( 29 September 1864 – 31 December 1936) was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca.

His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life (1912), and his most famous novels were Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917), a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story, and Mist (1914), which Literary Encyclopedia calls "the most acclaimed Spanish Modernist novel".

Biography

Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of the Basque Country, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language, which he could speak, and competed for a teaching position in the Instituto de Bilbao against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue.

Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry, and theater, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98, an ex post facto literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín)—a group that includes, besides Azorín, Antonio Machado, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Ángel Ganivet, among others.

Unamuno would have preferred to be a philosophy professor, but was unable to get an academic appointment; philosophy in Spain was somewhat politicized. Instead he became a Greek professor.

In 1901 Unamuno gave his well-known conference on the scientific and literary inviability of the Basque. According to Azurmendi, Unamuno went against the Basque language once his political views changed as a result of his reflection on Spain.

In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval. During the 1910s and 1920s, he became one of the most passionate advocates of Spanish social liberalism. Unamuno linked his liberalism with his hometown of Bilbao, which, through its commerce and connection with the civilized world, Unamuno believed had developed an individualism and independent outlook in stark contrast to the narrow-mindedness of Carlist traditionalism. When in 1912 José Canalejas was assassinated by an anarchist, he blamed it on the fact that Spain lacked a "true liberal democratic party" and in 1914 denounced the Spanish nobility for their alleged philistinism. Along with many other Spanish writers and intellectuals, such as Benito Pérez Galdós, he was an outspoken supporter of the Allied cause during the First World War despite Spain's official neutrality. Unamuno viewed the war as a crusade not just against the Imperial Family of the German Empire, but against the monarchy in Spain, and intensified his attacks upon King Alfonso XIII.

Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protests of other Spanish intellectuals. As a result of his vociferous criticisms of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands; his house there is now a museum, as is his house in Salamanca. From Fuerteventura he escaped to France, as related in his book De Fuerteventura a Paris. After a year in Paris, Unamuno established himself in Hendaye, a border town in the French Basque Country, as close to Spain as he could get while remaining in France. Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the university, Unamuno began his lecture by saying, as Fray Luis de León had done after four years of imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition, "As we were saying yesterday..." (Decíamos ayer...).

Also after the fall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Spain embarked on its Second Republic. He was a candidate on the Republican/Socialist ticket and was elected, after which he led a large demonstration in the Plaza Mayor in which he raised the Republic's flag and declared its victory. He always was a moderate and refused all political and anticlerical. In a speech delivered on 28 November 1932, at the Madrid Ateneo, Unamuno protested against Manuel Azaña's anti-clerical policies: "Even the Inquisition was limited by certain legal guarantees. But now we have something worse: a police force which is grounded only on a general sense of panic and on the invention of non-existent dangers to cover up this over-stepping of the law."

Unamuno's dislike for Manuel Azaña's ruling went so far as to tell a reporter who published his statement in El Adelanto in June 1936 that President Manuel Azaña "should commit suicide as a patriotic act". The Republican government had a serious problem with this statement, and on 22 August 1936, they decreed that Unamuno should once again be removed from his position as rector of the university. Moreover, the government removed his name from streets and replaced it with the name of Simón Bolívar.

Having begun his literary career as an internationalist, Unamuno gradually became convinced of the universal values of Spanish culture, feeling that Spain's essential qualities would be destroyed if influenced too much by outside forces. Thus he initially welcomed Franco's revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from the Red Terror by forces loyal to the Second Spanish Republic. When a journalist questioned how he could side with the military and "abandon a Republic that [he] helped create," Unamuno responded, it "is not a fight against the liberal Republic, but a fight for civilization. What Madrid represents now is not socialism or democracy, or even communism."

However, the tactics employed by the Nationalist faction in the struggle against their republican opponents caused Unamuno to also turn against Franco. Unamuno said that the military revolt would lead to the victory of "a brand of Catholicism that is not Christian and of a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns," referring in the latter case to the 1921 war with Abd el-Krim in Spanish Morocco.

In 1936 Unamuno had a public argument with Nationalist general Millán Astray at the university in which he denounced both Astray—with whom he had had verbal battles in the 1920s—and elements of the Nationalist faction. Shortly afterwards, Unamuno was removed for a second time as the rector of the University of Salamanca. A few days later he confided to Nikos Kazantzakis:

"No, I have not become a right-winger. Pay no mind to what people say. No, I have not betrayed the cause of liberty. But for now, it's totally essential that order be restored. But one day I will rise up—soon—and throw myself into the fight for liberty, by myself. No, I am neither fascist nor Bolshevik. I am alone!...Like Croce in Italy, I am alone!"

On 21 November, he wrote to the Italian philosopher Lorenzo Giusso that "The barbarism is unanimous. It is a regime of terror on both sides." In one of his final letters, dated 13 December, Unamuno, in terms that were to be widely quoted, condemned the White Terror being committed by Franco's forces:

"'[Franco's army] is waging a campaign against liberalism, not against Bolshevism [...] They will win, but they will not convince; they will conquer, but they will not convert.'"

Broken-hearted, Unamuno was placed under house arrest by Franco, until his death.

Confrontation with Millán Astray
On 12 October 1936, the Spanish Civil War had been underway for just under three months; the celebration of Discovery of America had brought together a politically diverse crowd at the University of Salamanca, including Enrique Pla y Deniel, the Archbishop of Salamanca, and Carmen Polo Martínez-Valdés, the wife of Franco, Africanist General José Millán Astray and Unamuno himself.

Unamuno had supported Franco's uprising because he believed it necessary to bring order to the anarchy created by the Popular Front, and that day he was representing General Franco in the event. By then the Republican Government had removed Unamuno from his perpetual rectory at the Salamanca University and the rebel government had restored him.

There are different versions of what occurred.

The Portillo/Thomas version
According to the British historian Hugh Thomas in his magnum opus The Spanish Civil War (1961), the evening began with an impassioned speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán. After this, Professor Francisco Maldonado decried Catalonia and the Basque Country as "cancers on the body of the nation," adding that "Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism."

From somewhere in the auditorium, someone cried out the Spanish Legion's motto "¡Viva la Muerte!" [Long live death!]. As was his habit, Millán Astray, the founder and first commander of the Spanish Legion, responded with "¡España!" [Spain!]; the crowd replied with "¡Una!" [One!]. He repeated "¡España!"; the crowd then replied "¡Grande!" [Great!]. A third time, Millán Astray shouted "¡España!"; the crowd responded "Libre!" [Free!] This—Spain, one, great, and free—was a common Falangist cheer and would become a francoist motto thereafter. Later, a group of uniformed Falangists entered, saluting the portrait of Franco that hung on the wall.

