rnc

The city has no problem giving tons of incentives to suburban developers, why not something downtown. Heck, they keep annexing more and more land (which they have to provide services to) just to provide developers greenfield to develop. How is there a shortage of affordable residential real estate in Huntsville? There are tons of options under $150K for a small 3/2 house in good school districts in SE Huntsville, Madison, Monrovia, NE Madison County... A friend just bought a nice starter home in a little neighborhood off Slaughter, right next to the Research Park for $130K for about 1400sqft. Other than a few minor asthetic things, it is a great little house. It is 1 mile from 20,000+ high paying jobs and the new Bridge Street development, it is in pretty good school districts and close to lots of shopping. Considering the high income in Huntsville, the housing is really reasonable, except for a few highly desirable areas.

A couple nice, large apartment complexes would do wonders for downtown. Maybe even more for the nightlife than condos because the tenants would typically be younger and probably a good number of college students.

OK, I realize a $150K 2 bedroom is probably not going to happen, but let's assume $150K for a 750sqft 1 bedroom and $200K for a 1000sqft 2 bedroom. That is $200/sqft. That seems really doable considering that properties in the most desirable "downtown" neighborhoods like Old Town, Five Points and Blossomwood typically don't (but sometimes do) go for that much. AND you get a yard and you don't have to pay condo fees! I wonder how land can be so expensive downtown. Look around, there are a lot of For Lease signs everywhere. The properties that are vacant aren't being snatched up quickly. I work and basically live downtown, I've seen For Lease signs in the same windows for a year or more in many cases. I realize that commercial and residential properties are two different animals, but still, if the demand is not there for commercial real estate, then why is the property value so high? The north and northwest sides of downtown have a lot of undeveloped land. Once the Searcy Homes are demolished, there will be a lot more.

16 Units! That is only 2 per floor. These must be some really large units. I like the location and the look of the building, but I think the Twickenham residents will fight having a building that tall at that location. When do you think there will be a reasonably priced condo development downtown? 301 East, the proposed Ovation Condos and this development are basically retirement homes for the extremely wealthy who want to downsize. I'd like to see some units in the $150-200K range for a 2 bedroom, even if it means sacrificing some external asthetic appeal to the building. Then, some young professionals might be able to consider living downtown. That is the only way downtown will start to feel vibrant. 16 units averaging between $500k-1mil won't do that.

I think this is great news. A good gym makes living and working downtown more attractive. I work downtown, so I can't wait for this to be done.

I can't believe no one has talked about the Old Towne fire on here. Does anyone have an inside scoop? I've seen the building, it is pretty much a loss, they are trying to save the brick facade on the front. The firefighters did a great job contained it to just that building it seems, it easily could have taken out adjacent properties. What do you think the brewery will do? The owner has expressed interest in relocating downtown. In the meantime, the owner was in discussion with other breweries to make their recipes. He ruled out opening a brewpub because of restrictive state laws that don't allow selling your brew off property. I can't understand this law. You can have a brewpub, but you can't sell that beer to other bars or in stores? I guess Alabama lawmakers want to make it as hard as possible for an alcohol related business to succeed. In any case, I hope they reopen somewhere downtown.

It would be tough to work out, considering UAH is trying to become more of a full time campus instead of a commuter school. Plus, neither UAH or A&M are hurting for classroom space that I know of. They would have to want to do it for the betterment of the city unless the city basically gave them the space for free. I posted on here a while back that I would love to see apartments go in downtown that had regularly scheduled shuttle services to UAH/A&M. I've seen complexes like that in other college towns and they have done well. Obviously, a younger population living downtown would do wonders for the nightlife. I was thinking of the area where the to-be-demolished Searcy Homes projects currently are would be a good location.

I've seen that on Discovery before, very cool stuff. Very lucky that happened over Siberia and not a populated area. What would lead you to believe it was a UFO? The article said they found meteorite dust in the trees around the explosion site.

http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/14C.html Here is a nice explanation of the Martian atmosphere color in the above link. It explains the various colors of the Martian atmosphere are essentially due to dust particles suspended in the atmosphere due to constant dust storms. According to the link, the atmosphere is generally a yellowish/brownish color, but can sometimes be whitish or blue. "If the Martian atmosphere were to be completely cleansed of dust, the daytime sky would appear blue, just as our own sky because of Rayleigh scattering by the molecules (primarily carbon dioxide molecules) which make up the atmosphere. It is possible (though unlikely) that future missions to Mars will find a different sky color." Seems pretty reasonable.

