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Josh Homme

Joshua Michael Homme (born May 17, 1973) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known as the founder and only continuous member of the rock band Queens of the Stone Age, which he formed in 1996. Homme is the band's primary songwriter and mainly sings lead vocals and plays guitar. He also plays drums in the rock band Eagles of Death Metal, which he co-founded in 1998.

Homme began his career as the co-founder and guitarist of the rock band Kyuss, with whom he performed from 1987 to 1995. He then served as a touring guitarist for the rock band Screaming Trees from 1996 to 1998, leaving to start Queens of the Stone Age. He has also overseen a musical improv project with other musicians (mostly from the Palm Desert Scene) known as The Desert Sessions since 1997. He formed the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures alongside Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones in 2009, releasing their eponymous debut album later that year. In 2016, he produced, co-wrote, and performed on the Iggy Pop album Post Pop Depression. He has also been involved with acts such as Royal Blood, Foo Fighters, Run the Jewels, and Arctic Monkeys.

Early life
Joshua Michael Homme was born in Palm Springs, California, on May 17, 1973. He grew up in a well-known family in and around Palm Desert, California; his paternal grandfather, Clancy "Cap" Homme, moved to the area from North Dakota and was an early settler of the Valley. Cap has a private street named after him in Rancho Mirage, marking the original road to the Homme ranch, as well as a park named after him in an exclusive enclave of the Valley. The Homme surname is believed to be Norwegian. Homme moved with his family on a regular basis due to his father's work, residing in many towns around the Valley. He later discussed having to "create [his] own fun" as a child growing up in the desert, stating that he did not start playing music to "get girls or make money" and that he assumed he would grow up to be a contractor like his father.

Homme also has ties in Idaho and has talked about his formative experiences there, such as seeing Carl Perkins perform at the Sandpoint Music Festival and the first time purchasing his own electric guitar (an Ovation Ultra GP) in a Sandpoint music store. He began playing guitar at the age of nine, after his parents denied his wishes for a drum kit. He took guitar lessons for the next few years but his teacher mostly focused on polka, so he supposedly did not learn of a barre chord or a pick until his third year of lessons, lending to his unique playing style. He joined his first band, Autocracy, in 1985 at the age of 12. Despite his musical success, he continued to work on his grandfather's farm until releasing the first Queens of the Stone Age album at the age of 25, because he "didn't want to lose [his] grip on reality".

Kyuss (1987–1995)
In 1987, when he was 14 years old, Homme formed a punk rock-influenced heavy metal band in Palm Desert High School called Katzenjammer with schoolmates John Garcia, Brant Bjork, Nick Oliveri and Chris Cockrell. Homme was the band's guitarist. After changing their name a few times, first to Sons of Kyuss (they released an EP of the same name), they finally shortened it to Kyuss. The band garnered a cult following by the early 1990s, often driving for hours to isolated locations in the desert and plugging into generators to perform. These events, known as "generator parties", became urban legend among rock subculture. The band became both famous for their heavy, down tuned, groove oriented music, and infamous for their backstage fights with local LA bands when they traveled into town to play gigs. This soon brought the attention of Chris Goss, who became the band's mentor, helping the band sign to a label and eventually producing them exclusively in an effort to preserve their sound. Due to Homme being younger than 18 at the time of the band's signing, his parents signed the contract on his behalf. Kyuss released four albums (Wretch, Blues for the Red Sun, Welcome to Sky Valley, and ...And the Circus Leaves Town), of which the final three Goss-produced efforts are often cited as cornerstones to the development of the stoner rock genre in the 1990s.

Queens of the Stone Age (1996–present)
When Kyuss split up in 1995, Homme moved to Seattle, Washington, briefly abandoning his desire for a music career and attending the University of Washington to study business. During this time, he fell back in with old musician friends such as Ben Shepherd and Mike Johnson, and eventually agreed to join the Screaming Trees as a rhythm guitarist on the summer Lollapalooza tour in 1996, a replacement for Johnson, and that continued into the following year. Homme and vocalist Mark Lanegan became close friends during this time but, disliking the rest of the band's continual disharmony, began considering forming his own band. He founded Gamma Ray, a group more centered on his unique style and tastes, in 1996. After a cease and desist from a band of the same name, this band became Queens of the Stone Age.

Homme lived in Amsterdam for several months in 1996, which set forth events that would help kickstart the band. Roadrunner Records approached Homme to contribute to the label's compilation ''Burn One Up! Music for Stoners'', which led to the first Queens of the Stone Age song, "18 A.D.", written with Dave Catching featuring Catching and members of Dutch stoner rock band Beaver on bass and drums. Homme also produced a song by Beaver for the compilation.

The band's first release under the new name was the Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age compilation EP, featuring tracks from both Kyuss and songs recorded from the Gamma Ray EP sessions from 1996, released in late 1997. Queens of the Stone Age released their eponymous debut album in 1998. Initially, the band consisted of various friends of Homme's from the Seattle area. Homme had asked a number of singers, including Lanegan, to perform as lead vocalist for Queens of the Stone Age, but by the time of recording the band's debut album, he had moved back to Palm Desert and the band was pared down to just Homme and ex-Kyuss drummer Alfredo Hernandez. Homme was left to cover every other instrument and ended up singing for the first time in his career. Shortly after recording, Homme and Hernandez were joined by bassist and vocalist Nick Oliveri and guitarist, keyboardist, and lapsteel player Dave Catching, the band was now composed entirely of ex-Kyuss members and roadies.

Following their debut album, by which time Hernandez left the group, Queens of the Stone Age released the next album, Rated R, during which the band used a wider range of instruments to achieve a more relaxed, spacious and psychedelic sound. Though it differed from the band's debut, Rated R became Queens of the Stone Age's first mainstream hit. The next release, 2002's Songs for the Deaf, however, would gain even more buzz from the music community and fans alike. In Songs for the Deaf, Homme continued his filtering of stoner rock and hard rock. The album centers on Homme's memories of uncomfortable rides through the California desert, where he had performed in his days with Kyuss, and where there was little to do but listen to Spanish radio stations.

During this time, Homme had a falling out with Oliveri. Following the release of Songs for the Deaf, their relationship deteriorated until Homme fired Oliveri from the band in 2004. Homme reportedly strongly considered breaking up the band at this point.

Homme began writing the band's next album, Lullabies to Paralyze, named after a lyric from the Songs for the Deaf hidden track "Mosquito Song". Lullabies to Paralyze, created with Songs for the Deaf touring recruits Troy Van Leeuwen and Joey Castillo and collaborators and future recruits Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider of Eleven, was a critical and commercial success, debuting at number five on the Billboard 200, QOTSA's best charting album on the Billboard 200 to date.

Queens of the Stone Age's fifth album, Era Vulgaris, was released in early June 2007 and received generally positive reviews from critics. Following the album's touring cycle, the band took a break to focus on individual projects, during which Homme continued to produce and create more records outside the band. This break would unintentionally turn into a six-year gap between albums.

In 2010, following his work with rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, Homme began performing more live shows with QOTSA. Following a deluxe reissue of Rated R, a 2011 re-release of their debut album and corresponding tour followed, featuring the album played front to back in the style in which it was recorded. This was the first time many of the songs had been performed live since the album's original release.

On June 4, 2013, after a tumultuous writing and recording process, Queens of the Stone Age released their sixth album, ...Like Clockwork, receiving high praise from critics as well as topping the Billboard 200 charts. ...Like Clockwork highlights Homme's collaborative recording process and features guests such as Elton John, Dave Grohl, Alex Turner, Jake Shears, Trent Reznor, Mark Lanegan, Nick Oliveri and Brody Dalle.

Their seventh album, Villains, was released in August 2017. The album contains no collaborations other than being produced by Mark Ronson, marking the first time the band has released an album with no featured guests on it.

In 2018, the band was featured on Revamp, a cover album containing various renditions of Elton John songs, on which they performed "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road".

The band's eighth album, In Times New Roman..., was released in June 2023.

The Desert Sessions (1997–present)

Homme founded The Desert Sessions in 1997 at the Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, describing it as a musical collective series "that cannot be defined". He stated, "At Desert Sessions, you play for the sake of music. That's why it's good for musicians. If someday that's not enough anymore, or that's not the reason behind you doing it – that's not your raison d'être – then a quick reminder like Desert Sessions can do so much for you, it's amazing. It's easy to forget that this all starts from playing in your garage and loving it."

The recordings are done "on the spot" in a matter of hours, and the line-up constantly changes, with new contributors being added for each new recording. Artists such as PJ Harvey, Twiggy Ramirez, Dave Catching, Nick Oliveri, Mark Lanegan, Ben Shepherd, John McBain, Josh Freese, Chris Goss, Alain Johannes, Dean Ween, and many others from the Palm Desert Scene have contributed to The Desert Sessions recordings.

After 11 years of inactivity, Homme revealed in October 2014 that he would start working on more Desert Sessions material the following year. However, things remained silent until May 2019, when Homme posted an image on Instagram with the hashtags "#Desert, #Sessions, #11, #12". In September, it was announced that Desert Sessions Volumes 11 & 12 will be released on October 25, 2019.

