title: Caithness

text: Wick Airport provided regular flights to Aberdeen and Edinburgh until 2020 when Loganair and Eastern Airways cancelled their flights to wick. In 2021 there were no scheduled flights to and from Wick Airport. Starting on 11 April 2022, Eastern Airways started a scheduled operation to Wick from Aberdeen.


title: Caithness

text: At the beginning of recorded history, Caithness was inhabited by the Picts, whose language Pictish is thought to have been related to the Brythonic languages spoken by the Britons to the south. The Norn language was introduced to Caithness, Orkney, and Shetland by the Norse occupation, which is generally proposed to be c. AD 800. Although little is known of that Norn dialect, some of this linguistic influence still exists in parts of the county, particularly in place names. Norn continued to be spoken in Caithness until perhaps the fifteenth century and lingered until the late eighteenth century in the Northern Isles.


title: Caithness

text: It is sometimes erroneously claimed that Gaelic has never been spoken in Caithness, but this is a result of language shift to Scots, and then towards Standard Scottish English during recent centuries. The Gaelic name for the region, "Gallaibh", translates as "Land of the Gall ("non-Gaels")", a name which reflects historic Norse rule. Gaelic speakers seem to first figure in the early stage of the Scandinavian colonisation of Caithness, gradually increasing in numerical significance from the 12th century onwards. Gaelic has survived, in a limited form, in western parts of the county.


title: Caithness

text: Scots began supplanting Norn in the early fourteenth century at the time of the Wars of Scottish Independence. The emergent Northern Scots dialect became influenced by both Gaelic and Norn and is generally spoken in the lowlying land to the east of a line drawn from Clyth Ness to some west of Thurso. The dialect of Scots spoken in the neighbourhood of John o' Groats resembles to some extent that of Orkney. Since the seventeenth century, Standard Scottish English has increasingly been replacing both Gaelic and Scots.


title: Caithness

text: Records showing what languages were spoken apparently do not exist from before 1706, but by that time, "[I]f ye suppose a Parallel to the hypotenuse drawn from Week to Thurso, these on the Eastside of it speak most part English, and those on the Westside Irish; and the last have Ministers to preach to them in both languages." Similarly, it is stated at that time that there were "Seven parishes [out of 10 or 11] in [the Presbytery of] Caithness where the Irish language is used."


title: Caithness

text: As previously indicated, the language mix or boundary changed over time, but the "New Statistical Record" in 1841 says: "On the eastern side of [the Burn of East Clyth] scarcely a word of Gaelic was either spoken or understood, and on the west side, English suffered the same fate". Other sources state:


title: Caithness

text: According to the 2011 Scotland Census, 282 (1.1%) residents of Caithness age three and over can speak Gaelic while 466 (1.8%) have some facility with the language. The percentage figures are almost exactly the same as for all of Scotland (1.1% and 1.7%, respectively). Nearly half of all Gaelic speakers in the county live in Thurso civil parish. The town of Thurso hosts the only Gaelic-medium primary school unit in all of Caithness (see Language in Thurso).


title: Caithness

text: The bilingual road sign policy of Highland Region Council has led to some controversy in the region. In 2008, eight of the ten Caithness representatives to the Highland Council tried to prevent the introduction of bilingual English-Gaelic road signs into the county. The first bilingual sign in Caithness was erected in 2012. In 2013, a bilingual road sign on the A99 road next to Wick Airport was damaged by gunfire within 24 hours of it being placed. Gaelic-speaking Councillor Alex MacLeod, at the time representing Landward Caithness in the Highland Council, referred to it as "an extreme anti-Gaelic incident".


title: Caithness

text: "The John O'Groat Journal" and "The Caithness Courier" are weekly newspapers published by Scottish Provincial Press Limited trading as North of Scotland Newspapers and using offices in Union Street, Wick (but with public reception via Cliff Road) and Olrig Street, Thurso.


title: Caithness

text: News coverage tends to concentrate on the former counties of Caithness and Sutherland. "The John O'Groat Journal" is normally published on Fridays and "The Caithness Courier" on Wednesdays. The two papers share a website.


title: Caithness

text: Historically, they have been independent newspapers, with the "Groat" as a Wick-centred paper and the "Courier" as a Thurso-centred paper. Even now, the "Groat" is archived in the public library in Wick, while the "Courier" is similarly archived in the library in Thurso. The "Courier" was printed, almost by hand, in a small shop in High Street, Thurso until the early 60's by Mr Docherty and his daughter. The "Courier" traditionally covers that week's sheriff court cases.


title: Caithness

text: "Caithness FM" has been broadcasting since 1993 and the Orkney Commercial Radio, Superstation Orkney from Kirkwall from 2004 to 2014.


title: Steve Fossett

text: James Stephen Fossett (April 22, 1944 – September 3, 2007) was an American businessman and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in a fixed-wing aircraft. He made his fortune in the financial services industry and held world records for five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth: as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot.


title: Steve Fossett

text: A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett set more than one hundred records in five different sports, sixty of which still stood at the time of his death. He broke three of the seven absolute world records for fixed-wing aircraft recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, all in his Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. In 2002, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aero Club of the UK, and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2007.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett disappeared on September 3, 2007, while flying a light aircraft over the Great Basin Desert, between Nevada and California. Extensive searches proved unsuccessful, and he was declared legally dead in February of the following year.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In September 2008, a hiker found Fossett's identification cards in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, leading shortly thereafter to the discovery of the plane's wreckage. Fossett's only known remains, two large bones, were found half a mile () from the crash site, probably scattered by wild animals.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett was born in Jackson, Tennessee and grew up in Garden Grove, California, where he graduated from Garden Grove High School.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett's interest in adventure began early. As a Boy Scout, he grew up climbing the mountains of California, beginning with the San Jacinto Mountains. "When I was 12 years old I climbed my first mountain, and I just kept going, taking on more diverse and grander projects." Fossett said that he did not have a natural gift for athletics or team sports, so he focused on activities that required persistence and endurance. His father, an Eagle Scout, encouraged Fossett to pursue these types of adventures and encouraged him to become involved with the Boy Scouts early. He became an active member of Troop 170 in Orange, California. At age 13, Fossett earned the Boy Scouts' highest rank of Eagle Scout. He was a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow, the Boy Scouts' honor society, where he served as lodge chief. He also worked as a Ranger at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico during the summer of 1961. Fossett said in 2006 that Scouting was the most important activity of his youth.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In college at Stanford University, Fossett was already known as an adventurer; his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers convinced him to swim to Alcatraz and raise a banner that read "Beat Cal" on the wall of the prison, closed two years previously. He made the swim, but was thwarted by a security guard when he arrived. While at Stanford, Fossett was a student body officer and served as the president of a few clubs. In 1966, Fossett graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics. Fossett spent the following summer in Europe climbing mountains and swimming the Dardanelles.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 1968, Fossett received an MBA from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was later a longtime member of the Board of Trustees. Fossett's first job out of business school was with IBM; he then served as a consultant for Deloitte and Touche, and later accepted a job with Marshall Field's. Fossett later said, "For the first five years of my business career, I was distracted by being in computer systems, and then I became interested in financial markets. That's where I thrived."


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett then became a successful commodities salesman in Chicago, first for Merrill Lynch in 1973, where he proved a highly successful producer of commission revenue for himself and that firm. He began working in 1976 for Drexel Burnham, which assigned him one of its memberships on the Chicago Board of Trade and permitted him to market the services of the firm from a phone on the floor of that exchange. In 1980, Fossett began the process that eventually produced his enduring prosperity: renting exchange memberships to would-be floor traders, first on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.


title: Steve Fossett

text: After fifteen years of working for other companies, Fossett founded his own firms, Marathon Securities and Lakota Trading, from which he made millions renting exchange memberships. He founded Lakota Trading for that purpose in 1980. In the early 1980s, he founded Marathon Securities and extended that successful formula to memberships on the New York stock exchanges. He earned millions renting floor trading privileges (exchange memberships) to hopeful new floor traders, who also paid clearing fees to Fossett's clearing firms in proportion to the trading activity of those renting the memberships. In 1997, the trading volume of its rented memberships was larger than any other clearing firm on the Chicago exchange. Lakota Trading replicated that same business plan on many exchanges in the United States and also in London. Fossett later used those revenues to finance his adventures. Fossett said, "As a floor trader, I was very aggressive and worked hard. Those same traits help me in adventure sports."


