BigDipper 80

How many of these people even know that Music Hall has a front side?

I think I'd cry if my electric bill was $200. I don't use my A/C more than a few days a week and only after 7 or 8:00 set at 77 degrees. My unit is undersized though and barely cools the upstairs bedrooms, which is the only place I really even want to be cooler anyway, so I keep it off most of the time.

I really really really hate that ashlar pattern. I wish they'd just go with an un-stamped design, or if they insist on having a texture, that vertical striped texture. And the noise walls look better with a brick pattern like up in Cleveland than the faux-stone.

^ I felt that the little concrete arches along the railings were a nice touch that mirrored the railing along Central Parkway, but it doesn't look that great painted with that anti-graffiti paint, big fences, and out-of-scale streetlights mounted on it. One of the best "highway trenches" I've seen in person is probably the stretch of I-35 north of downtown Duluth - that whole area was landscaped really well with a nice, modern motif that wasn't over the top and still seems to be holding up. Meanwhile ODOT is building weird ugly fake-stone highway overpasses in Lima that don't make any contextual sense.

Completely fine with this solution. The goal of these things should be to make themselves obsolete!

I think GCrites point is that he wants the same outcome but a different solution. Personally, while I don't think it's all that difficult to just actually follow the law, I still think it would be far better if we A) actually trained people better or B) made the punishment so much worse that people would stop risking it. I lean more toward option A for a variety of reasons, but I also think that people just learn where the cameras are and still drive recklessly elsewhere. On 3rd Street, I could just go 35 past the camera and still go 50 the rest of the way, because the road is still huge. Nothing changed, and you won't change that without constant monitoring, road diets, bigger punishments and/or better training. Cameras are just a band-aid that move the problem around in the long run, and don't fix the problem as effectively as they could be fixed, but there is zero political capital to be gained in increasing the requirements for getting/keeping a license.

The Split was one of those great sections of old expressway that had a bunch of character, especially when that old factory was standing on the east side of it still. Most of Ohio's freeways lack that level of intrigue, fast speeds and safety be damned.

Yeah obviously complete streets and road diets should be part of the equation. Here in Cincinnati, Main Street will be getting a sort of road diet between 12th and Liberty this fall. It will include adding several new crosswalks, adding bump-outs at crosswalks, and even a bump-out for one bus stop. It will be an interesting case study to see how much that reduces the speeding that's currently present on the street. The change on Brown Street in Dayton has been pretty remarkable since they completed the diet. It's still signed as 35 mph, but I don't ever go more than 30 on it, and usually more like 25. Dayton actually is doing a lot in the way of road diets (they just narrowed 5th at Keowee and West 3rd is getting bumpouts near Sinclair College) but the actual death-trap intersections and roads (I'm looking at you, Keowee - god help you if you want to bike on Keowee, much less cross it on foot or bike) are all located where the cameras are, and really should be completely re-made instead of policed by cameras.

Again, I think the solution to any of that is to make the street safer. The speed camera on East Third in Dayton is on what is an incredibly roomy road (effectively 7 lanes in width, though striped as 5) with virtually no businesses or stoplights along it, which obviously encourages speeding. Instead of cameras, add some bike lanes and get rid of some of the ROW width and you've won the battle, but that doesn't generate revenue.

Speed cameras I don't mind as much (assuming it's not a Linndale-style speed trap where the municipal speed limits slow down for the express purpose of giving out more tickets), but the red-light cameras scare the s**t out of me. Do they take photos the instant the light turns red? It's one thing to blow a clearly-red light but I can't think of anywhere that I've driven where people might still be in the intersection completing a left turn when the light switches over to red. If we want to be making streets safer, design them so that you don't encourage people to make traffic violations in the first place. ^Agreed that we need to be better at educating our drivers in the first place. If people view driving as a privilege and a big responsibility instead of "freedom" and some sort of birthright, a lot of the nonsense I see on a daily basis would go away immediately.

I've been spending a lot of time in airports the past few months, and it has gotten me wondering: has anyone at Google or Tesla proposed electrifying and autonomizing airport ground fleets? The whole ground fleet is almost entirely small, slow vehicles that make short, predictable trips and spend a lot of time sitting around, which would seemingly make them ideal for switching to battery power and driverless car technology. I assume getting FAA approval would be difficult but I feel like it would be a better proof-of-concept in a closed, professional, government-controlled environment than trying to push it to the consumer first.

My parents were down in the Flats a few weeks ago and said everything was slammed, especially Margaritaville. It almost reminded them of how it was back in the 80s - almost. I'm definitely not the target audience for Margaritaville, but I hope it ends up being more successful than the one in Cincinnati that still somehow managed to get closed despite being in the city that probably has the most parrotheads per capita. But of course, Cleveland's riverfront location for it is much nicer than the Cincinnati one, which was sort of hidden in the casino, which itself is sort of isolated from the rest of downtown.