Eagles of Death Metal (1998–present)
In 1998, Homme formed Eagles of Death Metal with friend Jesse Hughes as a joke band in the context of the Desert Sessions. Recordings from the band first appeared on Volumes 3 & 4, released that year. Over the next few years, Hughes settled into family life while Homme focused on Queens of the Stone Age. However, after Hughes' separation from his wife in 2003 and a spurt in creativity that resulted in dozens of songs, Homme convinced Hughes to pursue a full-time music career. Hughes writes, sings, and plays rhythm guitar, while Homme produces, arranges, and plays drums, bass, and various other instruments. So far, the band has released four albums: Peace, Love, Death Metal in 2004, Death by Sexy in 2006, Heart On in 2008, and most recently Zipper Down in 2015. Due to his commitments with Queens of the Stone Age and other projects, Homme does not regularly tour with Eagles of Death Metal, but occasionally makes appearances during live performances. In an October 2008 interview, he re-affirmed his commitment to the band saying, "This isn't a side project for me. I'm in two bands. I have musical schizophrenia, and this is one of those personalities."

Them Crooked Vultures (2009–2010, 2022)
In July 2009, it was revealed that Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones were recording together for a musical project named Them Crooked Vultures. Though initially conceived as solely a studio project, the trio performed their first show together on August 9, 2009, in Chicago at The Metro to a crowd of approximately 1,100 ticketholders with additional live rhythm guitarist/auxiliary man Alain Johannes. Their album, Them Crooked Vultures, was released by Interscope Records in the United States on November 17, 2009, and by Sony Music internationally. The band launched a world tour including performing on Saturday Night Live as a musical guest on February 6, 2010, and at Austin City Limits on October 2, 2009, as well as many festivals through 2010. Them Crooked Vultures won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 53rd Grammy Awards on February 13, 2011.

Though the band has been inactive for an extended period due to the schedules of its members' other projects, all three of members have expressed interest in returning to the project. On September 3, 2022, they reunited for a performance at Wembley Stadium in honour of Foo Fighters' late drummer Taylor Hawkins and again on September 27 at the KIA Forum for the second Hawkins tribute show. The band covered Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and Queens of the Stone Age's "Long Slow Goodbye", and also played their songs "Gunman" and "Dead End Friends".

Other projects
Homme has collaborated with acts such as Mondo Generator, Foo Fighters, PJ Harvey, Fatso Jetson, Mark Lanegan Band, Trent Reznor, Masters of Reality, Millionaire, Wellwater Conspiracy, Unkle, Primal Scream, Melissa Auf der Maur, Paz Lenchantin, Run the Jewels, Death from Above 1979, Earthlings?, Mastodon, Peaches, Lady Gaga, The Strokes, Local H, Biffy Clyro, Royal Blood, and Arctic Monkeys.

Homme, Nick Oliveri, and Brad Wilk contributed to the soundtrack for the 2002 film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Homme and Alain Johannes were originally meant to develop a score for the video game Spec Ops in 2005, however the project was cancelled before it later became Spec Ops: The Line in 2012. His work on the game would go unused. Homme was also set to provide music, including a cover of Joe Walsh's "In the City", for the 2005 video game adaption of the film The Warriors. This also went unused.

Homme has been featured on compilation albums. He appeared on Killer Queen: A Tribute to Queen for a cover of the song "Stone Cold Crazy" alongside Eleven, as well as Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three and the Turbonegro tribute Alpha Motherfuckers as part of QOTSA covering the song "Back to Dungaree High". The very first use of the QOTSA name was on the compilation album ''Burn One Up! Music For Stoners'' featuring a one-off lineup of Homme and Dave Catching with Beaver members Milo Beenhakker and Eva Nahon, recording the song "18 A.D."

Homme and frequent collaborator Chris Goss performed as The 5:15ers at the inaugural ArthurBall, an offshoot of the ArthurFest festival, in Los Angeles on January 26, 2006. The two were later credited as "The Fififf Teeners" when they co-produced QOTSA's second album Rated R and fifth album Era Vulgaris.

In August 2009, Homme collaborated with The Prodigy's Liam Howlett for a remix of the Prodigy track "Take Me to the Hospital". It was re-titled "Take Me to the Hospital (Josh Homme and Liam H.'s Wreckage Remix)". That same year, he produced most of the Arctic Monkeys album Humbug. He later provided backing vocals on "All My Own Stunts" from their 2011 album Suck It and See, and vocals for the tracks "One For the Road" and "Knee Socks" on their 2013 album AM. Homme went on to appear at multiple Arctic Monkeys concerts in the USA including Austin City Limits and The Wiltern.

In June 2010, Homme appeared on the Comedy Central series Tosh.0 to do an unplugged duet version of the hit viral song "What What" with Samwell. He also provided the theme song to Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1, formerly known as Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and collaborated with Mark Lanegan to provide the theme music for Anthony Bourdain's travel show Parts Unknown.

In May 2012, it was revealed on Dean Delray's comedy podcast Let There Be Talk that Homme would make a guest appearance on the album by Oliveri's project Mondo Generator called Hell Comes To Your Heart. The album was recorded over three days at Homme's Pink Duck Studios in Burbank, California, and features Homme playing guitar on the album's final track, "The Last Train". This marked the first time Homme and Oliveri collaborated since their public falling out in 2004. "The Last Train" also features fellow former Kyuss bandmate John Garcia providing vocals, which was recorded shortly before Homme's lawsuit with Garcia regarding the Kyuss Lives! band name; it was the first time Homme had collaborated with Garcia since 1997.

In June 2012, it was revealed that Homme would be starring in the music video for the song "A Better Place" from Glen Campbell's final album Ghost on the Canvas. In the video, Homme plays a bartender who shows Campbell a photo album of his life, from his early childhood through his music career to the present day. The video marked the end of Campbell's musical career and was a retrospect on his life following his decision to retire after his diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. In July, he had a very brief cameo at the end of Jack White's music video for "Freedom at 21", playing a police officer who intercepts White at a roadblock following White's escapades throughout the video. In September, he contributed the song "Nobody to Love" to the soundtrack of the action-drama film End of Watch.

In early 2013, Homme and fellow Queens contributors Alain Johannes and Chris Goss added three tracks each to the soundtrack of Dave Grohl's documentary Sound City: Real to Reel. Homme was interviewed for the documentary and is notably included in a scene where he collaborates with Grohl and Trent Reznor, under the name Sound City Players, to come up with a song called "Mantra". Homme played bass and provided backing vocals on the track.

Homme has appeared in a number of television comedies. In December 2014, Homme made an appearance on Channel 4 sitcom Toast of London. The star of the show, Matt Berry, had been working alongside Morgana Robinson (the half-sister of Homme's ex-wife Brody Dalle) in the BBC sitcom House of Fools, in which both had prominent roles. Earlier in the year, Homme had also made appearances on IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang! and Portlandia.

In July 2015, Homme began hosting a weekly hour-long show called The Alligator Hour with Joshua Homme on Apple Music's 24-hour streaming internet radio station Beats 1. The show features a highly eclectic selection of songs personally selected by Homme, interspersed with his own wry introductions of (and commentary on) the various tracks on that particular week's playlist. The show's musical selections typically have some sort of thematic, stream-of-consciousness-type relationship to each other.

In March 2016, Homme released a surprise album with Iggy Pop titled Post Pop Depression. The nine-track album was recorded at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, as well as Homme's Pink Duck Studios. Their backing band included guitarist and keyboardist Dean Fertita and drummer Matt Helders; the two joined Pop and Homme on tour, along with Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar and Matt Sweeney on bass. The band made their debut on January 21, 2016, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, announcing the album, and proceeded on a North American and European theater tour that March, culminating in a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, filmed and released as a concert DVD. The album's recording was also filmed and compiled into the 2017 documentary American Valhalla. In October 2016, Homme produced New Skin, the debut album from Nick Valensi's new band CRX.

In 2017, Homme composed the score for Fatih Akin's German-language drama In the Fade, named after the Queens of the Stone Age song.

In 2018, Homme sang a song written by Daniel Lanois called "Cruel, Cruel World" for the soundtrack of the Rockstar action-adventure video game Red Dead Redemption 2. The game features two versions of the song, with Homme's version playing over the end credits and Willie Nelson's version playing during the epilogue.

In 2020, Homme featured alongside Mavis Staples on the Run the Jewels song "Pulling the Pin" from their fourth album RTJ4. Later that year, he and Staples joined Run the Jewels (via separate pre-recorded performances displayed on giant screens due to the COVID-19 pandemic) to play the song during the group's voter encouragement performance Holy Calamavote, broadcast on YouTube.

In 2021, Homme produced the songs "Boilermaker", "Space", and "King" from Royal Blood's album Typhoons. "Boilermaker" was included on the standard album release, while "Space" and "King" were only available on the deluxe edition.

In 2024, Homme contributed a guitar part for "Капелан" (Ukrainian:, "Chaplain"), a song recorded in a mobile front-line studio as part of the Cultural Forces project to promote military music culture. The song itself was written by Oleksandr Remez, a ukrainian military serviceman and leader of the rock band uk:Руки'в Брюки, and produced by Oleksandr Chemerov.

Musical style
Homme's work is usually described as alternative rock, desert rock,   hard rock, and stoner rock. He has been evasive in the past about the equipment he uses, changing the subject or occasionally lying when asked in interviews about his setup, as well as objecting to official photos of his pedalboard. He explained in June 2007, "I don't [share secrets] only because my sound is important to me and I've spent a lot of years just working it over with little tricks here and there, I almost feel like if you reveal too much of that you give away something that's near and dear to you. It's like you put it up on the altar and say, 'Here, everyone take a slice.'"

Homme relaxed his secretive approach to the subject in the 2010s, though much of his known equipment has been compiled through amateur photos and screenshots of him performing live and in the studio. In choosing his equipment, he tends to look for the odd or unique, opting to stay away from the typical choices of other guitar players. In an interview about guitars in 2008, he claimed at the time to own close to 35 guitars, and said that only three of them were "really good". He has said that he purposely does not use famous guitars such as Stratocasters or Les Pauls, but that he is always in search of intriguing and unique guitars that are not always generally accepted as high-quality. He said that he tends to buy "weird Japanese guitars" or guitars that are "scarred" and have an interesting story.

