Israel and Iran

Oh, Israel. You have a right to exist, but you don’t have a right to be a bully and an asshole to the countries around you. Or towards the United States, for that matter.

If Israel wants to pick a fight against Iran, let them have at it. Being involved in yet another war is the last thing the U.S. wants or needs right now. If Israel wants to flex its muscles, it can do so without our help.

I’ve got no problem with America defending Israel if Israel is ever attacked. I do have a problem with Israel dragging America along on a misguided, ill-timed adventure against Iran. Yes, Iran is a rogue nation, supports terrorism, and doesn’t like us much. There are better ways of dealing with that than war. If Israel wants to start its own war it can fight it, too.

If nukes are so dangerous and destabilizing, why not renounce the possession of them, dismantle them, and find other solutions to our problems? It’s funny how hypocritical nuclear-armed countries are about other countries becoming nuclear-armed. This includes Israel and the United States, too.

Rethinking Sleep – NYTimes.com

Here’s an interesting look at the power of naps, i.e. breaking up the so-called usual 8-hour sleep cycle.

I’m a big believer in new sleep patterns. I think we’re doing it wrong by sleeping for long chunks. Without a spouse who’s willing to share my sleep habits, however, I’m not likely to change much!

Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed.

via Rethinking Sleep – NYTimes.com.

The future of driving: Seeing the back of the car | The Economist

Here’s a good look at “peak car,” the point where growth in automobiles … uh, stalls.

Looks like research confirms my hunch that the Internet is to blame.

A University of Michigan survey of 15 countries found that in areas where a lot of young people use the internet, fewer than normal have driving licences. A global survey of teen attitudes by TNS, a consultancy, found that young people increasingly view cars as appliances not aspirations, and say that social media give them the access to their world that would once have been associated with cars. KCR, a research firm, has found that in America far more 18- to 34-year-olds than any other age group say socialising online is a substitute for some car trips.

via The future of driving: Seeing the back of the car | The Economist.

Raleigh Union Station

Raleigh’s Union Station, circa 1940s. Photo by John F. Gilbert.

This morning, federal, state, and local officials gathered in the Dillon Supply Viaduct building to announce that Raleigh’s proposed new Union Station is now fully-funded. The chance of Raleigh getting a new train station anytime this decade looked remote until Raleigh won a $21 million federal grant. The Feds are kicking in $15 million of stimulus money and the state is kicking in an additional $6 million. Raleigh is funding $3 million from its earlier transportation bond and Triangle Transit is contributing the $1.3 million property.

Above is a circa 1940s photo of Raleigh’s former Union Station, which still stands at the corner of Dawson and Martin streets facing Nash Square. Raleigh’s station was an “end-station” with stub-end tracks, meaning trains stopping at Raleigh had to back either in or out of the station.

Backing up trains takes a lot of time, so when the Seaboard station and Southern station (both through-stations) opened up it spelled the doom of Union Station. Now the building houses offices. I believe the station’s tracks are still embedded beneath the surrounding roads.

Launch of TV News Search & Borrow with 350,000 Broadcasts | Internet Archive Blogs

For a while now I’ve wanted to build a search engine that would index TV shows by the shows’ closed-captioning transcript. Now I don’t have to, because the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) has built it for me!

The Internet Archives TV News Search & Borrow is amazing! It’s a catalog of news video which is searchable by keyword. Now anyone can do the video research that the wizards to on shows like The Daily Show do, right from their own desks. Obama made a speech about indefinite detention? Find it in seconds. Want to see Romney mixing up Randy Owens of Alabama with Lynard Skynard? A few clicks and it’s in front of you.

Give it a try and see for yourselves. It’s addicting.

Today the Internet Archive launches TV News Search & Borrow. This service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs.

The Internet Archive works to preserve the published works of humankind. Inspired by Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive project, the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news. Like library collections of books and newspapers, this accessible archive of TV news enables anyone to reference and compare statements from this influential medium.

via Launch of TV News Search & Borrow with 350,000 Broadcasts | Internet Archive Blogs.

Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation – The Washington Post

The Washington Post deconstructs why standardized testingis bad for education.

I’ve often wondered why politicians have felt the need to meddle with education when few or none of them are education experts.

The Times can say that using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers is a sensible policy and Obama can say it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan can say it and Emanuel can say it and so can Bill Gates (who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it) and governors and mayor from both parties, and heck, anybody can go ahead and shout it out as loud as they can.

It doesn’t make it true.

via Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post.

Blogging on and on

The kids and I attended a stream monitoring workshop put on by the City of Raleigh on Saturday. It was great learning how to measure the water quality of our city’s streams and we look forward to doing our part.

The workshop included field time and the group practiced in nearby Little Rock Creek. As I was wading around in the middle of the creek, a fellow participant wandered over to me.

“Are you the blogger?” he said.

“Excuse me? Am I the what?”

“The blogger, www.markturner.net?” he answered.

I laughed and introduced myself to my new friend, Sandro Gilser, blogger at The Daddy Weekly. You should check it out.
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My local urban woods to become subdivision

Urban deer

I received confirmation yesterday that the Weatherford property, the beautiful 10+ acre woods beside my neighborhood, is under contract by KB Homes. I believe their plans call for a 40-home subdivision with upscale homes similar to the ones in my neighborhood.

Checking KB Homes’s map of its other subdivisions in the Triangle area, this will be the first to be positioned so close to a downtown. That makes me wonder if we’ll see smaller, fancier, less car-centric homes to appeal to the new generation of homebuyers.

I will miss the nearby woods, though. I’ve grown used to mornings quiet enough to hear the call of barred owls, and the occasional encounter with urban deer grazing near my yard. I’m also expecting increased traffic as the dead-end street I live on gets extended to the new neighborhood, bringing more traffic through my neighborhood.
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Profile slamming

I was thinking that there isn’t much out there that describes what I believe Mitt Romney’s campaign (or one of its allies) is doing to surreptitiously set Facebook accounts to like the campaign’s page. Is it account hijacking? Hacking? Vandalism? What do you call it?

Then I recalled telephone slamming, the practice where unscrupulous telephone companies steals the customer of another telephone company by switching that customer’s long distance provider without their knowledge or consent. This happened to a company I once worked for and stunned me in its audacity.

I think that manipulating someone’s social media profile without their permission is similar in some ways to telephone slamming. Since no one else seems to have come up with a name for this practice, I will call it “profile slamming.”

The Cheapest Generation

Here’s another look at the dramatically changing demographics taking place in America. Raleigh leaders, take note.

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a?k?a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

via The Cheapest Generation – Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.

Update 1:38 PM: The authors cite the same thing I did back in March: that technology is making travel less necessary than it was before.

Smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year. But they also provide some of the same psychic benefits—opening new vistas and carrying us far from the physical space in which we reside.

“You no longer need to feel connected to your friends with a car when you have this technology that’s so ubiquitous, it transcends time and space,” Connelly said.

In other words, mobile technology has empowered more than just car-sharing. It has empowered friendships that can be maintained from a distance. The upshot could be a continuing shift from automobiles to mobile technology, and a big reduction in spending.