Unamuno, who was presiding over the meeting, rose up slowly and addressed the crowd: "You are waiting for my words. You know me well, and know I cannot remain silent for long. Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. I want to comment on the so-called speech of Professor Maldonado, who is with us here. I will ignore the personal offence to the Basques and Catalans. I myself, as you know, was born in Bilbao. The Bishop," Unamuno gestured to the Archbishop of Salamanca, "whether you like it or not, is Catalan, born in Barcelona. But now I have heard this insensitive and necrophilous oath, '¡Viva la Muerte!', and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent. General Millán Astray is a cripple. There is no need for us to say this with whispered tones. He is a war cripple. So was Cervantes. But unfortunately, Spain today has too many cripples. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millán Astray could dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. A cripple, who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes, hopes to find relief by adding to the number of cripples around him."

Millán Astray responded: "Death to intelligence! Long live death!" provoking applause from the Falangists. Pemán, in an effort to calm the crowd, exclaimed "No! Long live intelligence! Death to the bad intellectuals!"

Unamuno continued: "This is the temple of intelligence, and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will win [venceréis], because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince [pero no convenceréis]. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I see it is useless to ask you to think of Spain. I have spoken." Millán Astray, controlling himself, shouted "Take the lady's arm!" Unamuno took Carmen Polo by the arm and left under her protection.

The Severiano Delgado version
In 2018, the details of Unamuno's speech were disputed by the historian Severiano Delgado, who argued that the account in a 1941 article by Luis Gabriel Portillo (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine Horizon may not have been an accurate representation of events.

Severiano Delgado, a historian and librarian at the University of Salamanca, asserts that Unamuno's words were put in his mouth by Luis Portillo, in 1941, possibly with some help from George Orwell, in a piece in the literary magazine Horizon, entitled Unamuno's Last Lecture. Portillo had not witnessed the event.

Severiano Delgado's book, titled Archeology of a Myth: The act of October 12, 1936 in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca, shows how the propaganda myth arose regarding the confrontation that took place that day between Miguel de Unamuno and the general Millán Astray.

Delgado agrees that a "very fierce and violent verbal confrontation" between Unamuno and Millán Astray definitely occurred, which led to Unamuno being removed from his rectorship, but he thinks that the famous speech attributed to Unamuno was invented and written by Luis Portillo."

Delgado says that: "What Portillo did was to come up with a kind of liturgical drama, where you have an angel and a devil confronting one another. What he wanted to do above all was symbolise evil—fascism, militarism, brutality—through Millán Astray, and set it against the democratic values of the republicans—liberalism and goodness—represented by Unamuno. Portillo had no intention of misleading anyone; it was simply a literary evocation."

Unamuno took the floor, not to confront Millán Astray, but to answer a previous speech by Professor of Literature Francisco Maldonado who had identified Catalonia and the Basque Country with the "antiespaña" (Antispain). Unamuno himself was Basque and was revolted with Francisco Maldonado's speech, but when addressing the audience, Unamuno used the example of what had happened with José Rizal (a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution). Millán Astray had fought in the Philippines and it was the reference to José Rizal that annoyed Millán Astray, who shouted "The traitoring intellectuals die".

As proof that the incident was nothing more than a crossroads of hard words, the photograph reproduced on the cover of his book shows Millán Astray and Miguel de Unamuno calmly saying goodbye in the presence of Bishop Plà, with no tension between them. The photo was discovered in 2018 in the National Library and was part of the chronicle of the act that the newspaper "The Advancement of Salamanca" published the following day, 13 October 1936.

According to Delgado, Portillo's account of the speech became famous when a then very young British historian Hugh Thomas, aged 30, came across it in a Horizon anthology while researching his seminal book, The Spanish Civil War, and mistakenly took it as a primary source.

Death
Unamuno died on 31 December 1936 during house arrest imposed by the military forces that occupied Salamanca at the time. He died as a result of the inhalation of gases from a brazier during a one hour long interview with a visitor. A recent theory cites a 2020 book by Colette Rabaté and Jean-Claude Rabaté to suggest that he may have been murdered by Bartolomé Aragón, the last person to have visited him, based on the fact that he falsely claimed to be a former student of his, was a fascist militant (and requeté) with opposed political ideas to Unamuno and had collaborated with Nationals propaganda before. In fact, the Rabaté couple never defended this theory, since they have no new evidence to support it. These circumstances are, however, well known since the time of the events in 1936, and Aragón and Unamuno had indeed a previous intellectual relationship. Additional telltale findings were: the lack of autopsy (despite having been mandatory, as the cause of death was determined to be a sudden death due to an intracranial bleeding), two screams from Unamuno heard by his maid during the Aragón visit and discrepancies in the time of death registered by the coroner and the authorities.

Fiction

 * Paz en la guerra (Peace in War) (1897) – a novel that explores the relationship of self and world through familiarity with death. It is based on his experiences as a child during the Carlist siege of Bilbao in the Third Carlist War.
 * Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy) (1902) – a novel uniting comedy and tragedy in an absurd parody of positivist sociology.
 * El espejo de la muerte (The Mirror of Death) (1913) – a collection of stories.

 * Niebla (Mist) (1914) – one of Unamuno's key works, which he called a nivola to distinguish it from the supposedly fixed form of the novel (novela in Spanish).
 * Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (usually translated into English as Our Lord Don Quixote) (1914) – another key work of Unamuno, often perceived as one of the earliest works applying existential elements to Don Quixote. The book, on Unamuno's own admission, is of mixed genre with elements of personal essay, philosophy, and fiction. Unamuno felt that Miguel de Cervantes had not told the story of Don Quijote very well, cluttering it with unrelated tales. Unamuno intended this work to present Cervantes' story the way it should have been written. He felt that as a quijotista (a fan or student of Don Quixote) he was superior to Cervantes. The work is primarily of interest to those studying Unamuno, not Cervantes.
 * Abel Sánchez (1917) – a novel that uses the story of Cain and Abel to explore envy.
 * Tulio Montalbán (1920) – a short novel on the threat of a man's public image undoing his true personality, a problem familiar to the famous Unamuno.
 * Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue) (1920) – a much-studied work with a famous prologue. The title deliberately recalls the famous Novelas ejemplares of Miguel de Cervantes.
 * La tía Tula (Aunt Tula) (1921) – his final large-scale novel, a work about maternity, a theme that he had already examined in Amor y pedagogía and Dos madres.
 * Teresa (1924) – a narrative work that contains romantic poetry, achieving an ideal through the re-creation of the beloved.
 * Cómo se hace una novela (How to Make a Novel) (1927) – the autopsy of an Unamuno novel.
 * Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez (Don Sandalio, Chess Player) (1930).
 * San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) (1930) – a brief novella that synthesizes virtually all of Unamuno's thought. The novella centres on a heroic priest who has lost his faith in immortality, yet says nothing of his doubts to his parishioners, not wanting to disturb their faith, which he recognizes is a necessary support for their lives.