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett said he did not participate in any of the "interesting things" he had done in college during his time in exchange-related activities: "There was a period of time where I wasn't doing anything except working for a living. I became very frustrated with that and finally made up my mind to start getting back into things." He began to take six weeks a year off to spend time on sports and moved to Beaver Creek, Colorado in 1990. Fossett later sold most of his business interests, although he maintained an office in Chicago until 2006.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 1968, Fossett married Peggy Fossett (née Viehland), who was originally from Richmond Heights, Missouri. They had no children. The Fossetts had homes in Beaver Creek, Colorado and Chicago, and a vacation home in Carmel, California.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett became well known in the United Kingdom for his friendship with billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group sponsored some of Fossett's adventures.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Steve Fossett was well known for his world records and adventures in balloons, sailboats, gliders, and powered aircraft. He was an aviator of exceptional breadth of experience. He wanted to become the first person to achieve a solo balloon flight around the world (finally succeeding on his sixth attempt, in 2002, becoming the first person to complete an uninterrupted and unrefueled solo circumnavigation of the world in "any" kind of aircraft). He set, with co-pilot Terry Delore, 10 of the 21 Glider Open records, including the first 2,000 km Out-and-Return, the first 1,500 km Triangle and the longest Straight Distance flights. His achievements as a jet pilot in a Cessna Citation X include records for U.S. Transcontinental, Australia Transcontinental, and Round-the-World westbound non-supersonic flights. Prior to Fossett's aviation records, no pilot had held world records in more than one class of aircraft; Fossett held them in four classes.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 2005, Fossett made the first solo, nonstop unrefueled circumnavigation of the world in an airplane, in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, a single-engine jet aircraft.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 2006, he again circumnavigated the globe nonstop and unrefueled in 76 hours, 45 minutes in the "GlobalFlyer", setting the record for the longest flight by any aircraft in history with a distance of 25,766 statute miles (41,467 km).


title: Steve Fossett

text: He set 91 aviation world records ratified by Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, of which 36 stand, plus 23 sailing world records ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On February 21, 1995, Fossett landed in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada, after taking off from South Korea, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 2002, he became the first person to fly around the world alone, nonstop in any kind of aircraft. He launched the 10-story high balloon "Spirit of Freedom" from Northam, Western Australia on June 19, 2002 and returned to Australia on July 3, 2002, subsequently landing in Queensland. Duration and distance of this solo balloon flight was 13 days, 8 hours, 33 minutes (14 days 19 hours 50 minutes to landing), 20,626.48 statute miles (33,195.10 km). The balloon dragged him along the ground for 20 minutes at the end of the flight. Only the capsule survived the landing; it was taken to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it was displayed. The control center for the mission was in Brookings Hall at Washington University in St. Louis. Fossett's top speed during the flight was over the Indian Ocean. The trip set a number of records for ballooning: Fastest (, breaking his own previous record of ), Fastest Around the World (13.5 days), Longest Distance Flown Solo in a Balloon (), and 24-Hour Balloon Distance ( on July 1).


title: Steve Fossett

text: While Fossett had financed five previous tries himself, his successful record-setting flight was sponsored by Bud Light. In the end, Fossett actually made money on all his balloon flights. He bought a contingency insurance policy for $500,000 that would pay him $3 million if he succeeded in the flight. Along with sponsorship, that payout meant that in the end Fossett did not have to spend any of his money other than for initial expenses.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett was one of sailing's most prolific distance record holders. Speed sailing was his specialty and from 1993 to 2004 he dominated the record sheets, setting 23 official world records and nine distance race records. He is recognized by the World Sailing Speed Record Council as "the world's most accomplished speed sailor."


title: Steve Fossett

text: On the maxi-catamaran Cheyenne (formerly named "PlayStation"), Fossett twice set the prestigious 24 Hour Record of Sailing. In October 2001, Fossett and his crew set a transatlantic record of 4 days 17 hours, shattering the previous record by 43 hours 35 minutes; an increase in average speed of nearly seven knots.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In early 2004, Fossett, as skipper, set the Around the world sailing record of 58 days, 9 hours in "Cheyenne" with a crew of 13. In 2007, Fossett held the world record for crossing the Pacific Ocean in his sailboat, the "PlayStation", which he accomplished on his fourth try.


title: Steve Fossett

text: At the time of his death a submarine, DeepFlight Challenger, was under construction to enable Fossett to be the first solo submariner to reach the Challenger Deep.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett set the Absolute World Speed Record for airships on October 27, 2004. The new record for fastest flight was accomplished with a Zeppelin NT, at a recorded average speed of . The previous record was set in 2001 in a Virgin airship. In 2006, Fossett was one of only 17 pilots in the world licensed to fly the Zeppelin.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett made the first solo nonstop unrefueled fixed-wing aircraft flight around the world between February 28 and March 3, 2005. He took off from Salina, Kansas, where he was assisted by faculty members and students from Kansas State University, and flew eastbound with the prevailing winds, returning to Salina after 67 hours, 1 minute, 10 seconds, without refueling or making intermediate landings. His average speed of was also the absolute world record for "speed around the world, nonstop and non-refueled." His aircraft, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, had a carbon fiber reinforced plastic airframe with a single Williams FJ44 turbofan engine. It was designed and built by Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, for long-distance solo flight. The fuel fraction, the weight of the fuel divided by the weight of the aircraft at take-off, was 83 percent.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On February 11, 2006, Fossett set the absolute world record for "distance without landing" by flying from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, around the world eastbound, then upon returning to Florida continuing across the Atlantic a second time to land in Bournemouth, England. The official distance was 25,766 statute miles (41,467 km) and the duration was 76 hours 45 minutes.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The next month, Fossett made a third flight around the world in order to break the absolute record for "Distance over a closed circuit without landing" (with takeoff and landing at the same airport). He took off from Salina, Kansas on March 14, 2006 and returned on March 17, 2006 after flying 25,262 statute miles (40,655 km).


title: Steve Fossett

text: There are only seven absolute world records for fixed-wing aircraft recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and Fossett broke three of them in the Virgin Atlantic "GlobalFlyer". All three records were previously held by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager from their flight in the Voyager in 1986. Fossett contributed the "GlobalFlyer" to the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection. It is on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Fossett flew the plane to the Center and taxied the plane to the front door.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett set two U.S. transcontinental fixed-wing aircraft records in the same day. On February 5, 2003, Fossett and co-pilot Doug Travis flew his Cessna Citation X jet from San Diego, California to Charleston, South Carolina in 2 hours, 56 minutes, 20 seconds, at an average speed of to smash the transcontinental record for non-supersonic jets.


title: Steve Fossett

text: He returned to San Diego, then flew the same course as co-pilot for fellow adventurer Joe Ritchie in Ritchie's turboprop Piaggio Avanti. Their time was 3 hours, 51 minutes, 52 seconds, an average speed of , which broke the previous turboprop transcontinental record held by Chuck Yeager and Renald Davenport.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett also set the east-to-west transcontinental record for non-supersonic fixed-wing aircraft on September 17, 2000. He flew from Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego, California in 3 hours, 29 minutes, at an average speed of .


title: Steve Fossett

text: On July 2, 2005, Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz recreated the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic which was made by the British team of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in June 1919 in a Vickers Vimy biplane. Their flight from St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland in the open cockpit Vickers Vimy replica took 18 hours 25 minutes with 13 hours flown in instrument flight conditions. Because there was no airport in Clifden, Fossett and Rebholz landed on the 8th fairway of the Connemara Golf Links.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The team of Steve Fossett and Terry Delore (NZ) set ten official world records in gliders while flying in three major locations: New Zealand, Argentina, and Nevada, United States. An asterisk (*) indicates records subsequently broken by other pilots.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett and co-pilot Einar Enevoldson flew a glider into the stratosphere on August 29, 2006. The flight set the Absolute Altitude Record for gliders at . Since the glider cockpit was unpressurized, the pilots wore full pressure suits (similar to space suits) so that they would be able to fly to altitudes above . Fossett and Enevoldson had made previous attempts in three countries over a period of five years before finally succeeding with this record flight. This endeavor is known as the Perlan Project.


title: Steve Fossett

text: As a young adventurer, Fossett was one of the first participants in the Worldloppet, a series of cross-country ski marathons around the world. While he had little experience as a skier, he was in the first group of 'citizen athletes' to participate in the series debut in 1979. And in 1980, he became the eighth skier to complete all 10 of the long distance races, earning a Worldloppet medallion. He has also set cross-country skiing records in Colorado, setting an Aspen to Vail record of 59 h, 53 min, 30 s in February 1998, and an Aspen to Eagle record of 12 hr, 29 min in February 2001.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett was a lifelong mountain climber and had climbed the highest peaks on six of the seven continents. In the 1980s, he became friends with Patrick Morrow, who was attempting to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents for the "Seven Summits" world record, which Morrow achieved in 1985. Fossett accompanied Morrow for his last three peaks, including Vinson Massif in Antarctica, Carstensz Pyramid in Oceania, and Elbrus in Europe. While Fossett went on to climb almost all of the Seven Summits peaks himself, he declined to climb Mount Everest in 1992 due to asthma. He later returned to Antarctica to climb again.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett competed in and completed premier endurance sports events, including the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, in which he finished 47th on his second try in 1992 after training for five years. He became the 270th person to swim across the English Channel on his fourth try in September 1985 with a time of 22 hours, 15 minutes. Although Fossett said he was not a good enough swimmer "to make the varsity swim team", he found that he could swim for long periods. Fossett competed in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii (finishing in 1996 in 15:53:10), the Boston Marathon, and the Leadville Trail 100, a Colorado ultramarathon which involves running up to elevations of more than in the Rocky Mountains.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett raced cars in the mid-1970s and later returned to the sport in the 1990s. He competed in the 24 hours of Le Mans road race in 1993 and in 1996, along with the Paris to Dakar Rally.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett tried six times over seven years for the first solo balloon circumnavigation. His fifth attempt cost him $1.25 million of his own money; his sixth and successful attempt was commercially sponsored. Two of the attempts were launched from Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri. Washington University in St. Louis served as control center for four of the six flights, including the record-breaking one.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 1998, one of the unsuccessful attempts at the ballooning record ended with a five-mile (8 km) plummet into the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia that nearly killed Fossett; he waited 72 hours to be rescued, at a cost of $500,000. The first attempt began in the Black Hills of South Dakota and ended outside Hampton, New Brunswick later. The second attempt, launched from Busch Stadium, cost $300,000 and lasted before being downed halfway in a tree in India; the trip set records at the time for duration and distance of flight (with Fossett doubling his own previous record) and was called "Solo Spirit" after Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis". Fossett slept an average of two hours a night for the six-day journey, conducted in below-zero temperatures. After taking too much fuel to cross the Atlantic Ocean and circling Libya for 12 hours while officials decided whether or not to allow him into their airspace, Fossett did not have enough fuel to finish the flight. That year, Fossett flew farther for less money than better-financed expeditions (including one supported by Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson) in part due to his ability to fly in an unpressurized capsule, a result of his heavy physical training at high altitudes. The "Solo Spirit" capsule was put on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum across from the "Apollo 11" command module.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett grew up in Garden Grove, California and earned the Eagle Scout award in 1957. He credited his experience in Scouting as a foundation for much of his later success. "As a Scout, I learned how to set goals and achieve them," he once said. "Being a Scout also taught me leadership at a young age when there are few opportunities to be a leader. Scouting values have remained with me throughout my life, in my business career, and now as I take on new challenges." In his later years, he was described as a "legend" by fellow Scouts. As a national BSA volunteer, he served as Chairman of the Northern Tier High Adventure Committee, Chairman of the Venturing Committee, member of the Philmont Ranch Committee, and member of the National Advisory Council. He later became a member of the BSA National Executive Board, and in 2007, Fossett succeeded Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as president of the National Eagle Scout Association. Fossett previously had served on the World Scout Committee.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett was honored with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award in 1992. In 1999, he received the Silver Buffalo Award, BSA's highest recognition of service to youth.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 2002, Fossett received aviation's highest award, the Gold Medal of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) and in July 2007, he was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. He was presented at the ceremony by Dick Rutan.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 1997, Fossett was inducted into the Balloon and Airship Hall of Fame. In February 2002, Fossett was named America's Rolex Yachtsman of the Year by the American Sailing Association at the New York Yacht Club. He was the oldest recipient of the award in its 41-year history, and the only recipient to fly himself to the ceremony in his own plane.