I don't know if I can answer that, but the piece they showed in the video was a piece of single crystal silicon. Not silicone as the UFO "expert" said. We produce silicon all the time here on good ole planet Earth for computer applications, IR optics, and in solar panels. I have no idea why this was considered manufactured and extraterrestrial. It would be nice if they would explain these claims rather than just state it and move on, wouldn't it? Single crystal silicon breaks along a crystal plane. That is why the one side is glass smooth and the other side retained the machined surface.

Could you provide a reference that shows the Russians came forward? http://www.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/clementine/clib/ Here's where the pictures are, type in lat 70, long 240 and lat 64, long 265 at resolution 1 pixel = 1km and 768x768. Pretty cool stuff. It looks like errors where two images stitched together. You can see the seams of the different images all over the scene, but in those spots (aka the towers) image registration is messed up. I've seen problems like this with image registration techniques before, it looks like the two images overlapped more than intentended, creating blur in the overlap region. Every seam you see on the scene is a slight registration error or blur. The towers seem to be gross errors. This could be fixed with some manipulation of the images. An algorithm would have been used to stitch the images together. My guess is the algorithm wasn't perfect (they never are). It is especially hard to register images that don't contain many distinguishable features. These scenes are essentially shades of gray, it is very easy for the algorithm to get confused when trying to create a seam. FYI, I am an optical engineer but I'm more of a design/experiment guy. However, I work with people that do this exact sort of work everyday. I've talked to them often about the pitfalls related to image registration. Also, based upon the 768x768 image resolution and the 1 pixel = 1 km scale, those things would be approaching 200km in height. I'm pretty sure large aperture, ground based telescopes would be able to see structures that size.

Sorry, but I must keep playing skeptic. How do you know those pictures came from NASA? Are they from a conspiracy theory website or straight from NASAs servers? I'm guessing door #1. 100s (probably more like 1000s were listening in) of ham radio enthusiasts heard Armstrong and Aldrin, yet no one recorded it? I'm not old enough to remember, but audio recording equipment was around during those days. Given that this was the biggest event in human history, I would have to think someone would have recorded it. This is exactly the problem with much of the UFO "proof". Hundreds of unnamed ham radio enthusiasts heard this, yet there are no recordings and there is no one stepping forward to say they heard it. It is all heresay, and according to the UFO enthusiasts they have all been silenced by the government and are scared to come forward. I argue that this is impossible. The entire world was watching. Other countries, including our enemies, were listening to those same broadcasts that the ham radio enthusiasts heard. Yet, no one from other countries came forward. This would have to be a GLOBAL conspiracy to keep this silent, which I find hard to believe. By the way, the mirrors are still there.

Why is there obviously a source for ancient gods? The human mind is an amazing thing, we are a pretty creative bunch of creatures. In fact, there is a whole section in the library devoted to this creativity, it is called "Fiction". In 2000 years will a future civilization think that dinosaurs roamed the earth in the 1990s because of Jurrasic park? I'm not close mind on the subject. However, I'm not going to see a smudge on a picture of the moon and jump to the conclusion that NASA is obviously hiding alien space towers. None of those high profile people said they saw an alien spacecraft. They saw a UFO (UNIDENTIFIED Flying Object). They didn't know what it was and they can't explain it, there is a big difference.

Those are fascinating, I've seen some of them before. It is possible that we are seeing the same phenomena that they saw in previous times. Perhaps it isn't alien spacecraft, maybe it is some rare natural occurence that we don't understand and it takes the shape of a bright disk. Who knows, it is pretty cool though to see those paintings.

Improved parking, sidewalks highlight downtown facelift http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/ind....xml&coll=1 I still don't agree with tearing up the sidewalks, it seems like a waste when there are many other things that could be done. Oh well. By the way, the building that Jeff Sikes renovated on the SW corner of the square looks awesome. I'm looking forward to a tenant moving in to that spot.