Charity work
In 2013, Homme co-founded the Sweet Stuff Foundation, a charity that aims to give assistance to musicians, recording engineers, and their families struggling with illness and disability.

Family
Homme met Australian singer and musician Brody Dalle at Lollapalooza in 1996, when he was 23 and she was 17; he was there to perform with Screaming Trees, while she was there to see her then-boyfriend Tim Armstrong's band Rancid. They reconnected seven years later in 2003, during her separation from Armstrong, and began dating. Homme claimed to have received multiple death threats from fans of Armstrong and Rancid. The two were married on December 3, 2005. They have a daughter named Camille Harley Joan Homme (born January 17, 2006) and two sons, Orrin Ryder Homme (born August 12, 2011) and Wolf Dillon Reece Homme (born February 13, 2016).

Dalle filed for legal separation in November 2019 and divorce a month later, citing Homme's alcoholism and drug abuse; he subsequently entered rehab, but he and Dalle would accuse each other of domestic violence and have mutual restraining orders filed over the following months. Dalle requested that restraining orders be filed against him on behalf of their sons in September 2021, alleging physical and emotional abuse, but was denied by two judges. Homme won sole custody of his children in 2023 and was granted a restraining order against Dalle, as her boyfriend was found to have forged the signatures of the children on earlier documents.

Views and hobbies
Homme once described himself as financially conservative and socially liberal, considering himself a "fallen libertarian". He has said that he dislikes the idea of using his influence to tell people how to vote, and often likens his music to an "ice cream parlour or arcade" where people can simply have fun. Despite this, he referred to then-president Donald Trump as a "retarded human being" in June 2017 and began collaborating more with notably liberal artists such as Run the Jewels in the late 2010s.

Homme owns a few motorcycles, including a custom Falcon and a Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic. He drives a silver 1967 Chevrolet Camaro, which he was given as a gift when he was 14 years old; it is the only car he has ever owned. He owns several guns, including a Winchester rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and a Beretta 9 mm pistol.

Homme has adopted multiple pseudonyms over the years. He used the name "Carlo Von Sexron" to credit his bass, keyboard, piano, and drums playing on albums such as The Desert Sessions Volumes 3 & 4, Queens of the Stone Age, and Peace, Love, Death Metal. Homme is known as "(King) Baby Duck" to Dalle and the members of Eagles of Death Metal. He is also referred to as "J.Ho." and "The Ginger Elvis". Nick Oliveri referred to him as "Mr. Lucky".

Homme has over 20 tattoos. On his knuckles, he has his grandparents' nicknames ("Cam" for "Camille" on the left and "Cap" on the right) with hearts and his two sons' names ("ORH" for "Orrin Ryder Homme" and "Wolf"). He has his daughter's name, also Camille, tattooed over his heart. His left arm has a switchblade with "Stay Sharp" underneath, while his inner right arm has a straight razor with "Born to Win" inscribed; underneath, his nickname, "Baby Duck", is a shared tattoo with his Eagles of Death Metal bandmate Jesse Hughes, who has his nickname "Boots Electric" in the same location. Homme also shares a tattoo that says "Freitag 4:15" with former Queens of the Stone Age bandmates Nick Oliveri and Mark Lanegan and their sound engineer Hutch, commemorating their "worst show ever" at the 2001 Rock Am Ring Festival in Germany on a Friday at 4:15 p.m. All were tattooed on their ribs so that it would hurt the most and serve as a reminder.

Health issues
In a 2011 interview with NME, Homme talked about how his leg surgery affected him: "[In 2010] I had surgery on my leg and there were complications and I died on the table. I was in bed for three months." He became depressed and considered quitting music, eventually finding himself unable to produce any new music at all for almost two years. He has said that this experience greatly contributed to the making of the 2013 album ...Like Clockwork. He credits Transcendental Meditation with helping him recover.

In June 2017, Homme revealed on Steve Jones' radio show that he had recently tried to quit his decades-long smoking habit via hypnotherapy, but claimed that it failed because he was unable to relax enough to be fully influenced by the hypnotherapist. Three months later, Royal Blood frontman Mike Kerr discussed Homme's drinking habits and told Radio X interviewer Gordon Smart, "I can't go anywhere near [Homme] without having an unbelievable amount of tequila in my body. I did hide from him once [while touring together] because I could hear him coming and I was like, 'Oh no, I'm gonna have to do more tequila,' so I hid in the toilets of the dressing room." By 2023, Homme had completed rehab and was sober.

In an April 2023 interview with Revolver, Homme revealed that he had been diagnosed with a form of cancer in 2022, though he did not specify which type of cancer it was. He underwent a successful operation to remove the cancer from his body and spent the following year healing from it.

In July 2024, during the European leg of Queens of the Stone Age’s The End Is Nero World Tour, the band postponed a concert in Italy because Homme returned to the United States for “emergency surgery”.

Legal issues and controversies
In 2004, Homme was arrested for assaulting Dwarves frontman Blag Dahlia and Karl Doyle at the Dragonfly club in Los Angeles. Pleading no contest, he was ordered to remain at least 100 yards away from Dahlia and the club, sentenced to three years' probation with community service, and forced to enter a rehab program for 60 days.

In June 2008, at the Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo, Homme drew criticism for his reaction to an audience member who had thrown a shoe at him. He called the audience member a "chicken-shit fucking faggot" and "a 12-year-old dickless fucking turd". The incident drew accusations of homophobia from several blogs, which were later picked up by the mainstream media. Homme eventually responded in a public letter in which he denied all accusations of homophobia. Reaction to his apology was mixed, with music journalist Tim Jonze stating, "Attempting to prove his pro-gay stance, Homme points out in his letter that he also called the guy a pussy and threatened to have anal sex with him. OK, so it's a fuzzy kind of logic we're talking about here." In an interview 10 years later, Homme revealed that he had often been beaten up during his youth while trying to defend his gay older brother from homophobic bullying.

Following a September 2013 performance at Jay-Z's Made in America Festival, Homme made comments about Jay-Z during a radio interview with CBC Radio 2's Strombo Show. He explained that his band was frisked by the event's security team prior to the performance and referred to Jay-Z's personal interaction with the band as a marketing stunt: "[Jay-Z] has his security frisking the bands on the way in. I just told them, 'If you open up my bag I'm not playing, so I guess it's up to you whether we are playing or not.' [...] He also gave us some champagne and wanted us to take a photo with it. And I thought, 'That's not a gift, that is a marketing tool.' So I destroyed it."

In December 2017, Homme was captured on video kicking the camera of Shutterstock photographer Chelsea Lauren into her face during KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas concert in Los Angeles. After staying through the show and photographing subsequent bands, Lauren went to Cedars-Sinai for treatment. In a statement, Homme claimed that he had been kicking over lighting equipment and was unaware that he had kicked Lauren until he was informed of it the next day. Lauren disputed this, stating that he had made eye contact with her before kicking her. Homme later issued a video response in which he admitted to kicking Lauren and apologized to her.

title: Josh Homme


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DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe was an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at US$19.00 each to raise US$279 million in capital. On 5 October 2017, Maxar Technologies completed its acquisition of DigitalGlobe.

The company's "WorldView" satellites should not be confused with the unrelated WorldView company (a stratospheric balloon operator).

Origins
WorldView Imaging Corporation was founded in January 1992 in Oakland, California in anticipation of the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act (enacted in October 1992) which permitted private companies to enter the satellite imaging business. Its founder was Dr Walter Scott, who was joined by co-founder and CEO Doug Gerull in late 1992. In 1993, the company received the first high resolution commercial remote sensing satellite license issued under the 1992 Act. The company was initially funded with private financing from Silicon Valley sources and interested corporations in North America, Europe and Japan. Dr. Scott was head of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories "Brilliant Pebbles" and "Brilliant Eyes" projects which were part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Doug Gerull was the executive in charge of the Mapping Sciences division at the Intergraph Corporation. The company's first remote sensing license from the United States Department of Commerce allowed it to build a commercial remote sensing satellite capable of collecting images with 3 m resolution.

In 1995, the company became EarthWatch Incorporated, merging WorldView with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.'s commercial remote sensing operations.

In September 2001, EarthWatch became DigitalGlobe.

In 2007, DigitalGlobe acquired online imagery provider GlobeXplorer to extend its imagery distribution capabilities via online APIs and web services.

In 2011, DigitalGlobe was inducted into the Space Foundation's Space Technology Hall of Fame for its role in advancing commercial Earth-imaging satellites.

In 2013, DigitalGlobe purchased GeoEye.

In February 2017, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) and DigitalGlobe reached an agreement for MDA to acquire DigitalGlobe for US$2.4 billion. As of May 2017, DigitalGlobe's image catalog contains 100 petabytes worth of data, and grows by 100 terabytes each day. As of 5 October 2017, MDA has announced it has completed its acquisition of DigitalGlobe. On 5 October 2017, DigitalGlobe and MDA Holdings Company merged to become Maxar Technologies

On 30 December 2019, the company announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to sell MDA to a consortium of financial sponsors led by Northern Private Capital for CAD$1 billion (US$765 million). The sale included all of MDA's Canadian businesses, encompassing ground stations, radar satellite products, robotics, defense, and satellite components, representing approximately 1,900 employees.

On 8 April 2020, the sale of the MDA assets to NPC officially closed. The newly formed privately held Canadian company was named MDA.