Philosophy
Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself." He developed intellectually under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but during his youth he wrote articles that clearly show his sympathy for socialism and his great concern for the situation in which he found Spain at the time. An important concept for Unamuno was intrahistoria. He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts. Some authors relativize the importance of intrahistoria in his thinking. Those authors say that more than a clear concept, it is an ambiguous metaphor. The term first appears in the essay En torno al casticismo (1895), but Unamuno leaves it soon.

In the late nineteenth century Unamuno suffered a religious crisis and left the positivist philosophy. Then, in the early twentieth century, he developed his own thinking influenced by existentialism. Life was tragic, according to Unamuno, because of the knowledge that we are to die. He explains much of human activity as an attempt to survive, in some form, after our death. Unamuno summarized his personal creed thus: "My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live." He said, "Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge." He provides a stimulating discussion of the differences between faith and reason in his most famous work: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life, 1912).

A historically influential paperfolder from childhood to his last, difficult days, in several works Unamuno ironically expressed philosophical views of Platonism, scholasticism, positivism, and the "science vs religion" issue in terms of "origami" figures, notably the traditional Spanish pajarita. Since he was also a linguist (professor of Greek), he coined the word "cocotología" ("cocotology") to describe the art of paper folding. After the conclusion of Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy, 1902), he included in the volume, attributing it to one of the characters, "Notes for a Treatise on Cocotology" ("Apuntes para un tratado de cocotología").

Along with The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno's long-form essay La agonía del cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) and his novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, 1930) were all included on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

After his youthful sympathy for socialism ended, Unamuno gravitated towards liberalism. Unamuno's conception of liberalism, elaborated in essays such as La esencia del liberalismo in 1909, was one that sought to reconcile a great respect for individual freedom with a more interventionist state, bringing him to a position closer to social liberalism. In writing about the Church in 1932 during the second Spanish Republic, Unamuno urged the clergy to end their attacks on liberalism and instead embrace it as a way of rejuvenating the faith.

Unamuno was probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature, and history of his time. He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as with those of Catalan literature. He believed that Iberian countries should come together through the exchange of manifestations of the spirit but he was openly against any type of Iberian Federalism.

In the final analysis Unamuno's significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga, and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into Western intellectual life.

Poetry
For Unamuno, the art of poetry was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death.

Unamuno was always attracted to traditional meters and, though his early poems did not rhyme, he subsequently turned to rhyme in his later works.

Among his outstanding works of poetry are:
 * Poesías (Poems) (1907) – his first collection of poetry, in which he outlined the themes that would dominate his poetics: religious conflict, Spain, and domestic life
 * Rosario de sonetos líricos (Rosary of Lyric Sonnets) (1911)
 * El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez) (1920) – a religious work, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives: as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption, as a reflection on his Biblical names (Christ the myth, Christ the man on the cross, Christ, God, Christ the Eucharist), as poetic meaning, as painted by Diego Velázquez, etc.
 * Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922) – something of a travel book, in which Unamuno expresses profound emotion and experiments with landscape both evocative and realistic (a theme typical of his generation of writers)
 * Rimas de dentro (Rhymes from Within) (1923)
 * Rimas de un poeta desconocido (Rhymes from an Unknown Poet) (1924)
 * De Fuerteventura a París (From Fuerteventura to Paris) (1925)
 * Romancero del destierro (Ballads of Exile) (1928)
 * Cancionero (Songbook) (1953, published posthumously)

Drama
Unamuno's dramatic production presents a philosophical progression.

Questions such as individual spirituality, faith as a "vital lie", and the problem of a double personality were at the center of La esfinge (The Sphinx) (1898), and La verdad (Truth), (1899).

In 1934, he wrote El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro (Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre).

Unamuno's theatre is schematic; he did away with artifice and focused only on the conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity was influenced by classical Greek theatre. What mattered to him was the presentation of the drama going on inside of the characters, because he understood the novel as a way of gaining knowledge about life.

By symbolizing passion and creating a theatre austere both in word and presentation, Unamuno's theatre opened the way for the renaissance of Spanish theatre undertaken by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorín, and Federico García Lorca.

In popular culture

 * A sculpture of Unamuno's head by Victorio Macho was installed in the City Hall of Bilbao, Spain. It was withdrawn in 1936 when Unamuno showed temporary support for the Nationalist side. During the Spanish Civil War, it was thrown into the estuary. It was later recovered. In 1984 the head was installed in Plaza Unamuno near his birthplace. In 1999, it was again thrown into the estuary after a political meeting of Euskal Herritarrok. It was substituted by a copy in 2000 after the original was located in the water. The original was installed in the mayor's office.
 * In 2021, United States based jazz pianist and composer Dave Meder published an album of original music inspired by Unamuno's life and writing, entitled Unamuno Songs and Stories.
 * In the 2015 documentary La isla del viento, directed by Manuel Menchón, Unamuno is played by José Luis Gómez and his 1924 exile in Fuerteventura due to his critics to Primo de Rivera is depicted.
 * The 2019 film While at War shows Unamuno (played by Karra Elejalde) between 18 July 1936 and his death.
 * In the TV series Star Trek: Picard, the pilot Chris Rios has a book copy of The Tragic Sense of Life on the ship's dashboard.
 * The climax of the fiction (and meta-fiction) The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Editorial Caminho, Lisboa, Portugal, 1984; English translation, HarcourtISBN 978-0-15-199735-0, 1991) by José Saramago features a report of the famous Salamanca argument with Milan d'Astray, but seen from a Portuguese perspective.

title: Miguel de Unamuno


text:
Preikestolen

Preikestolen or Prekestolen ('The Pulpit Rock', 'Pulpit', or 'Preacher's Chair') is a tourist attraction in the municipality of Strand in Rogaland county, Norway. Preikestolen is a steep cliff which rises 604 m above Lysefjorden. Atop the cliff, there is an almost flat top of approximately 25 x. Preikestolen is located near the Western part of the fjord, and on its North side.

Tourism at the site has been increasing in the early 21st century, with 300,000 visitors in 2024, making it one of the most visited natural tourist attractions in Norway. BASE jumpers often leap from the cliff. Due to its increased popularity, the most used path to the site (a 3.8 km long hike) was improved by Nepalese Sherpas in 2013.

Name
The old local name of the site is Hyvlatonnå; (woodworker's) Plane's Tooth. The name Prekestolen (without the i) was coined around the year 1900 when the local tourist organisation,, wanted to promote the site for trekking. The "i" was added later to concord with Nynorsk, the official local form of Norwegian, and the site is now known both locally and officially as "Preikestolen."

