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