EarlyBird-1
EarlyBird-1 (COSPAR 1997-085A) commercial Earth imaging satellite was built for EarthWatch Inc. by CTA Space Systems (later part of Orbital Sciences Corporation) and launched on 24 December 1997, from the Svobodny Cosmodrome by a Start-1 launch vehicle. It had a mass of 317 kg and a design life of 3 years (fuel reserves for 5 years). It included a panchromatic (black-and-white) camera with a 3 m resolution and a multispectral (color) camera with a 15 m resolution. The imaging sensor was derived from a 1998-cancelled NASA satellite called Clark (SSTI 2). EarlyBird-1 was the first commercial satellite to be launched from the Svobodny Cosmodrome. Although the launch was successful, the satellite lost communications after only four days in orbit due to power system failure.

IKONOS
IKONOS was launched 24 September 1999. It was the world's first high-resolution commercial imaging satellite to collect panchromatic (black-and-white) images with 0.8 m resolution and multispectral (color) imagery with 3.2 m resolution. On 31 March 2015, IKONOS was officially decommissioned after more than doubling her mission design life, spending 5,680 days in orbit and making 83,131 trips around the Earth.

QuickBird
QuickBird, launched on 18 October 2001, was DigitalGlobe's primary satellite until early 2015. It was built by Ball Aerospace, and launched by a Boeing Delta II. It is in a 450 km altitude, 98° inclination Sun-synchronous orbit. An earlier launch attempt resulted in the loss of QuickBird-1; after this, the second satellite of the series, QuickBird-2 was launched and it is this satellite that became known simply as QuickBird (as no other QuickBird satellites were launched). It included a panchromatic camera with a 60 cm resolution and a multispectral camera with a 2.4 m resolution. On 27 January 2015, QuickBird was de-orbited, exceeding her initial life expectancy by nearly 300%.

GeoEye-1
The GeoEye-1 satellite collects images at 0.41 m panchromatic (black-and-white) and 1.65 m multispectral resolution. The satellite can collect up to 350000 km2 of multispectral imagery per day. This is used for large-scale mapping projects. GeoEye-1 can revisit any point on Earth once every three days or sooner.

WorldView-1
Ball Aerospace built WorldView-1. It was launched on 18 September 2007 from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II 7920-10C. Launch services were provided by United Launch Alliance (ULA). The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is expected to be a major customer of WorldView-1 imagery. It included a panchromatic only camera with a 50 cm maximum resolution.

WorldView-2
Ball Aerospace built WorldView-2. It was launched on 8 October 2009. DigitalGlobe partnered with Boeing commercial launch services to deliver WorldView-2 into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The satellite includes a panchromatic sensor with a 46 cm maximum resolution and a multispectral sensor of 184 cm

WorldView-3
Ball Aerospace built WorldView-3. It was launched on 13 August 2014. It has a maximum resolution of 25 cm. WorldView-3 operates at an altitude of 617 km, where it has an average revisit time of less than once per day. Over the course of a day it is able to collect imagery of up to 680000 km2.

Previously, DigitalGlobe was only licensed to sell images with a higher resolution than 50 cm to the U.S. military. However, DigitalGlobe obtained permission, in June 2014, from the United States Department of Commerce, to allow the company to more widely exploit its commercial satellite imagery. The company was permitted to offer customers the highest resolution imagery available from their constellation. Additionally, the updated approvals allowed the sale of imagery to customers at up to 25 cm panchromatic and 100 cm multispectral ground sample distance (GSD), beginning six months after WorldView-3 became operational. WorldView-3 was launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle in the 401 configuration on 13 August 2014, at 18:30 UTC from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3E) at Vandenberg Air Force base.

WorldView-3 is the industry's first multi-payload, super-spectral, high-resolution commercial satellite.

WorldView-4
The WorldView-4 satellite was designed to provide panchromatic images at a highest resolution of 31 cm, and multispectral images at 124 cm. Originally named GeoEye-2, the spacecraft was designed and built by Lockheed Martin, while the camera payload was provided by ITT Corporation.

Following the merger of GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, in 2013, DigitalGlobe announced that GeoEye-2 would be completed as a ground spare to be launched if or when required. It was renamed to WorldView-4 in July 2014, when the company announced that it would be launched in Fall 2016. It was launched on 11 November 2016.

In January 2019, the company reported the failure of a control moment gyroscope on the satellite, rendering it inoperable.

WorldView Legion
Currently being built by Maxar Technologies, WorldView Legion is Maxar's next generation of Earth observation satellites. WorldView Legion comprises six satellites planned to launch in 2023 into a mix of Sun-synchronous and mid-latitude orbits. These satellites will replace imaging capability currently provided by Maxar's WorldView-1, WorldView-2 and GeoEye-1 Earth observation satellites.

The six WorldView Legion satellites are contracted to launch on three flight-proven SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicles.

Customers and competitors
DigitalGlobe's customers range from urban planners, to conservation organizations like the Amazon Conservation Team, to the U.S. federal agencies, including NASA and the United States Department of Defense's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Much of Google Earth and Google Maps high resolution-imagery is provided by DigitalGlobe.

DigitalGlobe's main competitor is Airbus with Spot and Pleiades satellites.

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

title: DigitalGlobe


text:
Caning of Michael Fay

In 1994, a court in Singapore sentenced an American teenager, Michael Fay, to be lashed six times with a cane for violating the Vandalism Act. This caused a temporary strain in relations between Singapore and the United States.

Fay was arrested for stealing road signs and vandalizing 18 cars over a ten-day period in September 1993. Fay pled guilty, but he later claimed that he was advised that such a plea would preclude caning and that his confession was false, that he never vandalized any cars, and that the only crime he committed was stealing road signs. Although caning is a routine court sentence in Singapore, Fay's sentence garnered controversy and was widely covered in the media in the United States, as it was believed to be the first judicial corporal punishment involving an American citizen. The number of cane strokes in Fay's sentence was ultimately reduced from six to four after United States officials requested leniency, and the sentence was carried out on May 5, 1994.

Early life
Fay's parents divorced when he was a child. After living with his father for a time, he was sent to Singapore to live with his mother and stepfather, where he was enrolled in the Singapore American School.

Theft and vandalism in Singapore
In September 1993, 67 cars were vandalized in various neighborhoods of Singapore. The damage included spray painting and being pelted with eggs, and at least one had its windshield smashed.

The Singapore police eventually arrested two teenagers who were driving a car similar to one that witnesses had described as being involved in the vandalism. During questioning, the two gave seven names, all male students from the Singapore American School and ISS International School, whom police tracked down and raided. They found about 50 stolen items, including a telephone booth and road signs.

Fay was one of these students. He pleaded guilty to two counts of vandalism, referring to two cars that were spray-painted in a car park in mid-September; two counts of mischief; and one count of keeping 16 stolen items. Fay later claimed that he had been intimidated and threatened during the police interrogation, and maintained that he had been advised such a plea would preclude caning and that his confession was false, that he never vandalized any cars, and that the only crime he committed was stealing signs.

Under the 1966 Vandalism Act, originally passed to curb the spread of political graffiti and which specifically penalized vandalism of government property, Fay was sentenced on March 3, 1994, to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,230 or £1,450 at the time), and six strokes of the cane. Another student who pleaded not guilty was sentenced to eight months in prison and 12 strokes of the cane.

Fay's lawyers lost on appeal after arguing that the Vandalism Act provided caning only for indelible forms of graffiti vandalism, and that the damaged cars had been cheaply restored to their original condition.

Media and public reactions
Following Fay's sentence, the case received coverage by the American, Singaporean and international media.

Some US news outlets launched scathing attacks on Singapore's judicial system for what they considered an "archaic punishment", while others turned the issue into one of Singapore asserting "Asian values" towards "western decadence". The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times ran editorials and op-eds condemning the punishment. USA Today reported that the caning involved "bits of flesh flying with each stroke."

However, Singapore also found supporters among the foreign media and the US public. For example, Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko reported that he had been sent a large number of letters, nearly all of which supported the punishment. A Los Angeles Times poll found that Americans were evenly divided (49% approved, 48% disapproved) as to the appropriateness of the punishment, but would have only been 36% in favor had the sentence been handed down inside the US.

From the United States government
The Clinton administration ultimately expressed its objection to Singapore's decision to cane Fay. The official position of the United States government was that although it recognized Singapore's right to punish Fay within the due process of law, the punishment of caning was "excessive" for a teenager who committed a non-violent crime.

On March 3, the day the sentence was passed, Chargé d'Affaires Ralph Boyce at the United States Embassy in Singapore had also said that the punishment was too severe for the offence. The embassy claimed that, while the graffiti and physical damage to the cars was not permanent, caning could leave Fay with permanent physical scars.

Bill Clinton, the then-President of the United States, also called Fay's punishment "extreme" and "mistaken", and pressured the Singapore government to grant Fay clemency from caning. Two dozen United States senators signed a letter to the Singapore government also appealing for clemency.

From the Singapore government
The Singapore government stood its ground and defended the sentence and the country's right to uphold its own laws. On March 3, in response to Boyce's comments on Fay's sentence, the Ministry of Home Affairs said that it was Singapore's tough laws that kept the country orderly and relatively crime-free, unlike "in cities like New York City, where even police cars are not spared the acts of vandals". Various Singaporean ministers also spoke publicly about the case throughout the episode. In April during a local television program, Lee Kuan Yew, then Senior Minister, said that the US was neither safe nor peaceful because it did not dare to restrain or punish those who did wrong, adding, "If you like it this way, that is your problem. But, that is not the path we choose."