Access
Preikestolen is located in the southern part of the Ryfylke district in Rogaland county in Western Norway. The city of Stavanger, the fourth largest in Norway, with a number of direct flights to/from European cities, is located 25 km from the site. The parking facility for Preikestolen is located, thanks to the April 2020 opening of underwater tunnel Ryfylketunnelen, about 40 minutes from Stavanger by car.

Access to Preikestolen from Stavanger is via the Norwegian National Road 13 (Rv13). From the south, it is possible to drive to the Preikestolen parking facility via the ferry from Lauvvika to Oanes. Ferries run year-round, but have limited hours, so plan ahead if opting for ferry over tunnel.

The road to the site ends in the municipality of Strand, just south of the town of Jørpeland at a parking facility at the Preikestolen Fjellstue, with a trail extending from the parking facility to the site. A round-trip hike to Preikestolen from the closest car park takes about 3–4 hours for someone of average fitness.

The walk to Preikestolen is very steep in places. The path starts at the Preikestolhytta, at an elevation of approximately 270 m above sea level, and climbs to 604 m. The walk takes 2–3 hours depending on traffic along the trail, experience, and fitness level. Even though the elevation differential is only 334 m and the walk is not particularly long, about 3.8 km each way, the total elevation gain and loss over the course of the hike is more than one might initially expect, as the path climbs and descends various ridges. The walk is more difficult in winter and spring when there is snow and ice. Due to snow, it is not always possible to do the hike to the top in the winter.

Alternative access is available via a path from Bratteli – a stop for the tourist ferry from to Lysebotn that passes beneath the Pulpit Rock. This walk is more demanding, and takes 4–5 hours each way.

An alternative is to sail through the Lysefjorden, with trips running year-round. Outside of summer, the weather may be wet and cold, and clouds may obstruct views of the cliff. The ship stops at several small docks on the way in and out, including a layover at the end of the Lysefjorden at the village of Lysebotn.

Improvement project
In early April 2013, a project started to improve the path up to Preikestolen as the old one was so small that it often caused "delays", and at some points on the path it was sometimes impossible to get through. By 2016 the path was completed.

In 2019 a new project started to further improve paths, new website and improvement of signs.

Safety
The authorities have opted not to install fencing or other safety devices as they felt it would detract from the site and the fact that fatalities at the site are extremely rare, despite having approximately 200,000 visitors each year. Furthermore, there were concerns that fences or other devices might encourage dangerous behavior such as climbing onto the fences. Norwegian authorities have stated that "we cannot fence in all nature in this country".

Up until 2013 there had been no accidental fatalities at the site. However, there were previously suicide attempts. In February 2000, an Austrian woman and a Norwegian man committed a joint suicide by jumping together off the cliff after meeting on the internet and forming a suicide pact. In October 2004, a young German couple were on their way to the cliff to commit suicide but were stopped by the Norwegian authorities before being able to carry out the act when their families alerted authorities. In autumn 2013, a Spanish tourist became the first person to die from what was originally ruled to be an accident; however, right after the accident, a suicide note was posted on his Facebook account indicating that the incident was in fact a suicide.

According to local press the first accident without known suicidal intentions had been in 2020.

The most recent accident recorded at the attraction was on June 3, 2024 A small foreign tourist group was on the plateau when a person from the group fell off the edge. Shortly after, the police wrote on social media "X", former Twitter: "We have, from a rescue helicopter, discovered a person around 200 meters under the plateau who has fallen about the same distance. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with life." The plateau was as a result of the accident closed off and the remaining tourists and hikers were evacuated, in order to facilitate the rescue needed to retrieve the tourist.

Geology
The cliff was formed during the ice age, approximately 10,000 years ago, when the edges of the glacier reached the cliff. The water from the glacier froze in the crevices of the mountain and eventually broke off large, angular blocks, which were later carried away with the glacier. This is the cause of the angular shape of the plateau. Along the plateau itself there continues to be a deep crack. Due to these cracks, the plateau will at some point fall down, but all the geological investigations have revealed that this will not happen in the foreseeable future, and geologists have confirmed the safety of the plateau.

Climate
Along the fjord there is a mild and humid coastal climate.

Surrounding landscape
The cliff overlooks the valleys of the Ryfylke region. The mountains surrounding the cliff reach heights of up to 843 m. Some of the hilltops have plains which are interspersed with lakes.

Nearby, close to the end of the Lysefjord, is the 1110 m tall mountain Kjerag which is also a hiking destination. Some tourists elect to forgo trips to Preikestolen and go to Kjerag instead.

In popular culture

 * A granite sculpture of the cliff was erected in the town Langeskov in Denmark to commemorate its twin town of Forsand.
 * In the final scene of the final episode of the second season of Vikings the main character, Ragnar Lothbrok, is seen sitting atop Preikestolen.
 * Compressed air from Lysefjorden/Preikestolen is being sold in cans, mostly to China.
 * The final fight scene (from 2h:10m to 2h:15m) in Mission: Impossible – Fallout features Tom Cruise climbing the face of the cliff at Preikestolen, although in the movie, it is supposed to be in Indian-administered Kashmir, now administered by India as Laddakh union territory.
 * A movie song called Amali thumali (from 00:00m to 1:30m) from the 2011 blockbuster Tamil-language movie Ko features the lead couples dancing on the top of the cliff at Preikestolen.

title: Preikestolen


text:
FLCL

FLCL (フリクリ) is an original video animation (OVA) anime series created and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, written by Yōji Enokido, and produced by the FLCL Production Committee, which consisted of Gainax, Production I.G, and King Records. FLCL is a story following Naota Nandaba, a twelve-year-old boy whose suburban life is disturbed by the arrival of the mysterious Haruko Haruhara. The six-episode series was released in Japan from April 2000 to March 2001 alongside a manga and novel adaptation.

In 2016, two new seasons totaling 12 episodes were announced as a co-production between Production I.G, Toho, and Adult Swim. The second season, FLCL Progressive, premiered on June 3, 2018 on Adult Swim's Toonami programming block, while the third season, FLCL Alternative, premiered on September 8, 2018. In Japan, Alternative and Progressive had theatrical screenings as compilation films with Alternative opening on September 7, 2018 and Progressive opening on September 28, 2018. The first episode of FLCL Alternative premiered unannounced on April Fools' Day 2018 at 12 a.m. ET on Toonami in Japanese with English subtitles as part of Adult Swim's annual stunt. Two additional seasons were ordered by Adult Swim in 2022, titled FLCL: Grunge and FLCL: Shoegaze, respectively. Both seasons premiered in Northern America in 2023.