title: Steve Fossett

text: He received the Explorers Medal from the Explorers Club following his solo balloon circumnavigation. He was given the Diplôme de Montgolfier by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in 1996. He received the Harmon Trophy, given annually "to the world's outstanding aviator and aeronaut", in 1998 and 2002. He received the Grande Médaille of the Aéro-Club de France, and the British Royal Aero Club's Gold Medal in 2002. He received the Order of Magellan and the French Republic's Médaille de l'Aéronautique in 2003.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The White Knight Two VMS "Spirit of Steve Fossett" was named in Fossett's honor by his friend Richard Branson in late 2007. Following his disappearance, Peggy Fossett and Dick Rutan accepted the Spread Wings Award on Fossett's behalf at the 2007 Spreading Wings Gala, Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Denver, Colorado.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In 2010, Fossett was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.


title: Steve Fossett

text: At 8:45 a.m. on the morning of Monday, September 3, 2007 (Labor Day), Fossett took off in a single-engine Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon light aircraft from the Flying-M Ranch private airstrip, near Smith Valley, Nevada. When he failed to return, searches were launched about six hours later. There was no signal from the plane's emergency locator transmitter (ELT) designed to be automatically activated in the event of a crash, but it was of an older type notorious for failing to operate after a crash.


title: Steve Fossett

text: It was first thought that Fossett may have also been wearing a Breitling Emergency watch with a manually operated ELT that had a range of up to , but no signal was received from it. On September 13, Fossett's wife, Peggy, issued a statement clarifying that he owned such a watch but was not wearing it when he took off for the Labor Day flight.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Fossett took off with enough fuel for four to five hours of flight, according to spokesperson Major Cynthia S. Ryan, Public Information Officer with the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). Searchers with CAP were told that Fossett had gone out for a short flight, possibly including the areas of Lucky Boy Pass and Walker Lake. At one point it was suggested that he might have been out scouting for potential sites to conduct a planned land speed run.


title: Steve Fossett

text: A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson noted that Fossett apparently did not file a flight plan and was not required to do so.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On the second day, Civil Air Patrol aircraft searched but found no trace of wreckage after initiating a complex and expanding search of what later evolved into a nearly area of some of the most rugged terrain in North America. On the first day of CAP searching, operations were suspended by mid-day due to high winds, according to Ryan. By the fourth day, the CAP was using fourteen aircraft in the search effort, including one equipped with the ARCHER system that could automatically scan detailed imaging for a given signature of the missing aircraft.


title: Steve Fossett

text: By September 10, search crews had found eight previously unidentified crash sites, some of which were decades old. The urgency of what was still regarded as a rescue mission meant that minimal immediate effort was made to identify the aircraft in the uncharted crash sites, although some had speculated that one could have belonged to Charles Clifford Ogle, missing since 1964.


title: Steve Fossett

text: About two dozen aircraft were involved in the massive search, operating from the primary search base at Minden, Nevada, with a secondary search base located at Bishop, California.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On September 7, Google Inc. helped the search for the aviator through its connections to contractors that provide satellite imagery for its Google Earth software. Branson said he and others were coordinating efforts with Google to see if any of the high-resolution images might include Fossett's aircraft.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On September 8, the first of a series of new high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe was made available via the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta website so that users could flag potential areas of interest for searching. By September 11, up to 50,000 people had joined the effort, scrutinizing more than 300,000 278-square-foot () squares of the imagery. Peter Cohen of Amazon believed that by September 11, the entire search area had been covered at least once.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success. Major Cynthia Ryan later said it had been more of a hindrance than a help. She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward. Many of the ostensible sightings proved to be images of CAP aircraft flying search grids, or simply mistaken artifacts of old images.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Psychics flooded the search base in Minden with predictions of where the aviator could be found. Ryan got the majority of these calls personally, often at her home, in the middle of the night. One man from Canada was particularly persistent with daily calls to Ryan, interfering with her press briefings. Ryan asked her Incident Commander to issue a cease and desist order, backed up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) if necessary. Ryan noted that every message, letter, or phone call was taken seriously, which swamped the USAF specialists assigned the task of reviewing every one of them without regard to apparent plausibility. In retrospect, the crowdsource effort was "not ready for prime time", according to Ryan.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On September 17, the Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol said it was suspending all flights in connection with its search operations, but National Guard search flights, private search flights and ground searches continued.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began a preliminary investigation into the likely crash of the plane that Fossett was flying. The preliminary report stated that Fossett was "presumed fatally injured and the aircraft substantially damaged", but was subsequently revised to remove that assumption. Branson made similar public statements.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On September 19, 2007, authorities confirmed they would stop actively looking for Fossett in the Nevada Desert, but would keep air crews on standby to fly to possible crash sites. On September 30 it was announced that after further analysis of radar data from the day of his disappearance, ground teams and two aircraft had resumed the search.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Ryan later noted that the search was the largest, most complex peacetime search for an individual in U.S. history.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In July 2008, Simon Donato's Team Adventure Science searched for a week on the Nevada–California border. On August 23, 2008, almost a year after Fossett disappeared, twenty-eight friends and admirers conducted a foot search based on new information and computer modeling. That search concluded on September 10.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On May 1, 2008, the "Las Vegas Review-Journal" attributed to Nevada State Governor Jim Gibbons' spokesman, Ben Kieckhefer, the Governor's decision to direct the state to charge Steve Fossett's family for the $687,000 expense of the search for Fossett. Kieckhefer later played that early report down, when he told the "Tahoe Daily Tribune" that Nevada did not intend to demand an involuntary payment from Fossett's widow, but that such a payment would be voluntary: "We are going to request that they help offset some of these expenses, considering the scope of the search, the overall cost as well as our ongoing budget difficulties." Hotelier Barron Hilton, from whose ranch Fossett had departed on the day he went missing, had previously volunteered $200,000 to help pay for the search costs.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In his later comments to the "Tahoe Daily Tribune", Kieckhefer denied outright that a bill for the family was being prepared. Kieckefer said, "It will probably be in the form of a letter", which he indicated would include a financial outline of the steps taken by the state, the associated costs, and a mention of the state's ongoing budget difficulties.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Days prior to this announcement, state Emergency Management Director Frank Siracusa noted that "there is no precedent where government will go after people for costs just because they have money to pay for it. You get lost, and we look for you. It is a service your taxpayer dollars pay for", although he conceded that legally any decision would rest with Gibbons.


title: Steve Fossett

text: At an April 10, 2008 Legislature's Interim Finance Committee hearing, Siracusa indicated that he had hired an independent auditor to review costs incurred by the state in searching for Fossett, but added, "We are doing an audit but not because we are critical of anybody or suspect something was done wrong". Chairman Morse Arberry queried Siracusa as to why, since they lacked funds, had the state not billed the Fossett family for its search costs, to which Siracusa did not directly respond.


title: Steve Fossett

text: In a later interview with the "Las Vegas Review-Journal", Siracusa stated that his comments to the Committee may have given the false impression that he had hired an auditor for the purpose of later challenging the state's financial burden incurred on its behalf by the National Guard during the search operation. Upon interview regarding reports that the state would seek payment, Arberry was recorded as stating that he was glad to hear steps were being taken to try to recoup some of the costs.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The Nevada search cost $1.6 million, "the largest search and rescue effort ever conducted for a person within the U.S." Jim Gibbons asked Fossett's estate to shoulder $487,000, but it declined, saying Fossett's wife had already spent $1 million on private searching.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On September 29, 2008, a hiker found three crumpled identification cards in the eastern Sierra Nevada in California about south (186 degrees) of Fossett's take-off site. The items were confirmed as belonging to Fossett and included an FAA-issued card, his Soaring Society of America membership card and $1,005 in cash.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On October 1, late in the day, air search teams spotted wreckage on the ground at an elevation of , about from where the personal items had been found. Later that evening the teams confirmed identification of the tail number of Fossett's plane.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The crash site is located on the western side of a ridge (Volcanic Ridge) whose orientation is northwest/southeast. The site is about below the crest of the ridge. The steep terrain was sparsely forested with Ponderosa pines averaging to tall. Numerous boulders and rock outcrops surrounded by grassy areas covered the ground.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The crash site is within the Ansel Adams Wilderness in Madera County, California. Other named places near the site include Minaret Mine ( west), Emily Lake ( northeast), Minaret Lake ( west-southwest), the Minaret peaks ( west), Devils Postpile National Monument ( southeast), and the town of Mammoth Lakes (the nearest populated place, east-southeast). The site is east of Yosemite National Park.


