Dream Eco-Home Of Russian Hemp Tycoon Will Be Noosa’s Priciest Abode

                                                                    

An international industrial hemp trader is building one of Australia’s most expensive and ­spectacular eco-homes at Queensland’s exclusive Sunshine Beach.

Russian Evgeny Skigin has commissioned a leading architect to build a $14 million six-bedroom, seven-bathroom contemporary home nestled into the hillside next to Noosa National Park.

The Australian has viewed planning documents for the “Skigin House”, on almost a hectare of absolute beachfront vacant land purchased by Liechtenstein-based Universal Property Company Establishment in late 2013 for $5.4m. The multi-million-dollar house is set to be one of Australia’s finest homes, in one of the nation’s best settings.

Early works have started on the site, after Universal Property Company Establishment awarded a $14m tender to Queensland builders Hutchinson for the challenging two-year construction.

The curved concrete and timber home spans more than 1400sq m of living space across three levels. It is designed for privacy in a structure that blends into the environment, with green awnings and a green roof.

Prominent architect Noel Robinson, whose workbook ­includes Brisbane’s equal-tallest tower, Skytower, said the client was confidential. He said the home was designed to sit unobtrusively in the natural surrounds and the client had allowed “a generous budget”.

“It’s a very special building and a very special site,” he said. “You only get one chance at this site and we’re privileged to work on it.”

Hutchinson’s Sunshine Coast area manager Michael Michell, who also declined to comment on the client, said the house was set to be a spectacular but unobtrusive landmark. He said the build would be difficult and complex due to engineering and scale.

“It is more commercial than residential,” he said. “It’s going to be a fairly impressive build.”

The house will be largely “off-grid”, with solar panels, batteries, water storage, a greywater system, natural pool filtration and a green roof and panelling.

Mr Skigin, understood to be aged in his 30s, is listed as a representative of the Cyprus-registered hemp company Konoplex Ltd, a member of the European Industrial Hemp Association.

The Australian was unable to contact Mr Skigin by email or phone.

The lowest level will include a large lounge spilling out to a pool terrace alongside a leisure pool and a lap pool. Inside is a cinema, gym, steam room, sauna and ice bath with changing facilities.

The lift takes residents up to the main living level. There the dining area and living space look out to uninterrupted views of the ocean. The kitchen includes a separate butler’s pantry, freezer room and cold store.

Five bedrooms all face the ocean and have ensuites. On the top level is a guest suite, workshop and study. There is parking for six cars.

The Lions Head pocket of Sunshine Beach is home to some of Australia’s most prominent identities. A neighbouring home is owned by television producer John Stainton. Down the road, tennis star Pat Rafter’s home is on the market.

Local real estate agent Peter Butt said the Sunshine Beach waterfront market was confined to just 54 homes and it was only increasing in prestige.

“It’s a very strong market,” he said. “Another $20m asset at the northern end of Sunshine Beach is quite a significant sign. It will be the most expensive single residence in Noosa.”

By Roseanne Barrett and Mark Schliebs

With many thanks to The Australian 

Here is another one:

                                                                   

Replica Of Louis XIV's Versailles Is The World’s Most Expensive Home - $416 million

Pre-FabHobbit Houses You Can Actually Live In

The Most Expensive Things in the World

Scientists Just Broke A Fusion World Record - It Could Mean Limitless Clean Energy

                                                                 

Scientists have set a new world record for plasma pressure - the 'key ingredient' for producing energy from nuclear fusion - which means this clean and sustainable energy source is closer to our grasp than ever before.
The new record stands at 2.05 atmospheres - a 15 percent jump over the previous record of 1.77 atmospheres. Both this record and the last were set at the custom-built Alcator C-Mod reactor at MIT.

While a viable nuclear fusion reactor ready to power our homes is still a long way off, these increased pressures equate to increased reaction rates, and are more evidence that we're getting closer to a reactor that's technologically and economically viable.
It also gives scientists more clues about how best to move forward.

"This is a remarkable achievement that highlights the highly successful Alcator C-Mod program at MIT," said physicist Dale Meade of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the experiments.

"The record plasma pressure validates the high-magnetic-field approach as an attractive path to practical fusion energy."

To reach the 2.05-atmosphere record, MIT researchers turned the reactor up to 35 million degrees Celsius (63 million degrees Fahrenheit) - over twice as hot as the Sun's core - holding plasma producing 300 trillion fusion reactions per second for 2 seconds.

These three variables - temperature, pressure, and time sustained - act as trade-offs, as previous records from teams from around the world have demonstrated. For example, while the Alcator C-Mod reactor has the top spot in terms of pressure, other reactions have been hotter or lasted longer.

However, plasma pressure is crucial to the overall energy produced, which is why the MIT team is so excited. It says pressure levels are "two-thirds of the challenge" of producing nuclear fusion reactions.

