St Lawrence Project

I came across this proposal after seeing a link to a new public outcry against a proposed seven and a half storey hotel just across from Asheville's historic Basilica Cathedral.

The St Lawrence project would make for a breathtaking gateway into Asheville's downtown. With its central European plaza piazza, with old world style fountains, cafes, bistros, condos/residential apartments, and possibly even a small hotel, it makes for a much more attractive prospect than the mundane hotel.

I even see a mini roundabout in the southwest corner. The fancy ground stonework remind me of Paris and Nice. After having lived in Europe for the past three years, I can say this project is certainly welcomed and must be further explored by the council!

Pack Square Battle heats up in Raleigh

From the Asheville Citizen-Times

By Jordan Shrader, published May 19, 2009 11:34 am

Raleigh - State Court of Appeals judges today heard a lawyer argue that the developer who bought Buncombe County land beside City Hall should be allowed to keep it.

Stewart Coleman's company want the court to overturn a Superior Court judge's ruling that the sale was invalid and the land should remain a place for public use.

Joe Ferikes, an Asheville attorney who challenged the sale, told the three judge panel that the land is the site of decades of music, preaching, politicians' speeches, festivals and celebrations marking the end of two world wars.

“This may not seem to be a large tract of land to my opponents, but it is a very important piece of land to all the citizens and residents of Buncombe County," Ferikes told the three judges. "It is a place and a space that needs to be preserved.”

George Pack donated the property in 1901, intending it as the site of a courthouse, which was built but torn down when the present courthouse went up.

The longtime use of land as green space for the public is not enough to legally protect it as a park, Patrick Kelly argued on Coleman's behalf.

“There have been no maps that have been introduced into evidence showing it as a park," said Kelly, a Charlotte lawyer. "There's no evidence that the county has put in park benches" or given the area a name.

Coleman wants to build condominiums and retail space on the property and the lot next to it where the Hayes & Hopson Building stands.

Kelly said nothing in the 1901 deeds say what happens if the property is not used as intended. Without such instructions, legal precedent allows for the conditions to be ignored, he said.

The Court of Appeals often takes months to hand down its rulings.

I, for one, am going against the crowd on this one. I think this is a good idea. I've seen that building on many occasions and it's either in desperate need for renovations or something entirely new, like condos and offices, needs to be built. Although this Coleman guy seems to have no sympathy with the people of Asheville, in this climate almost any development should be looked at with renewed interest. Additionally, in order to curb urban sprawl, which is increasingly becoming a problem (especially in south Asheville, i.e. Arden, Skyland, Fletcher), we need to build higher density, mixed-use projects in the city center and encourage a stronger, pedestrian-based society. Every time we push a developer away from Asheville's urban core, we are sending a message out to developers to build on the outskirts while we "protect" our city center. We are forgetting growth is inevitable and this would only result in the mushrooming of population density rather than containing it in a smart, forward-thinking kind of way.

Asheville's Brewgrass Festival Sold Out Six Months Ahead

Asheville has already tied first place with Portland, Oregon, as "Beer City USA". More than 16,000 respondents from 46 countries participated in the poll, by New York City's examiner.com. Asheville has made great strides in recent years in the world of beers. Only in its fifth year, Asheville's Brewgrass Festival has already become one of the Southeast's most popular beer celebrations. The city, with six microbreweries and two more under construction, is fighting hard to retain its status as a beer mecca. Beer enthusiasts from the city also hope to one day knock Portland out of first place altogether.

From Take5 of the Asheville-Citizen Times
By Tony Kiss published March 18, 2009 2:17 pm

Asheville’s Brewgrass craft beer festival is sold out – six months before the event happens on Sept. 19 at Martin Luther King Jr. Park.

The final tickets were sold last weekend, said festival co-owner Jimi Rentz, who also owns Barley’s Taproom in Asheville. In all, 3,500 tickets were available for the festival. Sales began just a month ago.

This was the festival’s fastest sell out “by a long shot,’’ Rentz said. The festival has not even announced the bluegrass bands that will perform at the event, he said.