Plot
The first season of FLCL is a coming-of-age story and revolves around Naota Nandaba, a 12-year-old, working-class boy living with his widower father and grandfather. His life in the Japanese city of Mabase is interrupted by the arrival of a Vespa-riding maniac named Haruko Haruhara. She runs over Naota then revives him with CPR before hitting him on the head with her left-handed, electric bass guitar (a blue, vintage Rickenbacker 4001) and proceeds to stalk him. Finding Haruko weaseling her way into his life as a live-in maid, Naota discovers that the head injury she caused created an "N.O." portal, which giant robots produced by a company known as Medical Mechanica emerge from periodically. The first of these robots is hit on the head by Haruko and becomes a friendly service robot later named Canti. Canti ingests Naota to assume the reddened form he first had when fighting the robots sent after him.

Haruko claims she is an alien investigator from the Galactic Space Police Brotherhood, and her presence places Naota and those around him in danger. The Interstellar Immigration Bureau's Commander Amarao, whom Haruko has a history with, asserts rather that she is an apathetic seductress seeking a space-manipulating being called Atomsk who was partially contained within Canti. Every time Naota is absorbed by Canti, Atomsk is gradually brought to Earth. As Atomsk is held in Medical Mechanica's custody and Haruko ultimately places Earth under threat, the company eventually turns their factory stationed on the planet into a doomsday terraforming device, attempting to have Naota and Canti absorbed by the doomsday device's Terminal Core. Haruko's plan fails as Naota ends up becoming Atomsk's host and then releases him into the universe after a brief battle that ends Medical Mechanica's attack on Earth. Haruko follows after Atomsk, and Mabase returns to some normalcy.

In the second season, FLCL Progressive, Haruko returns to Mabase many years after her failed attempt to contain Atomsk in the first season, although she did manage to absorb him sometime in between these events. Placing herself as a middle school homeroom teacher, Haruko targets a 14-year-old girl named Hidomi Hibajiri through her classmate and eventual love interest Ko Ide. Haruko finds opposition in both the headphones Hidomi wears and Julia Jinyu, a more stoic offshoot of Haruko that splintered from her during her initial attempt to control Atomsk's power. Haruko eventually eats Julia to restore herself, and uses Ide to get to Hidomi. Like before, this causes conflict between Medical Mechanica and the Interstellar Immigration Bureau, as the latter was reverse-engineering Canti's technology to utilize the N.O. channel's energies for their own use. Atomsk appears on Earth as planned, but Haruko ends up failing again with a freed Julia taking her leave. Haruko regains her composure and resumes her hunt for Atomsk as Hidomi and Ide begin their relationship while Mabase rebuilds after much of it was destroyed by Medical Mechanica.

In the third season, FLCL Alternative, Haruko enters the life of high school student Kana Koumoto and her friends as she became a mentor of sorts to Kana in helping the teen's transition into adulthood as Medical Mechanica begins its assault on Earth. While helping Kana resolve some issues as one of her friends leaves for Mars, Haruko ends up on another planet as a direct result of Kana's reverse N.O. portal that they used to transport Medical Mechanica's plants off the planet. The season takes place before the events of all the other seasons currently present.

In the fourth season, FLCL: Grunge, Haruko manipulates the mob-run town of Okura in a scheme to infect Medical Mechanica with a virus and steal Atomsk from them. In the process, she influences the lives of three working kids: Shinpachi, Shonari and Orinoko, before taking off after Atomsk on top of Medical Mechanica's plant. The season takes place between the events of Shoegaze and the first season.

In the fifth season, FLCL: Shoegaze, Masaki is a teenager who sees ghosts that nobody else can see, including a large ghost bird perched atop a tower. Harumi joins him in exploring the tower after it is locked down by the Bureau of Interstellar Immigration. Kana Koumoto (from the third season) is now a 27-year-old adult working for the bureau and is called in to assist in getting the teenagers out. After setting off an explosion, the teenagers find that the tower extends into N.O. space. The bureau chief admits that the purpose of the tower is to reconnect the dimension they are currently in with a separate one that split away 10 years ago and he hopes that with enough emotional turmoil he can get Masaki to trigger the N.O. device and merge them back together. After Harumi is shot and Masaki realizes that he loves her, his N.O. field begins the merger in which Harumi realizes that she is actually from the other dimension, a colony on Mars. As Masaki calms, the merger fails, and a large snake-like entity appears. In the closing credits, Masaki is able to jump dimensions through N.O. space to visit the Mars colony. He explains that the worm-creature helps him do so and its name is Atomsk.

Production
The first season of FLCL was directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki and produced by the FLCL Production Committee, which included Gainax, Production I.G, and Starchild Records.

Tsurumaki has said that he tried to "break the rules" of anime when making FLCL, for example, by choosing a contemporary Japanese band to provide the soundtrack, and patterning the style more after "a Japanese TV commercial or promotional video", creating a work that is "short, but dense-packed".

FLCL's localization director and script writer Marc Handler stated that localization of the script was the hardest part of the show. The in-jokes in the show included obscure pop culture references that had to be decoded and transferred to English audiences. One example was a reference to Cheerio, a discontinued soft drink in Japan, for the English release the choice was made to use a discontinued American soft drink at the time, Crystal Pepsi. Director Kazuya Tsurumaki responded to criticism of FLCL, stating "comprehension should not be an important factor in FLCL".

The Medical Mechanica building featured is in the shape of a large iron. The character Amarao describes Medical Mechanica's goal as the destruction of all thought. FLCL uses the iron as a symbolic breakdown of "thought" by smoothing out the wrinkles as equated to the removing of the brain's wrinkles. For English localization, the Japanese team had to explain the concept because a direct translation of script did not convey the ideology.

Original video animation
The six-episode series was released in Japan from April 26, 2000 – March 16, 2001. It originally debuted in the United States on Adult Swim in August 2003, where it managed to gain a significant cult following and was widely acclaimed, despite its short length. The series would continue to air on the network in the following years, including reruns on the network's Toonami programming block from October 2013 to January 2014, and in April 2018. The series is also available via iTunes, adultswim.com and Funimation's website.

Six DVD compilations, each containing one episode, have been released in Japan by Gainax. In addition, a DVD collection box, containing all six DVD compilations, was released in Japan on August 13, 2005. Three DVD compilations were released by Synch-Point in North America. A DVD collection box, containing all the DVD compilations of the English episodes, was released on January 23, 2007, but have since gone out of print. In January 2010, Funimation announced that they had acquired the license for the series and would be releasing it on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in February 2011. Shortly after, it has been released in Australia and New Zealand by Madman Entertainment on a 3-disc DVD set and on Blu-ray Disc. It is also licensed in the United Kingdom by MVM Films. The series also aired in the United States on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block from August 4 to August 13, 2003.