title: Steve Fossett

text: Over the next two days, ground searchers found four bone fragments that were about in size. However, the bones were found to be either not human or too small for DNA tests.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On October 29, search teams recovered two large human bones that they suspected might belong to Fossett. These bones were found east of the crash site. Tennis shoes with animal bite marks on them were also recovered.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On November 3, California police coroners said that DNA profiling of the two bones by a California Department of Justice forensics laboratory confirmed a match to Fossett's DNA. Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said Fossett would have died on impact in such a crash, and that it was not unusual for animals to drag remains away.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On March 5, 2009, the NTSB issued its report and findings. The report states that the plane crashed at an elevation of about , below the crest of the ridge. The elevation of peaks in the area exceeded . However, the density altitude in the area at the time and place of the crash was estimated to be .


title: Steve Fossett

text: The aircraft, a tandem two-seater, was nearly 30 years old and Fossett had flown approximately 40 hours in this type. The plane's operating manual says that at an altitude of the rate of climb would be 300 feet per minute (about 1.5 m/s).


title: Steve Fossett

text: The NTSB report says that "a meteorologist from Salinas provided a numerical simulation of the conditions in the accident area using the WRF-ARW (Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting) numerical model. At 0930 [the approximate time of the crash] the model displayed downdrafts in that area of approximately 300 feet per minute." There was no evidence of equipment failure.


title: Steve Fossett

text: The report stated that a postmortem examination of the skeletal fragments had been performed under the auspices of the Madera County Sheriff's Department. The cause of death was determined to be multiple traumatic injuries. The ELT was destroyed by the crash.


title: Steve Fossett

text: On July 9, 2009, the NTSB declared the probable cause of the crash as "the pilot's inadvertent encounter with downdrafts that exceeded the climb capability of the airplane. Contributing to the accident were the downdrafts, high density altitude, and mountainous terrain."


title: R5 (band)

text: The band consisted of Ross Lynch (vocals/rhythm guitar), Riker Lynch (bass guitar/vocals), Rocky Lynch (lead guitar/vocals), Rydel Lynch (vocals), and Ellington Ratliff (drums/vocals). They released their first EP "Ready Set Rock" on March 9, 2010, but it was removed once Ross got his role on the Disney Channel show "Austin and Ally." They then released the EP "Loud" on February 19, 2013. Since releasing their debut album, "Louder", on September 24, 2013, which peaked at 24 on the "Billboard" 200, followed by their world tour. Their second album, "Sometime Last Night", was released on July 10, 2015, and debuted at 6 on the US "Billboard 200", and reached the top 20 in five other countries. They have also released five EPs, eleven singles, and a documentary called "R5: All Day, All Night" that was first released in theaters April 15, 2015.


title: R5 (band)

text: In 2018, it was announced that Ross and Rocky would be pursuing a different project under the name The Driver Era. All of the band's social media accounts under the handle "R5" were changed to "The Driver Era." Only Ross and Rocky are in The Driver Era.


title: R5 (band)

text: R5 is made up of brothers Riker Lynch, Rocky Lynch, Ross Lynch, and their sister Rydel Lynch, all born and raised in Littleton, Colorado, and their family friend Ellington Ratliff, whom they met at a California dance studio called the Rage. About a year after meeting, they asked Ratliff to join the band. While living in Colorado, the Lynch siblings went to a performing arts school. They used to put on shows for their family and charged them at least a dollar to watch them perform in their basement. At age 16, Riker decided he wanted to move to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Their parents, Mark and Stormie, moved the entire family there in order to stay together. Shortly after the move, the siblings began appearing in commercials, while Rocky began teaching himself, Ross and Riker how to play guitar.


title: R5 (band)

text: In 2009, R5 officially started the band and debuted their YouTube web series, "R5 TV", documenting the band's day-to-day life and career beginning. On September 5, they released their first music video, "Without You", directed by Riker. The band self-released a five-track EP entitled "Ready Set Rock" on March 9, 2010, consisting of songs written primarily by Riker, Rocky, Rydel, vocal coach Mauli B, and band coach E-Vega, who produced the EP. No official single was released from EP. On September 4 they released a music video for "Can't Get Enough of You" and, in the next month, for "Never". On July 26, 2011, the band released their debut promotional single, "Say You'll Stay". The music video was released on August 3. During these early years they played sets throughout Southern California at venues, including the Orange County Fair, the San Diego County Fair, the San Diego IndieFest, the Knitting Factory, and Six Flags Magic Mountain.


title: R5 (band)

text: In April 2012, the band members announced via their website that they had signed a record deal with Hollywood Records, and that they were planning for their first mini-tour in May. They collaborated on charity single "Make Some Noise" for Family Channel's Stand Up philanthropic campaign. Their debut tour, West Coast Tour, started on May 3, 2012, and traveled only to west coast. The second tour, East Coast Tour started on December 15, in Jamestown, New York, and traveled only to east coast serving to promote the band with the younger crowd. They also held three special concerts, entitled 3M Tour, in Madison, Wisconsin on November 18, 2012, Milwaukee on November 19 and Minneapolis on November 20. On February 19, 2013, they released the four-song EP "Loud", which charted in the top 3 of the iTunes chart within 24 hours of its release. One of the songs on the EP, "Here Comes Forever", was written by Riker, Rocky and Ross. The R5's debut single, "Loud", was released on February 13 and also serves as the first single from the debut album. The song peaked at number 72 in Japan and 199 in United Kingdom. On August 16, 2013, "Pass Me By", the second single from their debut album "Louder", was released.


title: R5 (band)

text: "Louder" was released on September 24, 2013, and climbed its way to number 2 on the iTunes charts, being classified as a "chart-topper" on the iTunes End of the Year Album list. On December 25, 2013, the third single from "Louder" was released, titled "(I Can't) Forget About You" and, shortly after, the official video was released on the band's website. The band had songwriting credits on 6 of the 11 songs on "Louder". The album includes all four songs from the "Loud" EP. In March 2013, R5 embarked on a 50-date North American tour, and later that year they toured in Australia. On February 5, 2014, the band embarked on the first leg of its first world tour starting in Warsaw, Poland. They toured numerous countries in Europe including: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Israel. The band also performed at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll and at the Radio Disney Music Awards. On April 24, 2014, the band appeared on Ryan Seacrest's popular KIIS-FM radio show, "On Air with Ryan Seacrest", where it was announced that they would be the opening act at the Wango Tango Music Festival. The band released "One Last Dance" as fourth and final single from "Louder" on May 30, 2014. On June 9, 2014, they released the music video for "Rock That Rock", a song written for Candymania's Ring Pop, featuring fan content.


title: R5 (band)

text: Their third EP, "Heart Made Up on You", was released on July 22, 2014, and consists of the songs "Heart Made Up On You," "Things Are Looking Up," "Easy Love," and "Stay With Me." The music video for "Heart Made Up on You" was released on August 1, 2014. R5's second full-length album, "Sometime Last Night", was released on July 10, 2015. Riker shared in interviews that their second album was "more mature," and that Ross was one of the key writers on the record. Ross stated that, earlier in the year, the band had an entire record finished and mastered, but they had second thoughts and scrapped it, feeling it was too similar to "Louder" and didn't accurately reflect the direction they wanted to go in. The album was originally going to include all four songs from the "Heart Made Up on You" EP. The band rewrote the entire album, taking a bigger role in the album's composition, writing most of the songs on the album. Some of the bonus tracks from the deluxe edition of "Sometime Last Night" were tracks intended for the original album. On November 15, 2014, the band released the album's lead single, "Smile", and performed the song at the American Music Awards pre-show.


title: R5 (band)

text: "Let's Not Be Alone Tonight", the second single, was released on February 13, 2015. On March 4, 2015, the group hosted an intimate "Hollywood Hang" at the Roxy in Los Angeles. On April 16, 2015, the band's concert movie, "R5: All Day, All Night", was screened in select Regal cinemas for one night only. In the documentary, Rydel and Ellington confirmed that they are in a relationship. "All Night" was released as the third single on June 2, along with the album's iTunes pre-order. On June 11, R5 made their late night debut, performing "All Night" on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!". On April 6, 2015, R5 announced the first leg of their Sometime Last Night Tour. Following the conclusion of their summer tour, R5 released "R5 Live: Sometime Last Night At the Greek Theatre", a two-disc DVD set featuring 80-minutes of live music and exclusive behind-the-scenes content. They toured around Europe, Australia, Asia, North America and South America, and wrapped up the last show of the tour on March 17, 2016, in Sioux City, Iowa. Jacob Whitesides joined the band as opener for first leg of the US tour, Jack and Jack opened for them in Australia, Max Schneider opened for the second leg of the American tour and DJ Ryland joined the band for the whole tour. On June 30, 2015, "F.E.E.L. G.O.O.D." was released on iTunes as an instant grat track for pre-orders.


title: R5 (band)

text: On July 8, 2015, the music video for "All Night" was released. On October 17, 2015, R5 released a music video for "I Know You Got Away". The video was shot during the European leg of the Sometime Last Night Tour and was directed by Ross and edited by Rydel. On December 18, 2015, R5 premiered a music video for "Wild Hearts" on Live Nation TV. The video was directed by the band during their trip to Las Vegas for Rocky's 21st birthday. In June 2016, R5 announced that they would headline Youth Music Zone in Kingston, Jamaica, on July 9, 2016. The band performed at Summer Sonic Festival in Tokyo, Japan on August 20, 2016, and in Osaka on August 21, 2016. It was their third time to visit Japan. After the festival, the members except for Rocky went back to Los Angeles, but Rocky stayed in Japan for about a few weeks to be with his girlfriend, who stayed in Japan at that time. Other artists on the lineup include Underworld, Fergie and Weezer.


