Just Found Out About Dubai's Underwater Tennis Court

The Middle East has had many outlandish projects over the years. As part of our summer series, we will be looking back at some of the most colourful and extraordinary proposals and investigating what happened to them.

The first project, which made global headlines back in April 2015, was a proposal to build an underwater tennis stadium off the Dubai coast.

The plans were pitched by Polish architect Krzysztof Kotala, who has a Master of Science in Architecture from Kraków Polytechnic and owns the 8+8 Concept Studio in Warsaw.


He completed initial designs for the ambitious project, but admitted he had not made much progress in attracting investors or gaining official approvals from Dubai authorities.

“There is not an investor but I would like to get interest as I think it is a good idea,” he told Arabian Business in April 2015.


The design proposal involved seven arenas, with a carbon-glass glazed dome above the court and located in the seabed within a reef off the coast of Dubai, near the famous Burj al Arab hotel.

Kotala said he believed the idea had strong commercial potential and would combine the best of “technology, ecology and sport.”

Plans went quiet until Kotala told Arabian Business in January 2016 he was in talks with potential backers in the United States to make the project a reality and he was working on the final designs for the concept. “This process takes a few months,” he conceded.

Again, things went quiet. Arabian Business contacted Kotala in May this year and he said he had created a website and a Youtube video in order to help generate interest in the project but he admitted he still had “no money to build it” and may look to develop a smaller arena first. He said he was hoping to try and drum up funding in Cannes this summer to help finance his underwater dream.

The Eagle

 

The Universe is NOT REAL

 

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Self Confidence

Age of EARTH

Concerning the age of the Earth, the Bible's genealogical records combined with the Genesis 1 account of creation are used to estimate an age for the Earth and universe of about 6000 years, with a bit of uncertainty on the completeness of the genealogical records, allowing for a few thousand years more.

Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years. Scientists have scoured the Earth searching for the oldest rocks to radiometrically date.

6,000 YEARS  Versus  4.54 Billion YEARS

Something ain't right here...  that is a significant amount of difference...  and yet, the religious community says don't pay any attention to this discrepency, instead focus on the overall message that the Bible is trying to convey...

That's all fine and dandy but if the timeline is incorrect how much other stuff in the Bible is incorrect as well?

I understand that the books of the Bible were written by man, but theoretically those words and those men were inspired by God...  or so our religious leaders claim...

Another issue that has always bothers me about the Bible and the creation of mankind is the Adam and Eve story...  and the fact that all of mankind came from those two individuals...  a male and female...  

Well, if that is true, then Adam and Eve committed INCEST in order to grow the population.

Church leaders want us to overlook the INCEST that was created and focus on the bigger picture...

WHY?

Are all the illnesses that we have today, the result of the INCEST that was committed by Adam and Eve?

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

LISTEN: Explore the depths of your mind

 

Going Beyond Mindfulness

 

Strictly Political

 

Grammar

Life in America 2000 to Present

Whiteness and White Supremacy seems to be topping the list of Blacks and Black Americans that only represent 12% of the overall United States population...

Blacks think Whites should be held accountable for the slavery that took place from 1776 (Independence from GB) until 1865 (End of Civil War) regardless of whether or not your ancestors were involved...  you should pay because you are WHITE...

Police brutality targets BLACKS and those who are poor and cannot afford high powered legal advice...

K-12 Education begins to take a tumble because educators are more concerned with earning more money and doing less in the classroom that teaching students...

K-12 Education begins to focus on passing tests rather than teaching students how to retain knowledge, think for themselves, and problem solve...

Vehicle drivers regardless of age or gender collectively decided that they no longer want to obey the posted speed limits anywhere...

Global Billionaires began to exert their influence and power over domestic politics and resources as well as international politics and global resources...

China began building up its economy and military so that by 2030 they could dominate the world and take power away from the USA...

Liberal, progressives, socialists laid the foundation to take over the Democratic Party so that their policies and beliefs would start to control the United States a decade later and continue through 2030 when the USA would be forever changed and could not change back...

The STUPID ASSED AMERICAN PUBLIC DID NOTHING TO PREVENT THIS FROM HAPPENING...

We are now in 2023 (over two decades later) and America has changed as we are becoming more and more WOKE (a grammatically incorrect concept but slang for the BLACKS).  

We are the only really powerful country that is doing away with gasoline...

We are the only really powerful country that is diverting money to social programs rather than to the military...

We are the only really powerful country that attempting to go completely green...

CHINA, believe it or not, owns most of the natural resources that the USA needs to build solar panels and electric batteries for cars...  The more we go solar and electric, the wealthier CHINA becomes...

GO FIGURE THE SMARTNESS OF THAT DECISION...

Snoopy

 

Sweatshops Powering ChatGPT

On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing.

Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer.

It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.

In this model, large companies maximise extraction and accumulation for their owners at the expense not just of their workers but also of the users. Users are sold the lie that they are participating in a community, but the more dominant these corporations become, the more egregious the unequal power between the owners and the users is.

“Community” increasingly means that ordinary people absorb the moral and the social costs of the unchecked growth of these companies, while their owners absorb the profit and the acclaim. And a critical mass of underpaid labour is contracted under the most tenuous conditions that are legally possible to sustain the illusion of a better internet.  READ MORE...

Life Inside SpaceX Starship

 

If I Were The Devil

 

Strictly Political

 

India Challenges China on Smartphones

Buying a new smartphone was a bit of a mission for Deepa Aswani, who works in marketing in Mumbai.