Novels
A three-volume novel series adaptation was written by the anime's screenwriter, Yoji Enokido, illustrated by Kazuya Tsurumaki and Hiroyuki Imaishi, and published by Kadokawa Shoten. The novels were released in Japan in June 2000, October 2000, and March 2001 respectively. The English-language versions were published by Tokyopop and were released in North America on March 11, 2008; September 9, 2008; and March 10, 2009 respectively. The novels cover all 6 episodes of the anime, introducing elements that were not present in the original production.

Manga
A two-volume manga adaptation was created by artist Hajime Ueda. The manga interprets the series with certain elements altered and removed, and tells the events of the anime using a reductive art style and unsteady pacing. Jack Kotin defended the unique artstyle of the manga, saying "It can be crudely drawn at times, but this style fits in well with the overall story and atmosphere...".

The manga was published by Kodansha and serialized in monthly Magazine Z from December 25, 1999 to March 26, 2001. The two volumes were released on October 23, 2000 and August 23, 2001 respectively. The manga was re-released in bunkoban format with the two volumes labeled "Jō" (上) and "Ge" (下) in two individual box sets titled "Kodansha Box". Jō volume was on May 7, 2007 and the Ge volume was released on June 4, 2007. An edited tankōbon version of the manga that was released in box sets, were released on January 10, 2012 and February 9, 2012 respectively.

The English-language editions of the manga was released by Tokyopop on September 16, 2003 and on November 4, 2003 respectively. In March 2011, Dark Horse Comics announced to re-release the manga in omnibus edition. The omnibus edition was released on May 16, 2012 and includes remastered story pages, a remastered script, and bonus color pages.

Soundtracks
Six pieces of theme music are used for the episodes; five insert songs and one closing theme, all by Japanese rock band the Pillows. The battle themes are "Advice", "Little Busters" and "I Think I Can"; the opening themes are: "One Life", used in episode one, "Instant Music" in episodes two and three, "Happy Bivouac" in episode four, "Runners High", in episode five, and "Carnival" in episode six. The closing theme of each episode is "Ride on Shooting Star", the series' main theme song, used during ending sequences in which appears Yukiko Motoya and a Vespa.

Geneon Entertainment has released three original soundtracks encompassing the songs by the Pillows, and the score by composer Shinkichi Mitsumune. The first soundtrack, titled FLCL No.1: Addict (フリクリNo.1 アディクト), contains tracks featured in the first three episodes of FLCL. The soundtrack was released on October 4, 2000 in Japan and January 20, 2004 in the US. The second soundtrack, titled FLCL No.2: King of Pirates (フリクリNo.2 海賊王), contains tracks featured in the last three episodes of FLCL. The soundtrack was released on July 25, 2001 Japan and September 7, 2004 in the US. This volume features several audio dramas, with the cast of FLCL playing the various parts. Due to the dramas included, this album acts as a sequel of sorts to the anime. The third soundtrack, titled FLCL No.3 (フリクリNo.3), is a compilation of the first two soundtracks, featuring only music by the Pillows. The released on June 8, 2005 and June 7, 2005 in the US. Unlike the previous two soundtracks, the songs are the original vocal versions from the band's LPs. A fourth album title FooL on CooL generation (フールオンクールジェネレーション) was released in September 2018 with music used in Progressive and Alternative.

Reception and legacy
FLCL has received a mostly positive reception. The series has been described as "bizarre" and "surreal", and has been noted for its symbolic content, unusual plot, and its soundtrack composed by the Pillows. Its experimental nature has also been noted, which includes an entire scene made in the cutout animation style of animated American series South Park, or The Matrix-like camera rotation tricks.

Christopher McDonald of Anime News Network called it "downright hilarious" and "visually superb" with great music, citing the packaging of 2 episodes per DVD as the only weakness of Synch-Point's original release. Robert Nelson of THEM Anime Reviews gave the anime 4 out of 5 stars, stating "FLCL may not have a straightforward or deep plot. It may not have complex characterizations. Hell, it may not have any meaning. But FLCL does succeed in its true objective. It is fun to watch!" Chris Beveridge of Mania gave it an A−, stating "FLCL is something that allowed those involved to try a wide variety of styles and techniques and does come off as quite experimental. But nearly everything worked in their favor and you end up with three hours of nearly break neck speed action, comedy and commentary on modern life." Brian Ruh praised the series, stating "It was very frenetic and kept pushing the envelope on what was possible in Japanese animation."

IGN columnist Davis Smith reviewed the anime shortly after its English premiere. In the article, Smith praised the series' unusual story telling, extremely high quality animation and the soundtrack provided by the Pillows; rewarding the series a score of 9 out of 10 concluding, "Logic dictates that FLCL should be an undisciplined and unaffecting mess, given all the insanity that its creators are attempting to weld into a functioning whole. Yet while it's hard to explain exactly why, it works. It entertains me. At times, it makes me laugh; at times, it makes me a little misty-eyed; at times, it makes me want to scream and howl and light things on fire and break windows with baseball bats and yes, maybe even buy a Vespa. That's the kind of success that you just can't argue with."

From January 3 to February 7, 2012, Hayden Childs, of the online magazine The A.V. Club, composed a six-part weekly analysis and review of each FLCL episode in celebration of The Legend of Korra's then upcoming third season, a series that was heavily influenced by FLCL's animation style. In the article, Childs gave an extremely positive review of the series, understanding it as a surrealist inspired coming of age story, stating "For all of its wild and initially bewildering aspects, the major purpose of FLCL is the impressionistic and often naturalistic documentation of Naota's passage into maturity."

Avatar: The Last Airbender director Giancarlo Volpe has stated members of his staff "were all ordered to buy FLCL and watch every single episode of it."

Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto has stated in his 3 million copies sold thank you letter to fans that Chainsaw Man is a "wicked version of FLCL".

Awards and acclaims
On August 12, 2003, a Time Warner press release noted the success of Cartoon Network: FLCL "ranked No. 42 among all shows on ad-supported cable among adults 18–34". Also in 2003, FLCL won third place for Best Animation Film at the Fantasia Festival. On February 24, 2007, FLCL was nominated for "Best Cast", and won "Best Comedy Series" and "Best Short Series" at the first American Anime Awards show. Anime Insider ranked FLCL 4th in their list of the best English-licensed anime of all time in November 2007.

Sequel seasons
On August 31, 2015, Anime News Network reported that Production I.G may have been planning a continuation or remake of the OVA series after announcing their acquisition of the rights to FLCL from production studio Gainax. According to Hideaki Anno, his animation studio Khara was originally set to buy the rights to FLCL from Gainax before Production I.G. However, before the deal was finalized Gainax suddenly raised the asking price causing the deal with Khara to fall though.