title: R5 (band)

text: On March 16, 2017, Riker announced that the band was recording new songs. On April 5, they announced their fourth EP, "New Addictions", which was released on May 12, 2017. The five-song EP includes the single "If", the original songs "Red Velvet", "Lay Your Head Down" and "Trading Time", and "Need You Tonight", a cover of the INXS single from their 1987 album "Kick". Short after the release of New Addictions, the new single Hurts Good was released The band also announced their New Addictions Tour, a US tour which begins on June 17, 2017, and toured to Mexico, Europe, South America, and other countries.


title: R5 (band)

text: On February 1, 2018, R5 posted on their YouTube a video called The Last Show. Then on March 1, 2018, R5's Instagram and Twitter handles were changed to The Driver Era and all of R5's previous posts were deleted. On March 2, 2018, they announced that the band was going on a temporary hiatus and that The Driver Era would be a band with only Ross and Rocky.


title: R5 (band)

text: The band has cited The Beatles, Fall Out Boy, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, The Beach Boys, INXS, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Prince and Queen as big musical influences. They have also mentioned more recent artists, including McFly, The Killers, Neon Trees, Walk the Moon, Maroon 5, Jack White, Bruno Mars and The Script.


title: Scandal (American band)

text: Scandal is an American rock band from the 1980s fronted by Patty Smyth. The band scored a hit in the United States with the song "The Warrior", which peaked at No. 7 in 1984. Other hits were "Goodbye to You" (1982 – No. 65 US), "Love's Got a Line on You" (1983 – No. 59 US), "Hands Tied" (1984 – No. 41 US), and "Beat of a Heart" (1985 – No. 41 US).


title: Scandal (American band)

text: Scandal was formed in New York City in 1981 by guitarist Zack Smith. The other initial members included: bassist Ivan Elias (1950–1995), guitarist Keith Mack, keyboardist Benjy King (1953–2012), drummer Frankie LaRocka (1954–2005) (later replaced by Thommy Price), and singer Patty Smyth. Bon Jovi lead singer Jon Bon Jovi also briefly played guitar for the band in 1983.


title: Scandal (American band)

text: The band had much success early on but due to struggles within the group and their record company, it slowly dissolved—losing member after member. By the time "The Warrior" tour hit the road in 1984, all that remained of the original lineup were Smyth and Mack. Scandal broke up shortly after the tour ended. The group (minus Ivan Elias, who died of cancer in June 1995; replaced by Kasim Sulton) reunited in 2004 for VH1's "Bands Reunited" show and did a string of concerts on the United States East Coast culminating in a show at Irving Plaza in their home city (New York) on February 9, 2005. During the summer of 2006, the band (excluding Price and Sulton) reunited again for VH1's "We Are the '80s" tour, playing a string of large – mainly outdoor – venues and earning critical acclaim. During the summer and fall of 2007, they toured again (this time without Zack Smith).


title: Scandal (American band)

text: In July 2008, "Billboard" reported the upcoming release of new music by Patty Smyth and Scandal (featuring original members Keith Mack and Benjy King). At a performance in Dewey Beach, Delaware on August 3, 2008, Smyth indicated Scandal would be releasing a new five song EP in the near future. Scandal also performed one of their new songs, "Trust in Me". Other new titles include "Make It Hard" and "End of the Girl". Patty Smyth & Scandal debuted their first single as a band ("Hard for You to Love Me", also referred to as "Make It Hard") in over 24 years on January 17, 2009 in Ridgefield, Connecticut to a standing ovation. Smyth stated the song will be available to purchase digitally in February 2009, with the new EP to follow shortly. However, the single has been indefinitely delayed as the EP will be expanded to a full-length album, according to Smyth's blog in May 2009. As of December 2011, the only new music released was "Silent Night", their cover of the Christmas classic, which was featured in the "NCIS" Season 9 Christmas episode, "Newborn King" and subsequently available for purchase on the band's official website.


title: Scandal (American band)

text: Original drummer Frankie LaRocka died in 2005 after undergoing surgery. Original keyboardist Benjy King died on September 20, 2012, from injuries sustained in an accident.


title: Microcode

text: In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions that implement higher-level machine code instructions or internal finite-state machine sequencing in many digital processing elements. Microcode is used in general-purpose central processing units, although in current desktop CPUs, it is only a fallback path for cases that the faster hardwired control unit cannot handle.


title: Microcode

text: Microcode typically resides in special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions, state machine data, or other input into sequences of detailed circuit-level operations. It separates the machine instructions from the underlying electronics so that instructions can be designed and altered more freely. It also facilitates the building of complex multi-step instructions, while reducing the complexity of computer circuits. Writing microcode is often called "microprogramming" and the microcode in a particular processor implementation is sometimes called a "microprogram".


title: Microcode

text: More extensive microcoding allows small and simple microarchitectures to emulate more powerful architectures with wider word length, more execution units and so on, which is a relatively simple way to achieve software compatibility between different products in a processor family.


title: Microcode

text: Some hardware vendors, especially IBM, use the term "microcode" as a synonym for "firmware". In that way, all code within a device is termed "microcode" regardless of it being microcode or machine code; for example, hard disk drives are said to have their microcode updated, though they typically contain both microcode and firmware.


title: Microcode

text: The lowest layer in a computer's software stack is traditionally raw machine code instructions for the processor. In microcoded processors, fetching and decoding those instructions, and executing them, may be done by microcode. To avoid confusion, each microprogram-related element is differentiated by the "micro" prefix: microinstruction, microassembler, microprogrammer, microarchitecture, etc.


title: Microcode

text: Complex digital processors may also employ more than one (possibly microcode-based) control unit in order to delegate sub-tasks that must be performed essentially asynchronously in parallel. For example, the VAX 9000 has a IBox unit to fetch and decode instructions, which it hands to a microcoded EBox unit to be executed, and the VAX 8800 has both a microcoded IBox and a microcoded EBox.


title: Microcode

text: A high-level programmer, or even an assembly language programmer, does not normally see or change microcode. Unlike machine code, which often retains some backward compatibility among different processors in a family, microcode only runs on the exact electronic circuitry for which it is designed, as it constitutes an inherent part of the particular processor design itself.


title: Microcode

text: Engineers normally write the microcode during the design phase of a processor, storing it in a read-only memory (ROM) or programmable logic array (PLA) structure, or in a combination of both. However, machines also exist that have some or all microcode stored in static random-access memory (SRAM) or flash memory. This is traditionally denoted as "writeable control store" in the context of computers, which can be either read-only or read-write memory. In the latter case, the CPU initialization process loads microcode into the control store from another storage medium, with the possibility of altering the microcode to correct bugs in the instruction set, or to implement new machine instructions.


title: Microcode

text: Microprograms consist of series of microinstructions, which control the CPU at a very fundamental level of hardware circuitry. For example, a single typical "horizontal" microinstruction might specify the following operations:


title: Microcode

text: To simultaneously control all processor's features in one cycle, the microinstruction is often wider than 50 bits; e.g., 128 bits on a 360/85 with an emulator feature. Microprograms are carefully designed and optimized for the fastest possible execution, as a slow microprogram would result in a slow machine instruction and degraded performance for related application programs that use such instructions.


title: Microcode

text: Microcode was originally developed as a simpler method of developing the control logic for a computer. Initially, CPU instruction sets were hardwired. Each step needed to fetch, decode, and execute the machine instructions (including any operand address calculations, reads, and writes) was controlled directly by combinational logic and rather minimal sequential state machine circuitry. While such hard-wired processors were very efficient, the need for powerful instruction sets with multi-step addressing and complex operations ("see below") made them difficult to design and debug; highly encoded and varied-length instructions can contribute to this as well, especially when very irregular encodings are used.


title: Microcode

text: Microcode simplified the job by allowing much of the processor's behaviour and programming model to be defined via microprogram routines rather than by dedicated circuitry. Even late in the design process, microcode could easily be changed, whereas hard-wired CPU designs were very cumbersome to change. Thus, this greatly facilitated CPU design.


title: Microcode

text: From the 1940s to the late 1970s, a large portion of programming was done in assembly language; higher-level instructions mean greater programmer productivity, so an important advantage of microcode was the relative ease by which powerful machine instructions can be defined. The ultimate extension of this are "Directly Executable High Level Language" designs, in which each statement of a high-level language such as PL/I is entirely and directly executed by microcode, without compilation. The IBM Future Systems project and Data General Fountainhead Processor are examples of this. During the 1970s, CPU speeds grew more quickly than memory speeds and numerous techniques such as memory block transfer, memory pre-fetch and multi-level caches were used to alleviate this. High-level machine instructions, made possible by microcode, helped further, as fewer more complex machine instructions require less memory bandwidth. For example, an operation on a character string can be done as a single machine instruction, thus avoiding multiple instruction fetches.


title: Microcode

text: Architectures with instruction sets implemented by complex microprograms included the IBM System/360 and Digital Equipment Corporation VAX. The approach of increasingly complex microcode-implemented instruction sets was later called complex instruction set computer (CISC). An alternate approach, used in many microprocessors, is to use one or more programmable logic array (PLA) or read-only memory (ROM) (instead of combinational logic) mainly for instruction decoding, and let a simple state machine (without much, or any, microcode) do most of the sequencing. The MOS Technology 6502 is an example of a microprocessor using a PLA for instruction decode and sequencing. The PLA is visible in photomicrographs of the chip, and its operation can be seen in the transistor-level simulation.