There is no chance that any more tickets will be made available by the festival, Rentz said. Fans without tickets may find some on sale through various Web sites. But all tickets will be electronically scanned at the gate, so be very cautious about second-hand purchases.

How Far Back in Time Can We See?

By independent blogger/journalist Robert Platt

The sun's light takes about eight minutes to reach Earth. Therefore, in a hypothetical situation, if the sun was to explode, we would see the sun in perfect form until eight minutes has passed. Then we would see the explosion as the light from the sun finally reaches Earth. Hence, many experts point out we as a human race would actually be looking into the past in the interim that it takes for light of the sun’s explosion to reach us. Actually, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, we are constantly peering into the past when we see the sun. So you see TIME also has physical properties. Time is only as fast as light, and if one could exceed the speed of light, you would likewise travel back in time.

That light takes so long to reach our planet means when one looks up into the night sky, the millions of twinkling stars that we see, which are billions if not tens of billions of light years away, are actually millions of years in the past. This means that we are actually looking at our universe as it was, and not as it is (depending on exactly what you define by ‘was’ and ‘is’, of course, which can also be said to be relative). So theoretically the universe could be being ripped apart by monstrous supermassive black holes gone MAD, but as long as it is not occurring in our conscious time bubble (the third dimension), it is undetectable and we would have no idea. That is, unless we somehow found a way to travel at light speed and actually arrived at some distant point in the universe in our third dimensional conception of time, but even then it would only be visible to those who have travelled there (and if you're not confused, these friends would now have travelled to some time in our third dimensional "past"). We, here on Earth, would not even be able to observe our space-travelling friends in telescopes because it would still take millions of years for "now" in the distant universe to reach "now" here on Earth. Even a "live" televisual conversation would be taking place in our space-travelling friends' past, because it would take that long for radio frequency or even ultra-high frequency (VHF) to reach our planet. This is why it can take up to 20 minutes for signals to reach Earth from the Mars rovers.

Mind-boggling, isn't it?

And so, the further the distance between objects and our relative position - in this scenario Earth - the longer it takes for the light to reach us and, subsequently, the further back in time we are looking. While it takes eight minutes for the hypothetical sun explosion to reach our earthly views, it could take many times that amount for a hypothetical explosion of a terrestrial body to reach our realm of vision. Consequently, we are looking deeper and deeper into the past the further and further we look into space. The more distant the object in space from our relative position, the deeper in the past this picture in the way it appears to us has occurred.

Tie this to recent headlines that ESO’s Very Large Telescope has discovered the most distant known object in the universe (a redshift of 8.2). The explosion, a faint gama-ray burst, occurred 13 billion years ago, which is only 600 million years after the Big Bang.

A thought occurred to me whilst reading this news: If we continue to build more powerful telescopes that can look even deeper into the universe, we would inevitably build something that could detect a terrestrial object that would go back to exactly the time of the Big Bang. But then what? Is that where the universe stops? What is the end of the universe like? And if we could go past the Big Bang, which, supposedly, marked the creation of time itself, we would be in an entirely new dimension (if "dimension" is the right terminology, because "dimension" would presume the existence of physical properties). The implications of such a device (which hopefully will be built in the not-too-distant "future") would be tremendous in regards to our understanding of the way things came to be.

Savage to sue British Home Secretary

By independent blogger/journalist Robert Platt

The man who moaned about immigrants now has the shoe on the other foot, and he does not like it one bit.
Michael Weiner, or, as he is better known, Mike Savage has been blacklisted from the UK.
British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith released the "named and shamed" list last week of 16 people banned from entering the country.

Savage was listed alongside pseudo-Baptist hate-pastor Fred Waldron Phelps and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, who have picketed the funerals of Aids victims and claimed the deaths of US soldiers are a punishment for US tolerance of homosexuality.
Also on the list were Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky, former Ku Klux Klan high-ranking member Stephen Donald Black, Hamas MP Yunis Al-Asta and neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe.

Mrs Smith said: "Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what's more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded."

Now, Savage, America's third most popular radio host, has threatened to sue Mrs Smith for defamation.