On March 24, 2016 via Toonami's official Facebook and Tumblr pages it was announced that 12 new episodes of FLCL would be produced in cooperation with Production I.G. The episodes were split into two individual seasons: FLCL Progressive (フリクリ プログレ) and FLCL Alternative (フリクリ オルタナ) which served as sequels to the popular series, which was initially broadcast on Adult Swim in August 2003.

The synopsis of the first sequel season was published by Adult Swim:

"In the new season of FLCL, many years have passed since Naota and Haruhara Haruko shared their adventure together. Meanwhile, the war between the two entities known as Medical Mechanica and Fraternity rages across the galaxy. Enter Hidomi, a young teenage girl who believes there is nothing amazing to expect from her average life, until one day when a new teacher named Haruko arrives at her school. Soon enough, Medical Mechanica is attacking her town and Hidomi discovers a secret within her that could save everyone, a secret that only Haruko can unlock.

But why did Haruko return to Earth? What happened to her Rickenbacker 4001 she left with Naota? And where did the human-type robot 'Canti' go?"

FLCL Progressive, the sequel series, featured the return of original character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamato (as his respective role) and original series creator Kazuya Tsurumaki, who supervised the project. Hideto Iwai wrote the scripts, and Katsuyuki Motohiro served as chief director on the project, with each episode featuring a different director: Kazuto Arai, Toshihisa Kaiya, Yuki Ogawa, Yoshihide Ibata, Kei Suezawa, and Hiroshi Ikehata. The animation was produced mostly by Production I.G, but studios Production GoodBook and Signal.MD handled episodes 2 and 5, respectively. The Pillows contributed to the series soundtrack, although the score was primarily composed by R・O・N from music production company VERYGOO.

FLCL Alternative, the third season, once again saw the return of character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, composer R・O・N (with tracks by the Pillows), scriptwriter Hideto Iwai, and supervisor Kazuya Tsurukamki. Katsuyuki Motohiro, as well, returned as chief director, although Yutaka Uemara was the only director, and Kiyotaka Suzuki served as assistant director. Production I.G, Revoroot, and NUT produced the animation for the series.

FLCL Progressive premiered on June 3, 2018 on Adult Swim's Toonami programming block and concluded on July 7, 2018;   FLCL Alternative premiered on September 8, 2018 and concluded on October 13, 2018. In Japan, Alternative and Progressive had theatrical screenings on September 7, 2018, and September 28, 2018, respectively. The first episode of FLCL Alternative unexpectedly premiered early at midnight on April Fools' Day on Toonami, airing entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. The day of the second season's US premiere, Toonami simultaneously announced via its Facebook page that they would be delaying the English subtitled versions of both new seasons until November 2018, in respect for the Japanese film format releases. Warner Bros. released FLCL Progressive on DVD on October 1, 2019. It later released FLCL Alternative on DVD along with a Blu-ray combo pack of both sequels on February 4, 2020.

Two additional seasons were ordered by Adult Swim in 2022, which were announced on Toonami's 25th anniversary, titled FLCL: Grunge and FLCL: Shoegaze. Both seasons premiered in 2023. On October 7, 2023, it was announced there are no plans for further FLCL seasons.

title: FLCL


text:
Overfitting

In mathematical modeling, overfitting is "the production of an analysis that corresponds too closely or exactly to a particular set of data, and may therefore fail to fit to additional data or predict future observations reliably". An overfitted model is a mathematical model that contains more parameters than can be justified by the data. In a mathematical sense, these parameters represent the degree of a polynomial. The essence of overfitting is to have unknowingly extracted some of the residual variation (i.e., the noise) as if that variation represented underlying model structure.

Underfitting occurs when a mathematical model cannot adequately capture the underlying structure of the data. An under-fitted model is a model where some parameters or terms that would appear in a correctly specified model are missing. Underfitting would occur, for example, when fitting a linear model to nonlinear data. Such a model will tend to have poor predictive performance.

The possibility of over-fitting exists because the criterion used for selecting the model is not the same as the criterion used to judge the suitability of a model. For example, a model might be selected by maximizing its performance on some set of training data, and yet its suitability might be determined by its ability to perform well on unseen data; overfitting occurs when a model begins to "memorize" training data rather than "learning" to generalize from a trend.

As an extreme example, if the number of parameters is the same as or greater than the number of observations, then a model can perfectly predict the training data simply by memorizing the data in its entirety. (For an illustration, see Figure 2.) Such a model, though, will typically fail severely when making predictions.

Overfitting is directly related to approximation error of the selected function class and the optimization error of the optimization procedure. A function class that is too large, in a suitable sense, relative to the dataset size is likely to overfit. Even when the fitted model does not have an excessive number of parameters, it is to be expected that the fitted relationship will appear to perform less well on a new dataset than on the dataset used for fitting (a phenomenon sometimes known as shrinkage). In particular, the value of the coefficient of determination will shrink relative to the original data.

To lessen the chance or amount of overfitting, several techniques are available (e.g., model comparison, cross-validation, regularization, early stopping, pruning, Bayesian priors, or dropout). The basis of some techniques is to either (1) explicitly penalize overly complex models or (2) test the model's ability to generalize by evaluating its performance on a set of data not used for training, which is assumed to approximate the typical unseen data that a model will encounter.

Statistical inference
In statistics, an inference is drawn from a statistical model, which has been selected via some procedure. Burnham & Anderson, in their much-cited text on model selection, argue that to avoid overfitting, we should adhere to the "Principle of Parsimony". The authors also state the following. "Overfitted models ... are often free of bias in the parameter estimators, but have estimated (and actual) sampling variances that are needlessly large (the precision of the estimators is poor, relative to what could have been accomplished with a more parsimonious model). False treatment effects tend to be identified, and false variables are included with overfitted models. ... A best approximating model is achieved by properly balancing the errors of underfitting and overfitting."

Overfitting is more likely to be a serious concern when there is little theory available to guide the analysis, in part because then there tend to be a large number of models to select from. The book Model Selection and Model Averaging (2008) puts it this way. "Given a data set, you can fit thousands of models at the push of a button, but how do you choose the best? With so many candidate models, overfitting is a real danger. Is the monkey who typed Hamlet actually a good writer?"

Regression
In regression analysis, overfitting occurs frequently. As an extreme example, if there are p variables in a linear regression with p data points, the fitted line can go exactly through every point. For logistic regression or Cox proportional hazards models, there are a variety of rules of thumb (e.g. 5–9, 10 and 10–15 — the guideline of 10 observations per independent variable is known as the "one in ten rule"). In the process of regression model selection, the mean squared error of the random regression function can be split into random noise, approximation bias, and variance in the estimate of the regression function. The bias–variance tradeoff is often used to overcome overfit models.

With a large set of explanatory variables that actually have no relation to the dependent variable being predicted, some variables will in general be falsely found to be statistically significant and the researcher may thus retain them in the model, thereby overfitting the model. This is known as Freedman's paradox.