Nevertheless, on May 4 that year, the Singapore government via Ong Teng Cheong, then the country's President, announced that the number of cane strokes would be reduced from six to four out of consideration for President Clinton as it valued the good historical relations between both countries. The other student's sentence was later also reduced, from 12 strokes to six, after a similar clemency appeal. Fay was caned on May 5, 1994, at the Queenstown Remand Centre.

Caning
Describing the caning day, Fay told Reuters that he did not know the time had come for punishment when he was taken from his cell. He said he was bent over a trestle so his buttocks stuck out, with his hands and feet buckled to the structure. He was naked except for a protective rubber pad fixed to his back. The flogger, a doctor, and prison officials were also present. Fay told Reuters the caner walked sharply forward three steps to build power. "They go 'Count one'—you hear them yell it really loud—and a few seconds later they come, I guess I would call it charging at you with a rattan cane." He noted that a prison officer guided him through the ordeal saying: "OK Michael, three left; OK Michael, two left; OK one more, you're almost done." Fay reported that when the fourth stroke was delivered he was immediately unbuckled from the trestle and taken to a cell to recover. The caning, which Fay estimated took one minute, left a "few streaks of blood" running down his buttocks, and seven weeks later, left three dark-brown scar patches on his right buttock and four lines each about half-an-inch wide on his left buttock. He said that the wounds hurt for about five days after which they itched as they healed. "The first couple of days it was very hard to sit," Fay reported, but he said he was able to walk after the caning.

Aftermath
After his release from prison in June 1994, Fay returned to the United States to live with his biological father. He gave several television interviews, including one with his American lawyer on CNN with Larry King on June 29, 1994, in which he admitted taking road signs but denied vandalizing cars. While he did not detail his experience, he claimed that he was "ill-treated" at times during questioning, but had shaken hands with the caning operative after his four strokes had been administered and the prison guards when he was released.

Several months after returning to the United States, Fay suffered burns to his hands and face after a butane incident. He was subsequently admitted to the Hazelden rehabilitation program for butane abuse. He claimed that sniffing butane "made [him] forget what happened in Singapore." In 1996, he was cited in Florida for a number of violations, including careless driving, reckless driving, not reporting a crash, and having an open bottle of alcohol in a car. Later, in 1998, still in Florida, Fay was arrested for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, charges to which he confessed but was acquitted because of technical errors in his arrest.

In June 2010, Fay's case was recalled in international news, after another foreigner in Singapore, Swiss national Oliver Fricker, was sentenced to five months in jail and three strokes of the cane for trespassing a rail depot to vandalise a metro train that is a part of the country's Mass Rapid Transit.

In popular culture

 * Season 19, episode 18 of Saturday Night Live cold-opened with a skit of Michael Fay's caning. The players included host Emilio Estevez as Fay, Kevin Nealon administering the caning, Rob Schneider as the warden, and Phil Hartman as the doctor.
 * In September 1994, "Weird Al" Yankovic released the song "Headline News" (a parody of the Crash Test Dummies hit "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm"), which satirized the Fay case along with the Tonya Harding and John and Lorena Bobbitt stories.
 * In October 1994, Death Row Records released the soundtrack album Murder Was The Case, which contained the song "Natural Born Killaz", performed by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, where Ice Cube references the incident in his second verse.
 * The case inspired a 1995 Simpsons episode, "Bart vs. Australia", in which Australia is to punish Bart via "booting"—a kick in the buttocks using a giant boot (later reduced to a shoe).
 * In the 1997 movie One Eight Seven, Dave Childress (John Heard), a burned-out teacher, upon hearing that his co-worker Trevor Garfield (Samuel L. Jackson) was stabbed by a student, who was then sent to a juvenile facility, comments "They should've caned the bastard like they did that kid in Singapore." and quotes Lee Kuan Yew's statement in favor of caning.

title: Caning of Michael Fay


text:
Talk:Egg tempera

The big indigestible 'howto' chunk of this page SHOULD REALLY BE MOVED ELSEWHERE, In my opinion. --dcf 12:50, 2004 Jun 21 (UTC)

An egg yolk has a membrane which contains the liquid yolk. You don't want to use the membrane to make paint. It's like using the skin off the exposed surface of house paint which has been setting open too long.

In preparing egg tempera, isolate the yolk and dry the membrane slightly by rolling it on a paper towel. Pick up the yolk GENTLY by the membrane, dangle it over a receptacle and puncture the membrane with [for instance] a toothpick to drain off the liquid inside. You will want to use distilled water. Chemical additives in the water can make the paint change color over time.

Your initial mixture of powdered pigment, yolk and distilled water will dry out and cease to flow well after you've been working awhile. This will happen whether or not you keep the mix covered--yolk just gets thick upon standing. You will have to keep adding water as you work, because the pigment-yolk paste dries out, and the paint won't flow. The result is a gluey, plaster-like buildup on your work, and it's very ugly. Too much yolk in the mixture makes the paint look greasy and clumpy; too much water makes it run. You can't hurt it by adding more of everything one substance at a time until you get what you want. Most pigment powders settle out; you have to keep stirring your paint. Keep coffee stirrers on hand for that, or a palette knife.

I use a child's tea-party set for holding the yolks and the water. I also fill 2 large syringes, one with yolk and one with distilled water, as this makes it easy to control the amount of each you add to the pigment and has the added advantage of keeping the yolk from thickening with exposure to air.

JEB Malcolm

DO REMEMBER THIS:

[1]  BUY NON TOXIC PIGMENTS AND

[2]  COVER YOUR NOSE AND MOUTH WITH A DAMP RAG WHEN YOU'RE HANDLING POWDERED PIGMENT, WHETHER IT'S TOXIC OR NOT. Even if the powdered pigment your're using isn't toxic, it is       finely ground and gritty, and it will damage your lungs if       if you breathe too much of it. Don't allow anyone into your studio when you're working with it, and wipe all your surfaces down with a damp rag when you're through. Vermillion--the real stuff--is made from cinnabar, which is mercury ore, and cadmium red, orange and yellow contain--well--cadmium, which is poisonous. You have to be careful. Research the pigments you use. Artificial pigments, such as the quinocronones, work very well and won't kill you or give you cancer. You don't have to use the same pigments Michaelangelo did. He used them because he didn't have a choice. If you just have to use a toxic pigment to be happy, for your family's sake, be smart and buy a respirator.

Misleading
You may be able to do painting with the described ingredients, but its's not even close to the classical tempera recipe which uses an emulsion of oil and water, emulgated by whole egg, not yolk alone, with the possible additions of mastic or dammar. --Pjacobi 23:08, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * Why not fix the article then? Disputed tags tend only to be used when there is an actual arguement on the talk page. Perhaps you could add a section on classical tempera recipe - who used it, how do we know etc. Theresa Knott (The snott rake) 23:25, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * One should be aware that there are many variations on how to "temper" pigments to make paint. Egg yolk tempera is one of the simplest formulas. There are also whole-egg temperas, egg white (glair), egg-and-oil emulsions, egg and varnish (such as dammar or mastic), distemper (hide glue), and so on. Despite the disputation above, the classic egg tempera mixture is, indeed, chicken egg yolk mixed with pigment and water. Refer to www.eggtempera.com and links within that site for clear directions on painting in egg tempera. --Dharper 12:32, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I beg our pardon, Pjacobi, you are mistaken and Dharper is correct. I am a professional working artist and art historian. Egg tempera is indeed nothing more than egg, water, and pigment. The oil emulsion you refer to is a much-disputed element of some medieval paintings, and although it can produce paint, there is little evidence it was much used before the Victorians hypothesized it as a possible "secret ancient medium". Chemical analyses of works ranging from Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits to high renaissance panels show pure-egg tempera. In fact, several forgeries of the twentieth century were uncovered which adhered strictly to the (now discredited) theory that medieval painters used a mixed egg and oil technique. Artemis-Arethusa 15:11, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Egg yolk is an emulsion, adding water makes it more fluid, it does not make it any more of an emulsion. The mentioned recipe is common enough and well known and I know it works as I have used it.

NOt sure where to put the following re dust hazards:

One way to minimise the dust flight is to premix the pigment with water in a jar, this creates a wet paste which is much easier to handle and mix with the yolk and water. The paste will keep if in airtight container and you can mix the pigment as when rather than having more tempered paint than required (which will go off).

If using synthetic vermillion or lamp black, a small amount of vodka will break the surface tension, so that you can shake the jar and water and create your paste instantly. This tip is well worth following as it reduces dust flight a great deal.

My only concern with the article is that only directs to a modern source book, looking at the original texts is useful for the context, especially in the realms of discussing what is a temper. stluke23

Recipe move to wikibooks?
While looking for something else on the Wikipedia:Guide to Votes for deletion page I read the following and thought of this article.

''"recipe" is a shorthand for "The article is a recipe, giving preparation instructions rather than discussing the foodstuff in question". Although articles on foods should discuss how the food is made and what is used to make it, they should not provide step-by-step guides directing the reader on how to do so; that is the province of our sister project Wikibooks.''

Perhaps the same guideline applies to this article? --sparkit (talk) July 6, 2005 04:22 (UTC)

title: Talk:Egg tempera


text:
Millennium Challenge 2002

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces under JFCOM in mid-2002, running from 24 July to 15 August. The exercise involved both live exercises and computer simulations, costing US$250 million (equivalent to about $M in ), the most expensive war game in US military history. MC02 was set in 2007, intended to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition towards new technologies that enabled network-centric warfare, and providing a more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and a fictitious state in the Persian Gulf, "Red", often characterized as Iran or Iraq.