Scientists think nuclear fusion could give us the clean, safe, and virtually unlimited energy source we've been looking for - it essentially replicates what's happening on the Sun here on Earth, by heating tiny elements of matter to over several million degrees Celsius, and forming the superheated gas called plasma.

Isolate plasma from ordinary matter using a super-strong magnetic field, and there's your energy source - one that could replace all nuclear and fossil fuel power plants at a stroke.
And unlike the nuclear fission reactions that power today's nuclear power plants (where atoms are split), nuclear fusion (where atoms are fused together) creates no radioactive waste, and there's no chance of a meltdown either.

By David Nield

With many thanks to Science Alert

                                                                 

How English Gave Birth To Surprising New Languages

                                                                    

Languages are ever changing, mixing and mutating, and sometimes they give birth to new ones. Sanskrit gave birth to Hindi and others; Latin is ancestor to a set of languages including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian; more recently, Afrikaans came from Dutch. But how about English? What will it give birth to?

Three important factors linguists have identified in languages giving birth to other languages are time, separation, and contact. 

All languages change with time, as speakers innovate and economise and each generation reanalyses what it received from its forebears. This does not quickly make a new language, but it can over time; Latin went through this to become Italian, but Shakespearean English and modern English are still seen as two versions of the same language, as are Ancient Greek and modern Greek.

Separation – geographical distance, cultural divergence, political independence – helps give a changed version of a language an independent identity. As Max Weinreich famously said (and linguists often repeat), a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Political separation has allowed Danish and Norse to be distinct.

Contact with other languages is a very important force: mutual influence leads to borrowing of words and even grammatical structures. If a language’s speakers move en masse into an area where another language is spoken, there may be considerable cross-influence, and one or both languages may simplify grammar because their speakers are learning each other’s languages. 

Influence from Danish, Norse, and French helped Anglo-Saxon become Chaucer’s English, and French is a descendant of Latin with some influence from Celtic and Germanic languages.

Sometimes a simplified version is created for the purposes of trade, often using simplified grammar mainly from one language and adapted words from mainly from the other. This simplified version – a pidgin (the word pidgin comes from a modified version of the word business in one such trade language) – can come to be so commonly used that children grow up speaking it and flesh it out as a full all-purpose language: a creole. 

All languages have influence from outside their direct ancestor, but a creole is a language that really has more than one ‘parent’ and sometimes more than two. This is why some people say modern English is a creole. It is a descendant of Anglo-Saxon, but it also has substantial influence in core vocabulary and some grammar from older versions of Danish and Norse, and it has received a large part of its current vocabulary from French.

For all that, though, we tend to think of modern English as the culmination of its history, subject at most to small changes in the future. We seldom ask about the descendants of English: which languages will be to English as French and Italian are to Latin? Or as modern English is to Anglo-Saxon?

English already has linguistic progeny in various parts of the planet. I don’t mean the mutually intelligible dialects of American, British, Indian, Australian, and other Englishes, although they may or may not become more distinct from one another in future. 

I mean languages that are not necessarily mutually comprehensible with English and may even have official status in a country (in other words, they may have an army and a navy). 

Here are a few of the descendants of English currently being spoken around the world today.Never mind ‘will be’. We can talk about what languages already are descendants of English.


Tok Pisin

                                                                        

Tok Pisin is an official language of Papua New Guinea with about 120,000 native speakers and 4 million second-language speakers.

There are many English-based creoles in the world, and many of them exist informally and with multiple variations ranging from quite different from standard English to very close to it. In some places, the creoles are the dominant language and have gained semi-official or official status and, with it, some standardisation.

Tok Pisin began as a pidgin based on English with influence from German, Portuguese, and several Austronesian languages, but it gained native speakers who more fully elaborated it and made it a creole.

Due to the cross-influence of several languages, it uses fewer vowels and consonants and it has a less inflecting grammar than English, preferring strings of words rather than prefixes and suffixes. It is not really mutually intelligible with English, as this translation of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the one about all humans being born free and equal in dignity and rights –  shows: “Yumi olgeta mama karim umi long stap fri na wankain long wei yumi lukim i gutpela na strepela tru.”


Pitkern

                                                                    

After the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, several of the mutineers and some Tahitians settled on Pitcairn Island. The mutineers were from various places, including parts of Scotland, England and the Caribbean, but most were not well educated, and they had little language understanding in common with the Tahitians. 

The isolation of Pitcairn in the South Pacific made this mixture of people a natural breeding ground for a distinct language, Pitkern, recognisably descended from English but clearly not English: “About yee gwen?” means “Where are you going?” and “I se gwen a nahweh” means “I’m going swimming.” 

Fewer than 500 people now speak Pitkern, however, so in our much more mobile and less isolating world, its future is not assured.