5 Reasons to Be Wary of Elon Musk's Hyperloop High-speed vactrains might be the ticket for a Martian colony. As a practical transit investment for Earth, the technology has a long way to go. Read more: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/5-reasons-to-be-wary-of-elon-musks-hyperloop/534387/ Looks like the Atlantic finally decided Hyperloop is nowhere near ready for primetime like Musk claims it is.

That era, to me, represents the pinnacle of studio recording. Listen to "Don't Worry Baby" and there is something there, an essence, that 99.9 percent of today's recordings just can not capture. I'm still amazed at how well-mastered Beatles records were. Almost all of them sound like they could have been recorded yesterday. All of The Beach Boys albums are in mono but the stereo tracks that have gotten released over the years just sound so crisp. I still listen to Pet Sounds in mono most of the time but the stereo isolated vocal recordings are mind-blowing.

I feel as though the fact that the fact that the general structure of a pop single hasn't really changed since the 50s helps make some of these bands so enduring. Obviously we all know how rock is rooted in blues and jazz, but for a lot of people jazz is a completely foreign art form with the exception of its occasional revivals and crosses into the mainstream as a Lady Gaga/Tony Bennet single or whatever here and there. Even with the EDM-splosion of recent years, two-guitars-and-a-drum-kit is still really common. So when you have these bands from the 60s playing in a familiar style but in a way that's still a unique sounding today, it can still cut through all the noise fifty years on. As for the Beatles being the end-all, I'm personally more of a Brian Wilson fan, but Rubber Soul, Hard Day's Night, and Help! are all phenomenal records. They have the unique Beatles sound at its prime, right before they got trippy and weird.

I snagged a photo of it a couple years ago from Jackson Hill Park when all the leaves were down. It goes quite a ways back and doesn't seem to be one distinct architectural style. It's such a misfit.

^It's been a few months but I'm pretty sure I tried Ohio Avenue addresses too based on looking up the parcel on CAGIS. Maybe I'll have to give it another go.

^I am absolutely obsessed with that weird house right at the base of the Ohio Avenue steps. Who lives there? Is it an apartment? Will I get shot at if I take a photo of it? I couldn't find any information on the auditor's website. What secrets does it hold?

Well "largest employer" and wages don't always align, although government jobs usually are decently-paid positions. Most states' largest employer is Wal Mart but economically that doesn't do many people much good. Also, it's 50,000 jobs in a region of about 2 million people. That's only less than 3% of columbusites, so the chance of you interacting with one, much less multiple, is still fairly small.

^Even as a white male I've gotten enough dirty looks from the Confederate flag-waving crowds in those pockets of NKY (and even here in parts of east Dayton) to have no desire to even really walk around and explore those neighborhoods on foot.

There are some great, interesting, odd corners of the West Side (South Fairmont jumps to mind, as does the State Avenue corridor), but it all feels so disorganized and jumbled and disconnected from the rest of the city. In a lot of ways (to stay somewhat on topic), some of even the older neighborhoods like Westwood and Upper Price Hill feel very sprawly even though they came around before "sprawl" was really a thing. It's especially strange given how geographically close they are to the basin, notwithstanding the fact they're on the other side of a massive rail yard and the Mill Creek and the industry related to those two features.

Dayton Rotary Foundation Awards $50,000 Grant JULY 13, 2017 BY DAYTON MOST METRO The Rotary Club of Dayton has awarded its first Signature Grant in the amount of $50,000 to The Gem City Market project, which is part of the Greater Dayton Union Cooperative Initiative (GDUCI). The check will be presented to Lela Klein, Director of GDUCI and will take place at the Dayton Rotary Club’s weekly luncheon on Monday, July 17, 2017, Noon, at Sinclair College Ponitz Center. Read more below: http://www.mostmetro.com/the-featured-articles/dayton-rotary-foundation-awards-50000-grant.html

Burke is Burke Lakefront Airport, between the Rock Hall and the USS Cod. It's just a general aviation airport but there may be some random Air National Guard stuff there from time to time. DCMA is just a government oversight agency but it looks like they have a little campus over in Bratenahl on Google Maps. If it's neither of those, you might need to post a screenshot, because I have no clue what else you'd be talking about.

^The tours are one Saturday each month, and you just missed one, but each month covers a different topic and different parts of the facility. The August topic is solar cells, and they're actually showing off the drop towers on September 9 - might want to add that to your calendar! What "air base" are you talking about? Burke? Or the DCMA offices near Gordon Park?

Have you ever been to one of the NASA open houses? It's a really cool experience. They actually have two gravity wells, one which is "outside" in a tower down into the ravine, and another that's a big pit that they dug. One of my elementary school teachers had a husband who was an engineer at Glenn so we all got to go on a field trip one time and throw stuff down the hole in the name of science, which was pretty exciting.