title: Microcode

text: Microprogramming is still used in modern CPU designs. In some cases, after the microcode is debugged in simulation, logic functions are substituted for the control store. Logic functions are often faster and less expensive than the equivalent microprogram memory.


title: Microcode

text: A processor's microprograms operate on a more primitive, totally different, and much more hardware-oriented architecture than the assembly instructions visible to normal programmers. In coordination with the hardware, the microcode implements the programmer-visible architecture. The underlying hardware need not have a fixed relationship to the visible architecture. This makes it easier to implement a given instruction set architecture on a wide variety of underlying hardware micro-architectures.


title: Microcode

text: The IBM System/360 has a 32-bit architecture with 16 general-purpose registers, but most of the System/360 implementations use hardware that implements a much simpler underlying microarchitecture; for example, the System/360 Model 30 has 8-bit data paths to the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and main memory and implemented the general-purpose registers in a special unit of higher-speed core memory, and the System/360 Model 40 has 8-bit data paths to the ALU and 16-bit data paths to main memory and also implemented the general-purpose registers in a special unit of higher-speed core memory. The Model 50 has full 32-bit data paths and implements the general-purpose registers in a special unit of higher-speed core memory. The Model 65 through the Model 195 have larger data paths and implement the general-purpose registers in faster transistor circuits. In this way, microprogramming enabled IBM to design many System/360 models with substantially different hardware and spanning a wide range of cost and performance, while making them all architecturally compatible. This dramatically reduces the number of unique system software programs that must be written for each model.


title: Microcode

text: A similar approach was used by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in their VAX family of computers. As a result, different VAX processors use different microarchitectures, yet the programmer-visible architecture does not change.


title: Microcode

text: Microprogramming also reduces the cost of field changes to correct defects (bugs) in the processor; a bug can often be fixed by replacing a portion of the microprogram rather than by changes being made to hardware logic and wiring.


title: Microcode

text: In 1947, the design of the MIT Whirlwind introduced the concept of a control store as a way to simplify computer design and move beyond "ad hoc" methods. The control store is a diode matrix: a two-dimensional lattice, where one dimension accepts "control time pulses" from the CPU's internal clock, and the other connects to control signals on gates and other circuits. A "pulse distributor" takes the pulses generated by the CPU clock and breaks them up into eight separate time pulses, each of which activates a different row of the lattice. When the row is activated, it activates the control signals connected to it.


title: Microcode

text: Described another way, the signals transmitted by the control store are being played much like a player piano roll. That is, they are controlled by a sequence of very wide words constructed of bits, and they are "played" sequentially. In a control store, however, the "song" is short and repeated continuously.


title: Microcode

text: In 1951, Maurice Wilkes enhanced this concept by adding "conditional execution", a concept akin to a conditional in computer software. His initial implementation consisted of a pair of matrices: the first one generated signals in the manner of the Whirlwind control store, while the second matrix selected which row of signals (the microprogram instruction word, so to speak) to invoke on the next cycle. Conditionals were implemented by providing a way that a single line in the control store could choose from alternatives in the second matrix. This made the control signals conditional on the detected internal signal. Wilkes coined the term "microprogramming" to describe this feature and distinguish it from a simple control store.


title: Microcode

text: Each microinstruction in a microprogram provides the bits that control the functional elements that internally compose a CPU. The advantage over a hard-wired CPU is that internal CPU control becomes a specialized form of a computer program. Microcode thus transforms a complex electronic design challenge (the control of a CPU) into a less complex programming challenge. To take advantage of this, a CPU is divided into several parts:


title: Microcode

text: There may also be a memory address register and a memory data register, used to access the main computer storage. Together, these elements form an "execution unit". Most modern CPUs have several execution units. Even simple computers usually have one unit to read and write memory, and another to execute user code. These elements could often be brought together as a single chip. This chip comes in a fixed width that would form a "slice" through the execution unit. These are known as "bit slice" chips. The AMD Am2900 family is one of the best known examples of bit slice elements. The parts of the execution units and the whole execution units are interconnected by a bundle of wires called a bus.


title: Microcode

text: Programmers develop microprograms, using basic software tools. A microassembler allows a programmer to define the table of bits symbolically. Because of its close relationship to the underlying architecture, "microcode has several properties that make it difficult to generate using a compiler." A simulator program is intended to execute the bits in the same way as the electronics, and allows much more freedom to debug the microprogram. After the microprogram is finalized, and extensively tested, it is sometimes used as the input to a computer program that constructs logic to produce the same data. This program is similar to those used to optimize a programmable logic array. Even without fully optimal logic, heuristically optimized logic can vastly reduce the number of transistors from the number needed for a read-only memory (ROM) control store. This reduces the cost to produce, and the electricity used by, a CPU.


title: Microcode

text: Microcode can be characterized as "horizontal" or "vertical", referring primarily to whether each microinstruction controls CPU elements with little or no decoding (horizontal microcode) or requires extensive decoding by combinatorial logic before doing so (vertical microcode). Consequently, each horizontal microinstruction is wider (contains more bits) and occupies more storage space than a vertical microinstruction.


title: Microcode

text: "Horizontal microcode has several discrete micro-operations that are combined in a single microinstruction for simultaneous operation." Horizontal microcode is typically contained in a fairly wide control store; it is not uncommon for each word to be 108 bits or more. On each tick of a sequencer clock a microcode word is read, decoded, and used to control the functional elements that make up the CPU.


title: Microcode

text: In a typical implementation a horizontal microprogram word comprises fairly tightly defined groups of bits. For example, one simple arrangement might be:


title: Microcode

text: For this type of micromachine to implement a JUMP instruction with the address following the opcode, the microcode might require two clock ticks. The engineer designing it would write microassembler source code looking something like this:


title: Microcode

text: For each tick it is common to find that only some portions of the CPU are used, with the remaining groups of bits in the microinstruction being no-ops. With careful design of hardware and microcode, this property can be exploited to parallelise operations that use different areas of the CPU; for example, in the case above, the ALU is not required during the first tick, so it could potentially be used to complete an earlier arithmetic instruction.


title: Microcode

text: In vertical microcode, each microinstruction is significantly encoded, that is, the bit fields generally pass through intermediate combinatory logic that, in turn, generates the control and sequencing signals for internal CPU elements (ALU, registers, etc.). This is in contrast with horizontal microcode, in which the bit fields either directly produce the control and sequencing signals or are only minimally encoded. Consequently, vertical microcode requires smaller instruction lengths and less storage, but requires more time to decode, resulting in a slower CPU clock.


title: Microcode

text: Some vertical microcode is just the assembly language of a simple conventional computer that is emulating a more complex computer. Some processors, such as DEC Alpha processors and the CMOS microprocessors on later IBM mainframes System/390 and z/Architecture, use machine code, running in a special mode that gives it access to special instructions, special registers, and other hardware resources unavailable to regular machine code, to implement some instructions and other functions, such as page table walks on Alpha processors. This is called PALcode on Alpha processors and millicode on IBM mainframe processors.


title: Microcode

text: The "field select" selects which part of the CPU will be controlled by this word of the control store. The "field value" controls that part of the CPU. With this type of microcode, a designer explicitly chooses to make a slower CPU to save money by reducing the unused bits in the control store; however, the reduced complexity may increase the CPU's clock frequency, which lessens the effect of an increased number of cycles per instruction.


title: Microcode

text: As transistors grew cheaper, horizontal microcode came to dominate the design of CPUs using microcode, with vertical microcode being used less often.


title: Microcode

text: When both vertical and horizontal microcode are used, the horizontal microcode may be referred to as "nanocode" or "picocode".


title: Microcode

text: A few computers were built using "writable microcode". In this design, rather than storing the microcode in ROM or hard-wired logic, the microcode is stored in a RAM called a "writable control store" or "WCS". Such a computer is sometimes called a "writable instruction set computer" (WISC).


title: Microcode

text: Many experimental prototype computers use writable control stores; there are also commercial machines that use writable microcode, such as the Burroughs Small Systems, early Xerox workstations, the DEC VAX 8800 ("Nautilus") family, the Symbolics L- and G-machines, a number of IBM System/360 and System/370 implementations, some DEC PDP-10 machines, and the Data General Eclipse MV/8000.


title: Microcode

text: Many more machines offer user-programmable writable control stores as an option, including the HP 2100, DEC PDP-11/60 and Varian Data Machines V-70 series minicomputers. The IBM System/370 includes a facility called "Initial-Microprogram Load" ("IML" or "IMPL") that can be invoked from the console, as part of "power-on reset" ("POR") or from another processor in a tightly coupled multiprocessor complex.


title: Microcode

text: Some commercial machines, for example IBM 360/85, have both a read-only storage and a writable control store for microcode.


title: Microcode

text: WCS offers several advantages including the ease of patching the microprogram and, for certain hardware generations, faster access than ROMs can provide. User-programmable WCS allows the user to optimize the machine for specific purposes.


title: Microcode

text: Starting with the Pentium Pro in 1995, several x86 CPUs have writable Intel Microcode. This, for example, has allowed bugs in the Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon microcodes to be fixed by patching their microprograms, rather than requiring the entire chips to be replaced. A second prominent example is the set of microcode patches that Intel offered for some of their processor architectures of up to 10 years in age, in a bid to counter the security vulnerabilities discovered in their designs – Spectre and Meltdown – which went public at the start of 2018. A microcode update can be installed by Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, or the motherboard BIOS.


title: Microcode

text: The design trend toward heavily microcoded processors with complex instructions began in the early 1960s and continued until roughly the mid-1980s. At that point the RISC design philosophy started becoming more prominent.