Gullah

                                                                 

Gullah, also called Geechee, is a language of the United States; it is the native language of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a heritage language of Michelle Obama. It is also called Geechee. It is a creole based on English and West African languages, and it is spoken by some 250,000 people – mostly descendants of slaves – along the south-east coast of the US. It arose during the 1700s and 1800s, and it is proudly maintained as a linguistic heritage today. It is to some extent – but not completely – mutually intelligible with English. If you have ever sung Kumbayah, you have used at least that one word of Gullah.

Sranan

                                                                       

Sranan, spoken in Suriname, has an English base with vocabulary from Portuguese, Dutch, and West African languages.Sranan (also called Sranan Tongo), spoken by some 400,000 people in Suriname (and first language for about 130,000 of them), has an English base with vocabulary from Portuguese, Dutch, and West African languages.

It emerged in the 1900s but was discouraged in the Dutch-run education system. After Suriname gained independence, Sranan’s status increased considerably. It is not truly mutually intelligible with English, as this example from omniglot.com shows: “A ben de so taki wan dei mi mama ben bori okro.”

Singlish

                                                                  

The government of Singapore has not always wanted people to think that Singlish is anything other than ‘bad English’. But this popular language is different from English in important ways. 

 Singlish arose in the past century from the mixing of many different language groups within an English school system. Much of its grammar is borrowed from dialects of Chinese, and while many of the words come (sometimes changed) from English, it also has Malay and Tamil influences. 

It is now the native tongue of many Singaporeans, and much of the country’s daily life is conducted in it. Since it is not official or standardised, it has multiple varieties on a continuum from quite similar to standard English all the way to really not mutually intelligible with English. 

To take a couple of examples from worksingapore.com: “Wah lau, the movie damn sian” (“I didn't really like the movie. I found it rather uninteresting”) and “Kena saman? Die, lah” (“I’m being fined? Oh dear”).

And what is the future of English and its offspring? There are pulls in two directions: on the one hand is the homogenising influence of the global economy and the internet, engendering greater conformity and homogeneity (but also spreading innovations rapidly); on the other hand is the desire for expression of local identity, a sense of belonging to a place and a distinct culture. 

English may come to have a global standard that is not exactly what is spoken in any local culture, which may be quite different in some places for the reasons mentioned above. Some of those local varieties may over time have strong mutual influence and convergence with global English. Others may become independent languages.

Some local varieties will not survive – the future is not bright for Pitkern. But other local variations may come to be increasingly local and even, as deliberate expressions of independence from the dominating hegemony of global English, become standardised languages of their own, as Tok Pisin has.

By James Harbeck
With many thanks to BBC Culture


See also 

Will Hair Unlock The Secrets Of The Bounty Mutineers?

Contronyms
 
Paraprosdokians

Oxford English Dictionary May Be Too Big To Print

Heteronyms 

Anemoia:Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known 

Oxford Dictionary's 'Word' Of The Year Is An Emoji

English And Mathematics Are Being Sorely Neglected

How English Gave Birth To Surprising New Languages

11 Inventors Who Became Nouns

Can You Correctly Pronounce Every Word In This Poem?

Pre-Fab Hobbit Houses You Can Actually Live In

                                                                

A long time ago, a friend gave me The Hobbit as a Christmas present (he even wrote a message in Elvish in the front. Rad, right?), and I LOVED it. Particularly the parts that happened in Bilbo's Hobbit hole. It sounded so cozy and comfortable and full of delicious treats. 

                                                                 

                                                                   
                               
My point here is that someone (who obviously loved the book even more than I did) has created pre-fab Hobbit holes that you can actually buy. And live in. I KNOW.

The company, called Green Magic Homes, has created prefabricated modular micro-houses designed specifically to exist under a layer of soil and turf. In other words, just like Hobbit-Holes. 

The structure features perforated flaps so the components can be screwed and sealed. The company website claims three people can assemble the structure in three days, with no special skills or heavy equipment.

So if you can handle a screwdriver, and have two friends, you can probably build one. Just sayin'.

Because the design is so simple, yet modular, the home can be adapted to any type of topography (mountains, beach, city--you name it) and customized to fit individual needs. Many people start out with one 400 square foot model, then add others on to expand their space as needed.

And if you think the outside looks rad, just wait until you see the cozy interior.

                                                                   

Yeahhhh. I'm pretty sure ol' Bilbo would feel right at home in there. 

Learn more at Green Magic Homes.

By Beth Buczynski 

Source: Via Stumbleupon

Related:

Replica Of Louis XIV's Versailles Is The World’s Most Expensive Home - $416 million

Dream Eco-Home Of Russian Hemp Tycoon Will Be Noosa’s Priciest Abode 

The Most Expensive Things in the World

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.