Machine learning

Usually, a learning algorithm is trained using some set of "training data": exemplary situations for which the desired output is known. The goal is that the algorithm will also perform well on predicting the output when fed "validation data" that was not encountered during its training.

Overfitting is the use of models or procedures that violate Occam's razor, for example by including more adjustable parameters than are ultimately optimal, or by using a more complicated approach than is ultimately optimal. For an example where there are too many adjustable parameters, consider a dataset where training data for $y$ can be adequately predicted by a linear function of two independent variables. Such a function requires only three parameters (the intercept and two slopes). Replacing this simple function with a new, more complex quadratic function, or with a new, more complex linear function on more than two independent variables, carries a risk: Occam's razor implies that any given complex function is a priori less probable than any given simple function. If the new, more complicated function is selected instead of the simple function, and if there was not a large enough gain in training data fit to offset the complexity increase, then the new complex function "overfits" the data and the complex overfitted function will likely perform worse than the simpler function on validation data outside the training dataset, even though the complex function performed as well, or perhaps even better, on the training dataset.

When comparing different types of models, complexity cannot be measured solely by counting how many parameters exist in each model; the expressivity of each parameter must be considered as well. For example, it is nontrivial to directly compare the complexity of a neural net (which can track curvilinear relationships) with $m$ parameters to a regression model with $n$ parameters.

Overfitting is especially likely in cases where learning was performed too long or where training examples are rare, causing the learner to adjust to very specific random features of the training data that have no causal relation to the target function. In this process of overfitting, the performance on the training examples still increases while the performance on unseen data becomes worse.

As a simple example, consider a database of retail purchases that includes the item bought, the purchaser, and the date and time of purchase. It's easy to construct a model that will fit the training set perfectly by using the date and time of purchase to predict the other attributes, but this model will not generalize at all to new data because those past times will never occur again.

Generally, a learning algorithm is said to overfit relative to a simpler one if it is more accurate in fitting known data (hindsight) but less accurate in predicting new data (foresight). One can intuitively understand overfitting from the fact that information from all past experience can be divided into two groups: information that is relevant for the future, and irrelevant information ("noise"). Everything else being equal, the more difficult a criterion is to predict (i.e., the higher its uncertainty), the more noise exists in past information that needs to be ignored. The problem is determining which part to ignore. A learning algorithm that can reduce the risk of fitting noise is called "robust."

Consequences
The most obvious consequence of overfitting is poor performance on the validation dataset. Other negative consequences include:

 * A function that is overfitted is likely to request more information about each item in the validation dataset than does the optimal function; gathering this additional unneeded data can be expensive or error-prone, especially if each individual piece of information must be gathered by human observation and manual data entry.
 * A more complex, overfitted function is likely to be less portable than a simple one. At one extreme, a one-variable linear regression is so portable that, if necessary, it could even be done by hand. At the other extreme are models that can be reproduced only by exactly duplicating the original modeler's entire setup, making reuse or scientific reproduction difficult.
 * It may be possible to reconstruct details of individual training instances from an overfitted machine learning model's training set. This may be undesirable if, for example, the training data includes sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). This phenomenon also presents problems in the area of artificial intelligence and copyright, with the developers of some generative deep learning models such as Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot being sued for copyright infringement because these models have been found to be capable of reproducing certain copyrighted items from their training data.

Remedy
The optimal function usually needs verification on bigger or completely new datasets. There are, however, methods like minimum spanning tree or life-time of correlation that applies the dependence between correlation coefficients and time-series (window width). Whenever the window width is big enough, the correlation coefficients are stable and don't depend on the window width size anymore. Therefore, a correlation matrix can be created by calculating a coefficient of correlation between investigated variables. This matrix can be represented topologically as a complex network where direct and indirect influences between variables are visualized. Dropout regularisation can also improve robustness and therefore reduce over-fitting by probabilistically removing inputs to a layer.

Underfitting

Underfitting is the inverse of overfitting, meaning that the statistical model or machine learning algorithm is too simplistic to accurately capture the patterns in the data. A sign of underfitting is that there is a high bias and low variance detected in the current model or algorithm used (the inverse of overfitting: low bias and high variance). This can be gathered from the Bias-variance tradeoff, which is the method of analyzing a model or algorithm for bias error, variance error, and irreducible error. With a high bias and low variance, the result of the model is that it will inaccurately represent the data points and thus insufficiently be able to predict future data results (see Generalization error). As shown in Figure 5, the linear line could not represent all the given data points due to the line not resembling the curvature of the points. We would expect to see a parabola-shaped line as shown in Figure 6 and Figure 1. If we were to use Figure 5 for analysis, we would get false predictive results contrary to the results if we analyzed Figure 6.

Burnham & Anderson state the following. "... an underfitted model would ignore some important replicable (i.e., conceptually replicable in most other samples) structure in the data and thus fail to identify effects that were actually supported by the data. In this case, bias in the parameter estimators is often substantial, and the sampling variance is underestimated, both factors resulting in poor confidence interval coverage. Underfitted models tend to miss important treatment effects in experimental settings."

Resolving underfitting
There are multiple ways to deal with underfitting:

 * 1) Increase the complexity of the model: If the model is too simple, it may be necessary to increase its complexity by adding more features, increasing the number of parameters, or using a more flexible model. However, this should be done carefully to avoid overfitting.
 * 2) Use a different algorithm: If the current algorithm is not able to capture the patterns in the data, it may be necessary to try a different one. For example, a neural network may be more effective than a linear regression model for some types of data.
 * 3) Increase the amount of training data: If the model is underfitting due to a lack of data, increasing the amount of training data may help. This will allow the model to better capture the underlying patterns in the data.
 * 4) Regularization: Regularization is a technique used to prevent overfitting by adding a penalty term to the loss function that discourages large parameter values. It can also be used to prevent underfitting by controlling the complexity of the model.
 * 5) Ensemble Methods: Ensemble methods combine multiple models to create a more accurate prediction. This can help reduce underfitting by allowing multiple models to work together to capture the underlying patterns in the data.
 * 6) Feature engineering: Feature engineering involves creating new model features from the existing ones that may be more relevant to the problem at hand. This can help improve the accuracy of the model and prevent underfitting.

Benign overfitting
Benign overfitting describes the phenomenon of a statistical model that seems to generalize well to unseen data, even when it has been fit perfectly on noisy training data (i.e., obtains perfect predictive accuracy on the training set). The phenomenon is of particular interest in deep neural networks, but is studied from a theoretical perspective in the context of much simpler models, such as linear regression. In particular, it has been shown that overparameterization is essential for benign overfitting in this setting. In other words, the number of directions in parameter space that are unimportant for prediction must significantly exceed the sample size.

title: Overfitting