title: Microcode

text: A CPU that uses microcode generally takes several clock cycles to execute a single instruction, one clock cycle for each step in the microprogram for that instruction. Some CISC processors include instructions that can take a very long time to execute. Such variations interfere with both interrupt latency and, what is far more important in modern systems, pipelining.


title: Microcode

text: When designing a new processor, a hardwired control RISC has the following advantages over microcoded CISC:


title: Microcode

text: Many RISC and VLIW processors are designed to execute every instruction (as long as it is in the cache) in a single cycle. This is very similar to the way CPUs with microcode execute one microinstruction per cycle. VLIW processors have instructions that behave similarly to very wide horizontal microcode, although typically without such fine-grained control over the hardware as provided by microcode. RISC instructions are sometimes similar to the narrow vertical microcode.


title: Microcode

text: Microcode has been popular in application-specific processors such as network processors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, channel controllers, disk controllers, network interface controllers, graphics processing units, and in other hardware.


title: Microcode

text: Modern CISC implementations, such as the x86 family, decode instructions into dynamically buffered micro-operations ("μops") with an instruction encoding similar to RISC or traditional microcode. A hardwired instruction decode unit directly emits μops for common x86 instructions, but falls back to a more traditional microcode ROM containing μops for more complex or rarely used instructions.


title: Microcode

text: For example, an x86 might look up μops from microcode to handle complex multistep operations such as loop or string instructions, floating-point unit transcendental functions or unusual values such as denormal numbers, and special-purpose instructions such as CPUID.


title: Om Prakash Chautala

text: Om Prakash Chautala (born 1 January 1935) is a Indian politician from Haryana who served as a former Chief Minister of Haryana from Indian National Lok Dal and son of 6th Deputy Prime Minister Chaudhary Devi Lal.


title: Om Prakash Chautala

text: Chautala is the son of Devi Lal, a former Deputy Prime Minister of India. He was married to Sneh Lata, who died in August 2019. He was born in a Jat family of Sihag clan. He has two sons, Ajay Singh Chautala and Abhay Singh Chautala, and three daughters. Abhay is MLA from Ellenabad also remained Leader of Opposition, Haryana Legislative Assembly from October 2014 - March 2019, 10th President of Indian Olympic Association and his grandson Dushyant Chautala is a Deputy Chief Minister of Haryana from Uchana, Jind Seat of Haryana Vidhan Sabha and former MP from Hisar Lok Sabha Seat. He was the Chief Minister of Haryana from 2 December 1989 to 22 May 1990, from 12 July 1990 to 17 July 1990, again from 22 March 1991 to 6 April 1991 and, finally, from 24 July 1999 to 5 March 2005. Politically, he had been part of NDA and Third Front (non-NDA & non-UPA front) at national level.


title: Om Prakash Chautala

text: Chautala was released from the Tihar Jail on 2 July 2021 after serving nine and a half years of a 10-year prison sentence. His early release was due to a decision of the Delhi government to reduce prison populations to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Om Prakash Chautala

text: In June 2008 OP Chautala and 53 others were charged in connection with the appointment of 3,206 junior basic teachers in the state of Haryana during 1999–2000. In January 2013 a New Delhi court sentenced Chautala and his son Ajay Singh Chautala to ten years' imprisonment under various provisions of the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act. Chautala was found guilty of illegally recruiting over 3,000 unqualified teachers. A CBI investigation was ordered by the Supreme Court based on a writ filed by the former director of primary education Sanjeev Kumar, a 1989 batch IAS officer.


title: Om Prakash Chautala

text: Chautala was awarded a four-year jail term in a 16 years old disproportionate assets case on 27 May 2022 by CBI Court. Along with the jail-time, the Delhi CBI Court also imposed a fine . In the process, Chautala became the oldest prisoner of the Tihar Jail of Delhi at age of 87.


title: Death Race 2

text: Death Race 2 is a 2010 American science fiction action film directed by Roel Reiné, written by Tony Giglio and Paul W. S. Anderson. It is the second installment in the "Death Race" film series. The film serves as a prequel to "Death Race" (2008) and was released directly to video on 27 December 2010. The film is followed by a sequel "" (2013)


title: Death Race 2

text: The film explores the origins of the first "Frankenstein" car driver, Carl "Luke" Lucas (Luke Goss). Alongside Goss, the film also stars Fred Koehler, Tanit Phoenix, Robin Shou, Lauren Cohan, Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames and Sean Bean as the villain. The film received a generally negative critical reaction.


title: Death Race 2

text: Getaway driver Carl "Luke" Lucas is arrested after a robbery for his crime boss Markus Kane goes wrong. As his accomplices are robbing the bank, two officers casually enter the building. Luke tells them to abort, but they refuse; Luke intervenes, but it results in the death of one of the three accomplices. Luke shoots and kills one of the officers and dumps off his accomplices in order to fulfill Markus's wishes. In doing so, Luke is eventually captured by the police following a high-speed chase and sentenced to prison. Six months later, Luke is transferred to Terminal Island.


title: Death Race 2

text: Terminal Island is a private prison under the control of the Weyland Corporation, which hosts the Death Match, a televised pay-per-view competition where two dangerous convicts are chosen and then forced to fight to the death or submission. The prisoners are given access to weapons or defense items to use during the fight by stepping on a marked plate in the arena. Luke meets the men who eventually become his pit crew in the Death Race: Lists, who annoys him by over-analyzing everything, Goldberg, and Rocco. The host of the Death Match is September Jones, a former Miss Universe who lost her crown due to allegations of having a sexual relationship with all of its judges. She now works for Weyland Corp to create profit from the pay-per-view subscribers of the Death Match.


title: Death Race 2

text: Luke is approached in the showers by September, who proposes that he fights. When he refuses, she makes sexual advances towards him, which he pretends to go for before refusing. In retaliation, September chooses Lists to fight in a Death Match with the convict Big Bill. Luke confronts her while Lists is running for his life during the event, pleading to let him fight in place of Lists. She refuses and he jumps over a barbed fence to fight for Lists. He is joined by Katrina Banks, a woman convict who is serving as a ring girl with other female convicts. She hits the convict with a round number sign made of metal. A riot breaks out during the fight between Luke and the convict because of racial tension, sparked because Luke is white and the other convict is black. The convicts break down the fence to get in, and some of the rapists attack and attempt to rape the female convicts. Katrina defends herself and helps the other women, who are then evacuated. When the riot control guards intervene, Luke surrenders. Markus, worried that Luke will trade info on his crimes for immunity, discovers his location at Terminal Island while watching the Death Match. Afterward, Luke is well-received when he sees Katrina and inquires about her well-being after the fight.


title: Death Race 2

text: Markus puts a bounty of $1 million on Luke's head and convinces some of the prisoners to kill him. Meanwhile, Jones comes up with a plan to boost their profits by converting the Death Match into a "Death Race", where the contestants will have to race over days to win each match. The person who manages to win five races will be released from prison, originally credited as Weyland's idea. Luke joins the race, during which other prisoners try to kill him to earn Markus' bounty. The female convicts are brought back to play navigator for each racer, and Katrina is paired with Luke.


title: Death Race 2

text: During the second race, Luke intervenes in an altercation between two other racers, and saves 14K, who is a member of the Triads. As a result, 14K claims to be indebted to Luke. Later in the same race, Luke's car - which was sabotaged by one of his pit crew members - crashes after being hit with a heat seeker missile fired by Big Bill (who is later killed by his navigator after he accidentally killed his pit crew); Luke's pit crew arrives and tries to save him, but it is too late and everybody is led to believe that Luke is dead. In reality, he survives with extensive scarring to his face. He joins the race as the new character "Frankenstein," with a mask to hide his identity. As the last race begins, a Triad assassin sent by 14K raids Markus's mansion and executes Markus as a favor to Luke. Lists kills Luke's pit crew member Rocco who tampered with Luke's car, and Luke kills September by running her over with his car, before he races with the other competitors.


title: Wheellock

text: A wheellock, wheel-lock or wheel lock is a friction-wheel mechanism which creates a spark that causes a firearm to fire. It was the next major development in firearms technology after the matchlock and the first self-igniting firearm. Its name is from its rotating steel wheel to provide ignition. Developed in Europe around 1500, it was used alongside the matchlock and later the snaplock (1540s), the snaphance (1560s) and the flintlock (c. 1610s).


title: Wheellock

text: The wheellock works by spinning a spring-loaded steel wheel against a piece of pyrite to generate intense sparks, which ignite gunpowder in a pan, which flashes through a small touchhole to ignite the main charge in the firearm's barrel. The pyrite is clamped in vise jaws on a spring-loaded arm (or 'dog'), which rests on the pan cover. When the trigger is pulled, the pan cover is opened, and the wheel is rotated, with the pyrite pressed into contact.


title: Wheellock

text: A close modern analogy of the wheellock mechanism is the operation of a lighter, where a toothed steel wheel is spun in contact with a piece of sparking material to ignite the liquid or gaseous fuel.


title: Wheellock

text: A wheellock firearm had the advantage that it can be instantly readied and fired even with one hand, in contrast to common matchlock firearms, which must have a burning cord of slow match ready if the gun might be needed and demanded the operator's full attention and two hands to operate. On the other hand, wheellock mechanisms were complex to make, making them relatively costly.