MC02 was an experiment mandated by Congress in 2000 to "explore critical war fighting challenges at the operational level of war that will confront United States joint military forces after 2010." The simulation took two years of planning and involved 13,000 troops. The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force, resulting in initial major successes. Over the course of the simulation, constraints were placed on the Red force's ability to free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted", resulting in a Blue victory.

Constraints
Since the war game allowed for a ship-to-shore landing of ground troops at some (unknown) point during the 14 day exercise, and because their naval force was substantial, the Blue force was positioned on the shore-side of the region's active shipping lanes to keep them from impacting commerce during the exercise. This placed them near the Red shore rather than at a "standoff" distance. Conducting the war games during peacetime also meant that there were a large number of friendly/unaligned ships and aircraft in the zone, restricting the use of automated defense systems and more cautious Rules of Engagement. Red's tactics took full advantage of these factors, and to great effect.

Exercise action
Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, simulating using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper simulated using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications in the model.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

Such defeat can be attributed to various shortfall in simulation capabilities and design that significantly hindered Blueforce fighting and command capabilities. Examples include: a time lag in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information being forwarded to the Blueforce by the simulation master, various glitches that limited Blue ships point-defense capabilities and error in the simulation which placed ships unrealistically close to Red assets.

Exercise suspension and restart
At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed. The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."

Aftermath
The rule changes following the restart led to accusations that the war game had turned from an honest, open, free playtest of U.S. war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise intended to end in an overwhelming U.S. victory, alleging that "$250 million was wasted". Van Riper was extremely critical of the scripted nature of the new exercise and resigned from the exercise in the middle of the war game. Van Riper later said that Vice Admiral Marty Mayer altered the exercise's purpose to reinforce existing doctrine and notions within the U.S. military rather than serving as a learning experience.

Van Riper also stated that the war game was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing. He was quoted in the ZDF–New York Times documentary The Perfect War (2004) as saying that what he saw in MC02 echoed the same view promoted by the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara before and during the Vietnam War, namely that the U.S. military could not and would not be defeated.

Responding to Van Riper's criticism, Vice Admiral Mayer, who ran the war game and who was charged with developing the military's joint concepts and requirements, stated the following: "Gen. Van Riper apparently feels he was too constrained. I can only say there were certain parts where he was not constrained, and then there were parts where he was in order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment and certain exercise pieces that were being done."

- Vice Admiral Marty Mayer

Navy Captain John Carman, Joint Forces Command spokesman, said the war game had properly validated all the major concepts which were tested by Blue Force, ignoring the restrictions placed on Van Riper's Red Force that led them to succeed. Based on these findings, Carman stated that recommendations based on the war game's result on areas such as doctrine, training, and procurement would be forwarded to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

title: Millennium Challenge 2002


text:
Spot Image

Spot Image, a public limited company created in 1982 by the French Space Agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the IGN, and Space Manufacturers (Matra, Alcatel, SSC, etc.) is a subsidiary of Airbus Defence and Space (99%). The company is the commercial operator for the SPOT Earth observation satellites.

Network and partners
Spot Image is a worldwide distributor of products and services using imagery from Earth observation satellites and works through a network of subsidiaries, local offices (Australia, Brazil, China, United States, Japan, Peru, Singapore), and partners. The goal is to provide on-the-spot service with worldwide availability.

Spot Image works with a network of more than 30 direct receiving stations handling images acquired by the SPOT satellites.

Spot Image collaborates with ESA's GMES programme, shares geographic information with the OGC and contributes to the interoperability of web services; with Infoterra Global it continues to offer services for precision-agriculture.

Satellites
The 3 SPOT satellites in orbit (Spot 5, 6, and 7) provide images with a large choice of resolutions – from 2.5 m to 10 m. Spot Image also distributes multiresolution data from other optical satellites, in particular from Formosat-2 (Taiwan) and Kompsat-2 (South Korea), for which it has exclusive distribution rights, and from radar satellites (TerraSAR-X, ERS, Envisat, Radarsat). Spot Image is also the exclusive distributor of data from the very-high resolution Pleiades satellites. The launch of Pléiades-1, via a Soyuz rocket, was confirmed on December 16, 2011. The second (Pléiades-2) was launched mid-2012. Spot Image also offers infrastructures for receiving and processing, as well as added value options.

Products
In addition to images, Spot Image proposes innovative added-value products to meet new user-needs:
 * ortho-images (SPOTView ortho) whose location accuracy is less than 10 m RMS
 * homogeneous territorial coverage, orthorectified (SPOTMaps), which come in natural colours with 2.5 m resolution
 * 3D products (SPOT DEM) built from automatic correlation of stereoscopic pairs acquired by SPOT 5's HRS (Haute Résolution Stéréoscopique, High Resolution Stereoscopic) instrument

Among the services offered by Spot File: On-line services:
 * Programming of SPOT satellites: direct-access satellite programming and regular revisit capability over the same point on the globe enable the acquisition of images over a selected area of interest.
 * The SPOT archives: more than 18 million images of the whole world, collected by SPOT satellites since 1986, are archived and accessible on line, offering recent or historical geographic information.
 * SPOTGallery giving the general public access to images chosen for aesthetic, cultural or thematic reasons,
 * In partnership with Google Earth, ’One World, One Year‘ offers the best images from the SPOT satellites whose acquisition data is not more than one year old, for almost the entire planet.

Planet Action, an initiative launched by Spot Image
Its goal is to encourage the Earth observation industry and geographic information professionals to support local projects searching for adaptive solutions to climate change problems. The products and materials available to these professionals – satellite images, geographic information systems, image processing and display software – are indispensable for studying the impact of global warming on our planet, on local and global scales. Planet Action supports projects that study:
 * the impact on populations and habitat
 * droughts, desertification and water resources
 * vegetation, biodiversity and ecosystems,
 * the oceans
 * ice, glaciers and snow cover

Planet Action Web Site

Important dates

 * 1982: Creation of Spot Image in Toulouse, France
 * 1983: Creation of Spot Image Corporation in the United States
 * 1986: Launch of the SPOT 1 satellite
 * 1990: Creation of Spot Imaging Services in Australia
 * 1990: Launch of the SPOT 2 satellite
 * 1991: Creation of Spot Asia in Singapore
 * 1998: Creation of Beijing Spot Image in China
 * 1998: Launch of SPOT 4
 * 2002: Creation of Tokyo Spot Image
 * 2002: Launch of SPOT 5
 * 2004: Opening of offices in Brazil and Mexico
 * 2004: Signing of a contract with the NSPO for the distribution of data from the Formosat-2 satellite
 * 2005: Signing of a contract with KARI for the distribution of data from the Kompsat-2 satellite
 * 2006: Opening of an office in Peru
 * 2008: Spot Image is 81% owned by Astrium Services, an EADS company
 * 2008: Spot Image Brasil replaces the office opened in this country
 * 2012 : Launch of SPOT 6
 * 2014 : Launch of SPOT 7

title: Spot Image


text:
Warsaw Chopin Airport

Warsaw Chopin Airport (Lotnisko Chopina w Warszawie, ) is an international airport in the Włochy district of Warsaw, Poland. It is the busiest airport in Poland and the 31st busiest airport in Europe with 18.5 million passengers in 2023, handling approximately 40% of the country's total air passenger traffic. The airport is a central hub for LOT Polish Airlines as well as a base for Enter Air and Wizz Air.

Warsaw Chopin Airport covers 834 ha of land and handles approximately 300 scheduled flights daily, including a substantial number of charters. London, Kyiv, Frankfurt, Paris, and Amsterdam are the busiest international connections, while Kraków, Wrocław, and Gdańsk are the most popular domestic ones.

Founded in 1934, the airport was previously known as Warsaw-Okęcie Airport (Port lotniczy Warszawa-Okęcie) and bore the name of its Okęcie neighborhood throughout its history. It was renamed in honour of Polish composer and former Warsaw resident Frédéric Chopin in 2001. Despite the official change, "Okęcie" ("Lotnisko Okęcie") remains in popular and industry use, including air traffic and aerodrome references.

An underground railway station connecting from the airport to Warsaw's suburban rail system was opened in June 2012 in time for the Euro 2012 football championships, and on 25 November 2013, the airport announced accommodating – for the first time in history – its 10 millionth passenger in a single year. A new and modern terminal was completed in 2015.

The secondary international airport of the city is the much smaller Warsaw Modlin Airport, which opened in 2012 and is used for low-cost traffic.

The pre-war and wartime Okęcie (1934–45)
In 1924, when urban development around Warsaw's aerodrome at Mokotów Field (Pole Mokotowskie) began affecting air traffic, the Ministry of Railways purchased land near the village of Okęcie to construct a new airport. On 29 April 1934, the Polish president, Ignacy Mościcki, opened Central Airport (Okęcie), which from then on took over the handling of all traffic from the former civilian aerodrome at Pole Mokotowskie. In the weeks after its opening, a journalist from the magazine Flight and Air Defence of Poland reported the following: "In a large pastel-coloured hall, we see a ticket office, a customs post, telegraph and post office, police station and a kiosk with various newspapers etc... On the first (upper) floor, there is a restaurant and viewing terrace, from where one can see the entire territory of the airport."

With the building finished in 1933, the new modernist premises of the Warsaw airport cost the State Treasury around zl 10 million. The new complex included three hangars, exhibition space, garages, and of course a large, modern terminal building with a concrete taxiway complete with stands for a number of aircraft. Warsaw thus received an airport befitting of any European capital city. In its first year of operation, Okęcie served over 10,000 passengers. After the aerodrome's civilian buildings were finished, the military potential of the site began to be developed, with a Polish Air Force base opening soon after; later followed the buildings of the Institute of Aviation, PZL aircraft-building plant and other pieces of aviation infrastructure.

