A construction company, tasked with building a Shell-sponsored sports stadium, notes that they are "helping to make Fort McMurray the greenest city in Canada".
This book, which describes the descendants of a civilisation that has converted the material in its planets into a giant ringlike structure around its sun, was inspired by Freeman Dyson's idea that a truly technologically advanced species would endeavour to capture as much light as possible by building a spherical shell around its central star.
Instead of working on his thesis, Keith spent most of two years holed up in the family garage, stripping the body off a Triumph Spitfire and building a new shell from scratch, using foam and 700 pounds of plaster of paris.
If you are playing with monsters on, you might want to protect your chest from exploding Creepers by building a protective shell around it.
However you don't get there by simply building an empty shell and avoiding the value question entirely.
Ukraine's government, along with the European Union and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, is building a gigantic new shell to cover Chernobyl's exploded reactor and the existing steel sarcophagus.
But somewhere along the path, I started to reinforce that shell by building a wall to shield me from the things that hurt.
Where previously, building a library meant shelling out cash on vinyl, cassettes or CDs to grow a collection over a lifetime, now it might mean downloading a slew of iTunes tracks, checking out a dozen different interpretations of the same piece for free on YouTube, or, increasingly, joining a streaming service like Spotify.
The second phase of the research programme was concerned with building a hollow aluminium carrier shell.
Mechanical engineer Nicholas Fang of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, says the research "clearly indicates" that achieving anisotropy is critical to building an acoustic cloaking shell.