title: Wheellock

text: The "dog" is a spring-loaded arm pivoted on the outside of the lock plate. A sparking material, usually a small piece of iron pyrite, is clamped and held by vise-like jaws at the swinging end of the arm. The dog has two possible positions to which it can be pivoted by hand: a "safe" position, in which the dog is pushed towards the muzzle of the firearm, and an "operating" position, where the dog is pulled towards the operator so that the pyrite in its jaws can engage either the top of the pan cover (see below), or (in the absence of the pan cover) the edge of a steel wheel bearing longitudinal grooves around its circumference. Flint is not suitable as a sparking material in the wheellock because it is too hard and would quickly wear away the wheel grooves.


title: Wheellock

text: The upper segment of the grooved wheel, made of hardened steel, projects through a slot cut to its precise dimensions in the base of the priming pan. The wheel is grooved on its outside circumference with three or more V-shaped grooves with transverse cuts at intervals to provide a friction surface for the iron pyrites. The wheel is fixed to a shaft, one end of which projects outside the lockplate. The outside projection is of square section to permit a spanner (wrench) to be engaged for subsequent tensioning of the lock. The other end of the shaft fits through a hole in the lockplate, and on this end is forged a cam, or eccentric. One end of a short, robust chain (made of three or four flat, parallel links like a short piece of bicycle chain) is fixed to the cam, while the other end of the chain is held in a groove at the end of the longer branch of a large heavy V-spring, which is generally retained by a screw and a headed bracket through upstands inside the lockplate.


title: Wheellock

text: As in all muzzle-loading firearms (prior to the introduction of the percussion cap), the pan transmits the fire to the main charge of gunpowder inside the breech of the barrel, via a small hole (or "vent") in the side of the breech, that gives on to the pan. The priming pan of all wheellocks is provided with a sliding cover that has two purposes, the first of which is to contain the priming powder and afford it some protection from the elements (the second is examined below, under 'Operation'). The pan cover may be slid open and closed by hand, but it is also attached to an arm inside the lock plate, which is acted upon by the eccentric on the shaft of the wheel.


title: Wheellock

text: The trigger engages one arm of a "z"-shaped sear pivoting in its centre between two upstanding brackets riveted or brazed to the inside of the lockplate. The other arm of the sear passes through a hole in the lockplate, and engages in a blind hole on the inner side of the wheel, thus effectively locking it and preventing any rotation but only because of a secondary sear or wedge that is pressed under the rear arm of the sear—that is between the lockplate and the sear—when the forward part of it engages into the recess in the wheel. When the trigger is pulled, the secondary lever is withdrawn from its position and the strong pull of the mainspring pushes the unsupported main sear back into the lock and the wheel is free to rotate. The mechanism may seem overconstructed, but it prevents the trigger mechanism from working against the very powerful mainspring as it is the case with all vertical acting sears in flint and percussion locks or even modern firearms that still have cocks (revolvers).


title: Wheellock

text: First, the dog is rotated forward to the "safe" position, and the priming pan is pushed open (if it is not already so). After loading a powder charge and ball through the muzzle in the usual way, the operator takes his "spanner", slips it onto the square section of the wheel shaft, and turns it until a click is heard (about one half to three-quarters of a revolution), and the wheel is felt to lock in place, whereupon the spanner is withdrawn. What occurs is that when the wheel is turned, the mainspring is tensioned via the chain, which is wound partially around the shaft. The click is the sound of one end of the sear engaging in the blind hole on the inside of the wheel, thus immobilising it.


title: Wheellock

text: The pan is then primed with powder, and the pan cover pulled shut. Finally the dog is pulled back so that the pyrite in its jaws is resting on the top of the pan cover, under some pressure from the spring at the toe of its arm.


title: Wheellock

text: On pulling the trigger of a wheellock firearm, the sear effects a slight rotation as described above. The end of the sear arm (that has hitherto locked the wheel and prevented it from turning) is disengaged, leaving the wheel free to turn under the tension of the mainspring. There is a subtlety here that is of vital importance: the "hole" in the side of the wheel into which the sear engages, is not a parallel-sided shaft. If it were, then under the tremendous tension of the mainspring, it would require a huge force on the trigger to disengage the sear. Nor is the tip of the sear arm cylindrical, which would have a similar effect. Rather, the "hole" is a depression in the wheel (like a small crater), and the sear has a rounded end: the wheel is locked by reason of lateral force on the shaft of the wheel rather than vertical force on the sear.


title: Wheellock

text: As soon as the wheel is released by the sear, the longer arm of the mainspring pulls the chain engaged in it. The other end of the chain being fixed to the cam on the wheel shaft, the latter rotates at high speed, whilst the rotating cam pushes forward the arm to which the pan cover is attached, thus causing the pan cover to slide forward towards the muzzle of the piece, and the pyrites to fall (under tension of the dog spring) on to the now rotating wheel. That is the second purpose of a sliding pan cover: were the pyrites to engage a stationary wheel, it would almost certainly jam the mechanism: but the built-in delay allows the pyrites to slip off the sliding pan-cover on to an already rotating wheel. A more modern development has been the use of a ball bearing between the wheel and the sear. This design allows a smoother and lighter trigger pull, requiring less force to operate.


title: Wheellock

text: The fast rotation of the wheel against the pyrites produces white-hot sparks that ignite the powder in the pan, which is transferred to the main charge in the breech of the barrel via the vent, and the gun discharges.


title: Wheellock

text: The wheellock took around a minute to load, prepare and fire. Many contemporary illustrations of a wheellock pistol in action show the gun held slightly rotated (about 45 degree angle from the horizontal) rather than vertically as with a hand cannon, to ensure that the priming powder in the pan lay against the vent in the barrel, and avoid a 'flash in the pan' or misfire. This was not the case for the flintlock, where the sparks had to fall vertically a certain distance on to the pan.


title: Wheellock

text: The invention of the wheellock in Europe can be placed at about 1500. There is a vocal group of scholars who believe Leonardo da Vinci was the inventor. Drawings made by Leonardo of a wheellock mechanism date (depending on the authority) from either the mid-1490s or the first decade of the 16th century. However, a drawing from a book of German inventions (dated 1505) and a 1507 reference to the purchase of a wheellock in Austria may indicate the inventor was an unknown German mechanic instead.


title: Wheellock

text: In 1517 and 1518, the first gun control laws banning the wheellock were proclaimed by the Emperor Maximilian I, initially in Austria and later throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Several Italian states followed suit in the 1520s and 1530s, another argument used by the pro-German camp.


title: Wheellock

text: As Lisa Jardine relates in her account of the assassination of William the Silent of the Netherlands, in 1584, the small size, ease of concealment and user-friendly loading aspect of the wheellock, compared to larger and more cumbersome hand-held weapons, meant that it was used for the killing of public figures, such as Francis, Duke of Guise and William himself. Jardine also argues that a stray wheellock pistol shot may have been responsible for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Huguenots in 1572.


title: Wheellock

text: Wheellock pistols were in common use during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) on both sides for cavalry and officers. Around 1650 the flintlock began to replace the wheellock as it was cheaper and easier to use than the wheellock.


title: Wheellock

text: Wheel-lock firearms were never mass-produced for military purposes, but the best preserved armoury collection at the Landeszeughaus in Graz, Austria, contains over 3,000 examples, many of which were produced in small batches for military units.


title: Wheellock

text: Among the advantages of the wheellock was a better resistance to rain or damp conditions than the matchlock and the absence of a telltale glow, or smell from the burning slow match, itself a hazard in proximity to gunpowder. A slow match could be next to impossible to light in rain, but the wheellock allowed sparks to be generated in any weather, and the priming pan was fitted with a cover that was not opened until the instant the gun was fired. That made it feasible for the first time to conceal a firearm under clothing. The high production cost and complexity of the mechanism, however, hindered the wheellock's widespread adoption. A highly skilled gunsmith was required to build the mechanism, and the variety of parts and complex design made it liable to malfunction if it was not carefully maintained. Early models also had trouble with unreliable springs, but the problem was quickly solved.


title: Wheellock

text: The wheellock was used along with the matchlock until both were replaced by the simpler and less-costly flintlock, by the late 17th century. The wheellock mechanism however gave faster ignition than the flintlock, because the sparks were produced directly in the pan rather than having to fall a certain distance from the frizzen.


title: Transmedicalism

text: Transmedicalism is the idea that being transgender or transsexual is contingent upon experiencing gender dysphoria or requiring medical treatment to transition. Transmedicalists believe individuals who identify as transgender, do not experience gender dysphoria, and have no desire to undergo a medical transition through methods such as hormone replacement therapy or sex reassignment surgery, are not genuinely transgender. They may also exclude those who identify themselves as non-binary from the trans label.


title: Transmedicalism

text: Transmedicalists are sometimes referred to as transmeds and truscum, a term coined by a user on microblogging website Tumblr, meaning ""true transsexual scum"," which has since been reappropriated. Those who believe that gender dysphoria is not required to be transgender are sometimes called "tucute", meaning ""too cute to be cisgender"." Transmedicalists sometimes refer to those who identify as transgender without medicalized criteria as "transtrenders".


title: Transmedicalism

text: Criticism of the transmedicalist perception of gender is broad and varied. Many may view transmedicalism as akin to the medical model of disability in that it medicalizes an attribute that contains both medical and social components.


title: Fist of Legend

text: Fist of Legend () is a 1994 Hong Kong martial arts film directed and co-written by Gordon Chan, featuring action choreography by Yuen Woo-ping, and produced by Jet Li, who also stars in the lead role of Chen Zhen. It is a remake of the 1972 Bruce Lee film "Fist of Fury".


title: Fist of Legend

text: Set in the Shanghai International Settlement in 1937, the film follows Chen as he investigates his old master Huo Yuanjia's death at the hands of the Imperial Japanese occupation forces. The film co-stars Chin Siu-ho, Yasuaki Kurata, Shinobu Nakayama, Billy Chow and Paul Chun. It was released by Golden Harvest on 22 December 1994.