A better use for The Shard?

The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linköping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse."

The greenhouse will serve as a regenerating food bank, tackling urban sprawl while making the city self-sufficient. Plantagon predicts that growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers, a key shift as the world's population grows increasingly urban—80 percent of the world's residents will live in cities by 2050, the United Nations estimates. "Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide," Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle says.



The greenhouse is a conical glass building that uses an internal "transportation helix" to carry potted vegetables around on conveyors. As plants travel around the helix, they rotate for maximum sun exposure. Hassle says the building will use less energy than a traditional greenhouse, take advantage of "spillage heat" energy companies cannot sell, digest waste to produce biogas and plant fertilizers, and decrease carbon dioxide emissions while eliminating the environmental costs of long-distance transportation. And growing plants in a controlled environment will decrease the amount of water, energy, and pesticides needed.
The greenhouse, which will open in late 2013, is already serving as a model for other cities—Plantagon hopes to install the transportation helix technology in regular office buildings around the world, eliminating the need to build entirely new structures. The tallest models even have a name: Plantascrapers.



Check out Plantagon's YouTube Channel for more great videos of their designs.

Source: Julie Ma at Good Environment

Where does the lead singer of the Monkees keep his school bag?

In Davy Jones' Locker of course. It's a terrible old Christmas Cracker joke. But having just watched the latest adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (the one with Eddie Izzard, Philip Glenister and Donald Sutherland) I found myself wondering about the origin of the phrase. Upon death, a good sailor - a god-fearing man or who had served honestly for 50 years - would end up in Fiddlers' Green; a place 'nine miles beyond the dwellings of his satanic majesty' where jigs were played all day and the rum and the women never ran out. However, the body of a wicked sailor went instead to Davy Jones's locker to suffer eternal torment and damnation. But who was Davy Jones and why is his locker (an old term for a chest) a synonym for a watery grave?

Sadly, it seems that no one really knows. However, there are several popular theories and I'll list them here:

The first relates to an actual David Jones, who was a pirate on the Indian Ocean in the 1630s. However, most scholars agree that he was not renowned enough to gain such lasting global fame. Then there was a British pub owner called David Jones who supposedly threw drunken sailors into his ale locker and then dumped them onto any passing ship (or gave them up to the naval press gangs). He is mentioned in the 1594 song Jones's Ale is Newe. Or it could be a reference to 'Duffer Jones', a notoriously myopic sailor who often found himself falling overboard.

Others claim that it's the invention of Welsh sailors who would call upon Saint David, also known as Dewi, for protection in times of mortal danger. Davy may also stem from Duppy or Duffy, a West Indian term for a malevolent ghost, or from Jonah, the 'evil angel' of all sailors. Jonah, you'll recall from the Bible, was so cursed with bad luck that his shipmates threw him into the sea where he was swallowed by a whale. Davy Jones may be a corruption of 'Devil Jonah'.

Another suggestion is that it comes from Deva Lokka or Loka, a Hindu goddess of death. Although Deva is undoubtedly a Hindu term for a goddess, it is not clear that there was such a figure as 'Deva Loka' (However, it was used as the name of a planet in the 1982 Doctor Who TV series Kinda).

The first use of the term in print (that we know of) was in 1726 when Daniel Defoe mentions it in his book The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts: 'Heaving the rest into David Jones's locker, i.e. the sea.'

He then turns up as a malevolent demon or spirit in Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751): 'By the Lord! Jack, you may say what you wool; but I'll be damned if it was not Davy Jones himself. I know him by his saucer eyes, his three rows of teeth, his horns and tail, and the blue smoke that came out of his nostrils. [...] This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters, to which a seafaring life is exposed; warning the devoted wretch of death and woe.'

Is it just a curious coincidence that, when writing Treasure Island in 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson named the captain of the Hispaniola 'Smollett'?

Then there is this definition in the 1803 Naval Chronicle: '... seamen would have met a watery grave; or, to use a seaman's phrase, gone to Davy Jones's locker.' It may have already been in popular use as a euphemism for a century by then.

Ha-Haar.