I say, good riddance! Now you have a taste of your own medicine, enjoy.

Asheville Tram and a Green Transit Future

By independent blogger/journalist Robert Platt

Asheville's Transportation Future - Tram

A tram system would be splendid for the city of Asheville. The city and county are both poised to take on continuous population growth and a tram system would be cost-effective and green.

It would prove popular as has been shown time and time and time again in cities that have re-introduced modern tram networks, such as Nice (France), Manchester (UK), Amsterdam, San Diego and Portland (Oregon). This move would finally restore faith in a public transport system (which city's are increasingly noticing and thus taking action) and people would subsequently ditch their cars, or at least put them somewhere out of sight for the day, with the knowledge there would be no need for vehicles in a pedestrian-embracing city. This move would also benefit businesses in the downtown district, bringing much-needed economic stimulation from an increased volume of foot traffic from visitors who might have otherwise been in a vehicle.

It would encourage development to perhaps neglected parts of the city while bringing more attention on the city. It would become iconic and a memorable feature of a city that is increasingly dubbed "San Francisco of the East" and "Paris of the South". It would spread Asheville's blossoming reputation as a green city to far reaches of the country and perhaps even overseas. It would be innovative, daring, European, chic, unique and most-of-all attractive. Trams are beautiful and they beautify cities and it would make Asheville even more sexier than it already is. Bring on the tram!

Bike Sharing introduced in North America

From www.twincities.indymedia.org

Submitted by H. Stone on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 15:03

Six biking and walking projects will receive more than $4 million in grants from Bike Walk Twin Cities, a federally-funded program to increase biking and walking and decrease driving in the metro area.

One of the projects is the Minneapolis Bike Share Program, which received a $1.75 million grant, will be run by Nice Ride Minnesota, a nonprofit organization. The program will place 1000 bikes at 75 security kiosks throughout Minneapolis.

Bike Share riders will have the option of purchasing a season pass for about $50, and may check out a bike at any time and return it to a self-service kiosk of their choice. The first 30 minutes are free and additional time is available for a small fee. In addition, day passes are available. In Minneapolis, the program will run from April through November. The Bike Share Program is expected to be operational by summer 2010.

Also part of the program is a radio frequency identity system, based at the new U of M Bike Center, will permit bicyclists, who install an identity tag on their bikes, to earn benefits and incentives, such as reduced costs for tune-ups and commuter goods by simply validating their bike trips.

According to U of M President Robert Bruininks “This center becomes more than a secure place to park your bike and change clothes; it’s a community space that rewards existing bike commuters and welcomes new bicyclists to our campus with services to make their rides more efficient and convenient.”

The U of MN Bike Center, which will receive $524,000 in Bike Walk Twin Cities funds, will serve 6,000 cyclists on campus, as well as other commuting cyclists, and will be located in the now dormant Oak Street Parking Ramp transit station waiting area, located at Oak and Delaware Streets SE.

In addition to the RFID system, the center will include an electronic bike trip-planning kiosk, 24-hour accessible secure bike storage, changing facilities, repair service and bike retail opportunities, as well as public meeting space. Construction could start this summer.

These grants are the third series awarded through Bike Walk Twin Cities. In June 2007, $7 million was granted to 30 projects, and in July 2008, $1.8 million was granted to five projects. Other projects announced today that receiving Bike Walk Twin Cities funds include corridor biking and walking improvements in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Edina.

I could easily envisage such a project in a small city like Asheville. A dispersement of large numbers of bikes would immediately be welcomed by such a forward-thinking community and would enhance the walkability in downtown. It is also a bold and daring concept in America's Southeast, whereas such projects have long existed in sections of Europe. Asheville city officials need to realise the future is alternative/green transit, not the automobile as was the case in the last century. Such a move would have splendid, far-reaching benefits because it would increase the appeal of downtown, encourage abandonment of automobiles in exchange for bicycles, decrease vehicle traffic in exchange for increased foot traffic (and subsequently impact businesses), and make the region an even bigger leader in the push to "go green".