As air traffic and the number of aircraft movements grew greatly year on year, the authorities identified the need to develop a new system for air traffic navigation and control. The state, as a result, marked a number of air corridors for use by civil airlines, whilst radio stations were established to regulate such traffic and divert it away from sensitive and restricted areas. By 1938, the airport was equipped with 16 immigration checkpoints for passengers both departing and arriving on international flights. These posts were then manned by the Polish Border Guard. By 1937, the airport had also received new radio navigation equipment and was using Lorenz beam technology to assure the safety of landings and approaches over Warsaw, during periods of poor visibility or bad weather. On the eve of World War II, Okęcie airport was connected by regular scheduled flights with 6 domestic and 17 foreign airports, among which were Tel-Aviv (then in Palestine) and Beirut in Lebanon; there were also plans to soon begin transatlantic service to the United States.

During World War II, Okęcie was often used as a battleground between the German Army and Polish resistance and was almost completely destroyed. From the very first day of the war in Poland, Okęcie became a target for bombing by the German Luftwaffe. Later, once Warsaw was occupied by the German army, the airport became the base for two German aviation schools and a Junkers aircraft repair works. During this period, the airport also received its first concrete runway and taxiways; these were left undamaged until the very final days of the war, despite numerous attacks by both the Home Army and Soviet Armed Forces. However, with the German withdrawal from the city, both Okęcie's remaining buildings and ground infrastructure (including the runway) were intentionally destroyed in order to deny their use to the advancing Red Army and Polish First Army.

Rebuilding Okęcie in the years 1945–89

After the war, LOT Polish Airlines resumed operations at Okęcie using what was left of the pre-war infrastructure; the airline was also responsible for initiating reconstruction efforts at the airport, and soon, within two years, a new terminal, control tower and a number of stands for aircraft based at and visiting the new Okęcie had been completed.

By the end of the 1940s, the airport had been reconnected with most of Poland's most important cities and a number of international services, including those to Moscow, Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Brussels, Copenhagen, Prague and Stockholm. In the first half of the 1950s, this development continued and the airport authorities continued to hold talks with many international airlines on the subject of opening routes to Warsaw. In 1956, maintenance of Okęcie was transferred from LOT Polish Airlines to state administration, then later in 1959, on the government's initiative, a decision was made to reconstruct the airport's main terminal; this, however, did not actually take place until 1964.

The new civil aviation authority began to exercise control over airports, air corridors and routing, ground aviation infrastructure and the responsibility for entering into and signing aviation accords with other states. This gave the authority effectively complete control over Warsaw's airport.

In 1969, the new terminal officially became operational, with it celebrating, just one year later, its first million passengers served. However, it soon became apparent that the new terminal was too small. As a result of this situation, and to alleviate the problems it was causing, part of the airport's administrative office was moved to the south of the terminal and into makeshift buildings and the old airport premises on Ul. 17 Stycznia. A new separate, temporary arrival hall was then built. Meanwhile, domestic flights continued to operate from the facilities built on the site of the pre-war terminal. Some years later, in 1978, a new arrivals hall, the so-called 'Finnish Hall' opened. Thereafter, there was a further upgrade to the airport's runways, and after the renovation of runways 1 and 3, runway 2 was re-designated as taxiway 'Delta'; this was because of its location on the same axis as a number of major obstacles, most notably the Palace of Culture and Science and Raszyn radio transmitter.

Political events of the early 1980s caused a decline in passenger traffic, but already by 1983, there was renewed growth, especially on international routes. However, it turned out that the existing airport infrastructure was not able to handle as much traffic as the airport was dealing with by this period; thus, in November 1986, the Government decided to expand the airport. In the face of economic reform in the late 1980s, there was also a need to create a new managing body for airports and air traffic in Poland. In October 1987, a new company, the State Enterprise "Polish Airports" (PPL), an independent, self-governing and self-financing entity of the national economy, replaced the state aviation administration as the manager of the airport. The company was managed under the authority of the minister responsible for communications and transport.

Post-communist development (since 1989)

It was only in 1990, after the fall of communism, that a new terminal started to be built at Okęcie. The main contractor was the German company Hochtief, and the work involved some 164 subcontractors, of which 121 were Polish companies. After 24 months, the new terminal was completed at the expense of some 300 million German marks. A network of multi-storey car parks and access roads was also built, and with their completion, Warsaw gained a modern terminal with a capacity of 3.5 million passengers a year. The terminal began to operate on 1 July 1992, with the first travellers to use it being those returning from Athens, Bangkok, Dubai and New York. Ten days later, the airport celebrated the first passengers departing from the new Warsaw Okęcie. In the departure hall at that time, there were 26 check-in desks; however, in subsequent years of operation, passenger traffic grew rapidly. In 1993, the airport handled nearly 2.2 million passengers, while six years later, this figure climbed to 4 million. Eventually, the decision was taken to increase the number of available check-in desks to 33, and then to 46, consequently increasing the terminal's capacity to 6 million passengers a year.

In March 2001, Warsaw Airport was renamed in honour of the renowned Polish pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin (though this name is less popular with residents of Warsaw, and many visitors know the airport as Okęcie). A year later, a tender for the construction of a new passenger terminal at Warsaw airport was announced, this was then won by the Polish-Spanish consortium of Ferrovial Agromán, Budimex and Estudio Lamela, who joined in 2004 to implement the largest Polish investment in civil aviation history, Chopin Airport's long-awaited 'Terminal 2'. By 2006, the arrivals level of this new terminal had been inaugurated, with the departures level finally, after a long delay due to certification issues, being opened in late 2007. In this same year, the low-cost Etiuda terminal was also opened; this, however, was closed again just two years later in 2009, with all operations being transferred to terminals 1 and 2. The final and most recent developments in the airport's history came in the period covering 2010–2011, when the airport's new central and south piers were finished (left unfinished until the possibility of connecting them with the north pier appeared) and opened along with a redesigned terminal complex which saw the airport's two terminals merged to form a single 'Terminal A' complex. Despite this, work continues on reconstructing taxiways, ramps and access roads, the most important projects of which will see the airport connected to Poland's expressway network via the S79 Airport Expressway and S2 Southern Warsaw Bypass. An underground railway station connected to Warsaw's suburban rail system was opened in June 2012 in time for the UEFA Euro 2012 football championships.

As of July 2015, the airport is managed by the State Enterprise "Polish Airports" (PPL), which has existed since 1987 and deals with construction and operation of airports and provision of services to passengers and airlines. PPL is owned and managed by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Development, in line with the 1987 Act.

Runways
The airport has two intersecting runways, whose configuration and available taxiways under current rules permit 34 passenger operations (takeoffs or landings) per hour.

Overview
In 2010, the designation of terminals had changed and the entire former Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 complex is now designated as Terminal A divided into five check-in areas (A, B, C, D, E) in two main halls. The complex contains 116 check-in desks. Additionally LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, Finnair, Turkish Airlines, KLM and Air France passengers can use one of the 23 self-service check-in stands located in the Terminal. There are 45 passenger gates, 27 of which are equipped with jetways.

South hall
The south hall contains the check-in areas A and B (former Terminal 1) was built in 1992 with a capacity for 3.5 million passengers per year to replace the ageing complex from the Communist era. Initially, it handled all the traffic. Since 2007, the T2, a newly built terminal adjacent to T1, has been gradually taking over the major part of the traffic. Reconstruction of the south hall started on 13 September 2012. On 23 May 2015, the redesigned, reconstructed south hall was fully integrated into the 'Terminal A' complex. Before its refurbishment, the south hall was very recognisable by Poles for its very characteristically dark red colour of many construction elements, including the roof that covered the departure hall, pillars, frames of doors and windows and other. In Polish, it was called "buraczkowy", which simply means "beetroot-coloured" in English.

North hall
This new terminal (formerly known as Terminal 2), featuring the check-in areas C, D and E, became fully operational on 12 March 2008, two years after the originally planned opening date. The arrivals area was in operation from mid-2007 but problems with safety certification and disagreements between the airport and the construction firm delayed full operation. The new terminal is considerably larger than the older Terminal 1 and has taken over departures for all Star Alliance and Oneworld airlines and a few other carriers. August 2014 saw Chopin Airport as one of the first European airports offering free unlimited Internet access to all its passengers and visitors.

Airlines and destinations
The following airlines operate regular scheduled and charter flights to and from Warsaw–Chopin:

Aviation services
Passenger handling, aircraft handling, into-plane fueling and de-icing/anti-icing services are handled by LS Airport Services (LS) or Welcome Airport Services (WAS).

Ground transportation
Warsaw Chopin Airport is located in the south-west part of Warsaw, approximately 10 km from the city centre. The airport is easy to access by train, local buses or taxi.

Rail

A rail link was built at a cost of 230 million złoty to connect the airport's Warsaw Chopin Airport railway station (built as part of the former Terminal 2) to the Warsaw city center. The station was opened on 1 June 2012, with service starting on the same day. Trains run every 15 minutes. Service to the station is provided by both Szybka Kolej Miejska and Masovian Railways.

On 15 December 2019, a direct rail service was established with the city of Łodź.

Car
Żwirki i Wigury, named after the celebrated aviators who won the Challenge International de Tourisme in 1932, is the main artery leading to the airport.

Bus
Warsaw city centre can be reached by the bus lines: 175 and 188 during the day and N32 at night. There is also an additional line 148 that provides access to Ursynów (a southern part of Warsaw) and Praga (an eastern part of Warsaw). Bus 331 connects with the Wilanowska metro station.