"I am very particular about what phone I buy. I did not want to invest too much," she says.


After two months of deliberation, she chose the OnePlus 10R, which in a sale cost her $400 (£329), a reasonable price for a smartphone, but still a significant sum in any country, and particularly in a developing one like India.


"The idea was to buy a phone which did not make a hole in my pocket and had good features. I am happy with the phone I have purchased," she says.


Ms Aswani's new smartphone was made by a Chinese firm in India - a common arrangement these days.


But as recently as 2014, the majority of phones sold in India would have been imported.


That has all changed in recent years. In 2022 almost all phones sold in India were made there as well, according to the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA).


Many of those phones would have been made by overseas firms with operations in India, like Taiwan's Foxconn or South Korea's Samsung.


But the number of home-grown firms is increasing rapidly.  READ MORE...

The Tongue

 

Pretty Face

 

Flight

It Ain't Just the NEWS

North

East

West

South

This is what we call NEWS...  and, right now we have the following media outlets:

1. CNN
2. ABC
3. MSNBC
4. CBS
5. NPR
6. FOX

And yet, FOX News is the only media outlet that is willing to cover the illegal immigration at our southern border.  My question is WHY?

These news outlets were formed for the sole purpose of reporting the news but they refuse to report some of the news...  especially if it goes against the liberal points of view.

Are these news outlets CENSORING the news from the American public so that they will not know the TRUTH???

The management of these media outlets, claim that what is happening at the southern border is not worth reporting...  They have decided what is or is not important...  not the general public...  this is insulting...

I used to be a fan of CNN and CBS but a few years ago when I was exercising at the local gym, walking on the treadmill, Fox news was on the monitor...  When I got home and turned on CBS, they were not reporting the news that I had just watched.  For the next couple of weeks, I analyzed the reporting and found that certain stories were not being reported by CNN and CBS.

So I switched to FOX News...

Similarly, I used to be a liberal Democrat but switched to a conservative liberal when I realized I had very little in common with the Progressive Dems that were controlling the party.  The USA, in my opinion, is not ready for progressive idealogy that leans towards socialism and communism....  

We need to maintain a strong economy, a strong military, and a strong educational system that prepares students to survive not just go to college...   robots will be replacing jobs and therefore a college education will be as useless as teats on a wild boar.

Respect

 

Wrong "v" Right

 

Silence

 

Theories About the Universe

Why is the universe the way it is? Scientists have explored many ways to explain the cosmos, leading to some crazy-sounding ideas

Why is the universe the way it is? Over the years, scientists have explored many ideas to explain our cosmos and its future. Here are some of the strangest ideas, from a braneworld scenario that involves the universe floating in a higher dimensional space, to the "Big Splat" that describes such a brane colliding with another to form an entirely new universe.

1. Braneworld

An aspect of the universe we take for granted is that it's three dimensional — there are three perpendicular directions you can move in. Some theories, however, suggest another spatial dimension — which we can't perceive directly — in another perpendicular direction. This higher dimensional space is referred to as "the bulk," while our universe is a three-dimensional membrane — or "brane" — floating inside the bulk.

As complicated as it sounds, the braneworld picture solves several problems in physics. For example, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall, of Harvard University, and Raman Sundrum, of the University of Maryland, proposed a version of the braneworld that explains an asymmetry in subatomic forces by suggesting the existence of other branes parallel to our own. But it's not enough for a theory to explain facts we already know — it has to make new predictions that can be tested experimentally. In the case of the Randall-Sundrum model, such tests could involve measuring gravitational waves emitted by black holes linking one brane to another.  

TO READ ABOUT THE OTHER NINE WILD THEORIES, CLICK HERE...

Drum Solo

Dog Wants Stick

 

Strictly Political

Multiverse Theory

Multiverse theory suggests that our universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars, spanning tens of billions of light-years, may not be the only one. Instead, there may be an entirely different universe, distantly separated from ours — and another, and another. 

Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies (if stars and galaxies can exist in those universes), and maybe even their own intelligent civilizations.

It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much larger multitude of universes: a multiverse.  The concept of the multiverse arises in a few areas of physics (and philosophy), but the most prominent example comes from something called inflation theory. 

Inflation theory describes a hypothetical event that occurred when our universe was very young — less than a second old. In an incredibly brief amount of time, the universe underwent a period of rapid expansion, "inflating" to become many orders of magnitude larger than its previous size, according to NASA.

Inflation of our universe is thought to have ended about 14 billion years ago, said Heling Deng, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and an expert in multiverse theory. "However, inflation does not end everywhere at the same time," Deng told Live Science in an email. "It is possible that as inflation ends in some region, it continues in others."

Thus, while inflation ended in our universe, there may have been other, much more distant regions where inflation continued — and continues even today. Individual universes can "pinch off" of larger inflating, expanding universes, creating an infinite sea of eternal inflation, filled with numerous individual universes.

In this eternal inflation scenario, each universe would emerge with its own laws of physics, its own collection of particles, its own arrangement of forces and its own values of fundamental constants. This might explain why our universe has the properties it does — particularly the properties that are hard to explain with fundamental physics, such as dark matter or the cosmological constant, Deng said.

"If there is a multiverse, then we would have random cosmological constants in different universes, and it is simply a coincidence that the one we have in our universe takes the value that we observed," he said.   READ MORE...

Light of Protection