Accidents and incidents

 * On 19 December 1962, a LOT Polish Airlines Vickers Viscount 804 crashed on approach after a flight from Brussels and Berlin-Schönefeld Airport, while attempting a go-around. All 33 passengers on board died.
 * On 14 March 1980, LOT Polish Airlines Flight 007, Ilyushin Il-62 aircraft crashed on final approach from New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport, when attempting a go-around. All 87 passengers and crew members on board died, including the entire amateur US boxing team, Polish pop singer Anna Jantar and Alan P. Merriam.
 * On 9 May 1987, LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055, Ilyushin Il-62M took off for a flight to New York city's John F. Kennedy International Airport and returned to Okęcie, after an engine failure. During its approach, the aircraft crashed in a heavily wooded area, short of the runway. All 183 passengers and crew members on board died.
 * On 14 September 1993 Lufthansa Flight 2904, Airbus A320-200 overran the runway 11. It was a flight from Frankfurt, Germany. The aircraft departed the runway and rolled 90 m before it hit the embankment and an LLZ aerial. A fire started and penetrated into the passenger cabin. Two of 70 occupants died in this accident, including the training captain who died on impact and one passenger who was unable to escape because he lost consciousness as a result of the smoke in the cabin.
 * On 31 December 1993, LOT Polish Airlines Flight 002, a Boeing 767-300ER arriving from Chicago-O'Hare International Airport, suffered substantial damage after its nose gear collapsed when touching down. There were no fatalities.
 * On 1 November 2011, LOT Polish Airlines Flight 16, a Boeing 767-300ER, inbound from Newark Liberty International Airport, safely landed at Warsaw Chopin after a mechanical failure of the landing gear prior to landing. The cockpit crew successfully performed an emergency gear-up landing at the airport with no loss of life or injuries.

title: Warsaw Chopin Airport


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Irreversible process

In science, a process that is not reversible is called irreversible. This concept arises frequently in thermodynamics. All complex natural processes are irreversible,   although a phase transition at the coexistence temperature (e.g. melting of ice cubes in water) is well approximated as reversible.

In thermodynamics, a change in the thermodynamic state of a system and all of its surroundings cannot be precisely restored to its initial state by infinitesimal changes in some property of the system without expenditure of energy. A system that undergoes an irreversible process may still be capable of returning to its initial state. Because entropy is a state function, the change in entropy of the system is the same whether the process is reversible or irreversible. However, the impossibility occurs in restoring the environment to its own initial conditions. An irreversible process increases the total entropy of the system and its surroundings. The second law of thermodynamics can be used to determine whether a hypothetical process is reversible or not.

Intuitively, a process is reversible if there is no dissipation. For example, Joule expansion is irreversible because initially the system is not uniform. Initially, there is part of the system with gas in it, and part of the system with no gas. For dissipation to occur, there needs to be such a non uniformity. This is just the same as if in a system one section of the gas was hot, and the other cold. Then dissipation would occur; the temperature distribution would become uniform with no work being done, and this would be irreversible because you couldn't add or remove heat or change the volume to return the system to its initial state. Thus, if the system is always uniform, then the process is reversible, meaning that you can return the system to its original state by either adding or removing heat, doing work on the system, or letting the system do work. As another example, to approximate the expansion in an internal combustion engine as reversible, we would be assuming that the temperature and pressure uniformly change throughout the volume after the spark. Obviously, this is not true and there is a flame front and sometimes even engine knocking. One of the reasons that Diesel engines are able to attain higher efficiency is that the combustion is much more uniform, so less energy is lost to dissipation and the process is closer to reversible.

The phenomenon of irreversibility results from the fact that if a thermodynamic system, which is any system of sufficient complexity, of interacting molecules is brought from one thermodynamic state to another, the configuration or arrangement of the atoms and molecules in the system will change in a way that is not easily predictable. Some "transformation energy" will be used as the molecules of the "working body" do work on each other when they change from one state to another. During this transformation, there will be some heat energy loss or dissipation due to intermolecular friction and collisions. This energy will not be recoverable if the process is reversed.

Many biological processes that were once thought to be reversible have been found to actually be a pairing of two irreversible processes. Whereas a single enzyme was once believed to catalyze both the forward and reverse chemical changes, research has found that two separate enzymes of similar structure are typically needed to perform what results in a pair of thermodynamically irreversible processes.

Absolute versus statistical reversibility
Thermodynamics defines the statistical behaviour of large numbers of entities, whose exact behavior is given by more specific laws. While the fundamental theoretical laws of physics are all time-reversible, experimentally the probability of real reversibility is low and the former state of system and surroundings is recovered only to certain extent (see: uncertainty principle). The reversibility of thermodynamics must be statistical in nature; that is, it must be merely highly unlikely, but not impossible, that a system will lower in entropy. In other words, time reversibility is fulfilled if the process happens the same way if time were to flow in reverse or the order of states in the process is reversed (the last state becomes the first and vice versa).

History
The German physicist Rudolf Clausius, in the 1850s, was the first to mathematically quantify the discovery of irreversibility in nature through his introduction of the concept of entropy. In his 1854 memoir "On a Modified Form of the Second Fundamental Theorem in the Mechanical Theory of Heat," Clausius states:

It may, moreover, happen that instead of a descending transmission of heat accompanying, in the one and the same process, the ascending transmission, another permanent change may occur which has the peculiarity of not being reversible without either becoming replaced by a new permanent change of a similar kind, or producing a descending transmission of heat.

Simply, Clausius states that it is impossible for a system to transfer heat from a cooler body to a hotter body. For example, a cup of hot coffee placed in an area of room temperature (~72 °F) will transfer heat to its surroundings and thereby cool down with the temperature of the room slightly increasing (to ~72.3 °F). However, that same initial cup of coffee will never absorb heat from its surroundings, causing it to grow even hotter, with the temperature of the room decreasing (to ~71.7 °F). Therefore, the process of the coffee cooling down is irreversible unless extra energy is added to the system.

However, a paradox arose when attempting to reconcile microanalysis of a system with observations of its macrostate. Many processes are mathematically reversible in their microstate when analyzed using classical Newtonian mechanics. This paradox clearly taints microscopic explanations of macroscopic tendency towards equilibrium, such as James Clerk Maxwell's 1860 argument that molecular collisions entail an equalization of temperatures of mixed gases. From 1872 to 1875, Ludwig Boltzmann reinforced the statistical explanation of this paradox in the form of Boltzmann's entropy formula, stating that an increase of the number of possible microstates a system might be in, will increase the entropy of the system, making it less likely that the system will return to an earlier state. His formulas quantified the analysis done by William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, who had argued that:

The equations of motion in abstract dynamics are perfectly reversible; any solution of these equations remains valid when the time variable t is replaced by –t. On the other hand, physical processes are irreversible: for example, the friction of solids, conduction of heat, and diffusion. Nevertheless, the principle of dissipation of energy is compatible with a molecular theory in which each particle is subject to the laws of abstract dynamics.

Another explanation of irreversible systems was presented by French mathematician Henri Poincaré. In 1890, he published his first explanation of nonlinear dynamics, also called chaos theory. Applying chaos theory to the second law of thermodynamics, the paradox of irreversibility can be explained in the errors associated with scaling from microstates to macrostates and the degrees of freedom used when making experimental observations. Sensitivity to initial conditions relating to the system and its environment at the microstate compounds into an exhibition of irreversible characteristics within the observable, physical realm.

Examples of irreversible processes
In the physical realm, many irreversible processes are present to which the inability to achieve 100% efficiency in energy transfer can be attributed. The following is a list of spontaneous events which contribute to the irreversibility of processes.
 * Ageing (this claim is disputed, as aging has been demonstrated to be reversed in mice. NAD+ and telomerase have also been demonstrated to reverse ageing.)
 * Death
 * Time
 * Heat transfer through a finite temperature difference
 * Friction
 * Plastic deformation
 * Flow of electric current through a resistance
 * Magnetization or polarization with a hysteresis
 * Unrestrained expansion of fluids
 * Spontaneous chemical reactions
 * Spontaneous mixing of matter of varying composition/states

A Joule expansion is an example of classical thermodynamics, as it is easy to work out the resulting increase in entropy. It occurs where a volume of gas is kept in one side of a thermally isolated container (via a small partition), with the other side of the container being evacuated; the partition between the two parts of the container is then opened, and the gas fills the whole container. The internal energy of the gas remains the same, while the volume increases. The original state cannot be recovered by simply compressing the gas to its original volume, since the internal energy will be increased by this compression. The original state can only be recovered by then cooling the re-compressed system, and thereby irreversibly heating the environment. The diagram to the right applies only if the first expansion is "free" (Joule expansion), i.e. there can be no atmospheric pressure outside the cylinder and no weight lifted.

Complex systems
The difference between reversible and irreversible events has particular explanatory value in complex systems (such as living organisms, or ecosystems). According to the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, living organisms are characterized by autopoiesis, which enables their continued existence. More primitive forms of self-organizing systems have been described by the physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine. In the context of complex systems, events which lead to the end of certain self-organising processes, like death, extinction of a species or the collapse of a meteorological system can be considered as irreversible. Even if a clone with the same organizational principle (e.g. identical DNA-structure) could be developed, this would not mean that the former distinct system comes back into being. Events to which the self-organizing capacities of organisms, species or other complex systems can adapt, like minor injuries or changes in the physical environment are reversible. However, adaptation depends on import of negentropy into the organism, thereby increasing irreversible processes in its environment. Ecological principles, like those of sustainability and the precautionary principle can be defined with reference to the concept of reversibility.

title: Irreversible process