I was catching up on my RSS feeds today when I came across Stephen J. Dubner’s May 9th post on the Freakonomics Blog. In the post he writes about Sushi Para II in Chicago, where they have a sushi buffet. You can order all the sushi you want for $17, but if you have any leftovers at the end of your meal, you pay an additional charge for them. It’s an interesting, albeit not new, twist to buffet pricing. Several comments tell of other restaurants with similar policies.
While I love sushi, after looking at the Center Stage user reviews, I’m not sure I’d want to trek all the way out to North Clark Street for what many have said is a bad experience. A few of the reviewers report having been overcharged, which is why I try to keep my dining receipts until the charges get posted to by my bank or credit card company. And if this restaurant is related to Sushi Para in Palatine, I can believe that the service is slow.
I’m glad we’ve got Sushi Station in Rolling Meadows. I just wish they would open one up in Schaumburg.
Palatine does not have an airport, but a plane landed there Friday night. The Tribune article is a bit sparse on details, but a small plane of unknown size and with an unknown origin and destination landed at Northwest Highway and Quentin Road last night.
The title of this post will only be humorous (or frustrating) to those in my school district.
The humor (or frustration) aside, at Folklore.org there is an anecdote about how Apple’s Lisa Applications team came up with the OK button for the original Macintosh operating system. It’s a good technology history geek read that I found on del.icio.us/popular. If you’re interested in Macs or Mac history, there are a lot of other good stories there about the history of the Mac.
Instead of cleaning my office, I watched the rest of Day Break online today. I was halfway through the season watching it on TV before ABC canceled it, so I figured I’d watch the rest of the season now that it is finally available online as ABC promised.
I have to say that I feel only half satisfied after the series finale. I thought that all of the questions would be answered by the end of the season, and that’s almost true. Detective Hopper does solve the Garza murder, and you can watch the final episode yourself to find that out. What was never addressed was why Hopper kept having to relive the one day over and over again. That disappoints me greatly. The FAQ lead me to believe I would get an answer to that by the end of the day, but that just isn’t true.
About the only thing I can think of is that Hopper has the ability to affect the happenings of the day through his actions during previous "days." In one episode, Hopper’s talk with Rita, his girlfriend, changes how she reacts the next few times he relives the day. When Hopper finally makes it to tomorrow, I can only imagine that the excessive trauma he experienced, along with getting close solving the Garza murder and who is behind framing him for it, triggered something that allowed him to see the next day. I just wish they actually come out and just said what caused his déjà vu. There is no such luck, unless I am missing something obvious.
So, it was an entertaining show, and I am sad to see that it will not get a second season. I am just thankful for being able to watch the remainder of the season online at ABC’s website. Let this be a sign to the other networks: embrace online broadcasting. I watched the few commercials online (there was no easy way to circumvent them, and I didn’t try), and I almost didn’t mind them. I sometimes even appreciated the deliberate break. With the ad presenting me with a link to click to continue to the next segment of the episode, I didn’t have to worry about coming back to my desk and having to find the spot I was at the time I left.
A post a slashdot about students in Texas receiving suspensions for bypassing online filters has sparked quite a discussion (not surprisingly) about schools, technology and liability. Cliff at slashdot concluded the post by asking this:
While security breaches by students are something to take seriously, should school administrations continue with their knee-jerk mentality to something like this, especially at the times when its obvious that no malicious intent was involved?
I agree that the terms of the punishments, reported to be suspensions of up to three months, may be excessive, but without any details on the school policy or what actually transpired, I can only guess that the administrators felt that the length of the suspensions were appropriate for what was done. However, I disagree with the contributor’s comment that "the school district be liable for their own insecurity." The contributor goes on to ask, "Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district’s end?"
It does not matter that the district was unable to prevent students from bypassing the filters. The fact is that the students likely violated an acceptable use policy, and therefore needed to be punished. As a public institution with limited resources, the school district has to prioritize how it manages its technology infrastructure. It is important to patch up any security holes, but it is impractical to spend half your day, every day, trying to block every known proxy server.
The discussion is lively, and like many discussions of socio-political nature, there are some very vocal sides in the discussion. Check it out.
MSNBC has an article about research being done by Dr. Lance Becker at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Resuscitation Science. What Dr. Becker’s research is showing is that even an hour after clinical death, the oxygen deprived heart cells of a heart attack patient are still alive. His research also shows that it is the reperfusion, the resumption of oxygen supply to the cells, that actually results in cell death. When oxygen is resupplied to previously deprived cells, apoptosis occurs. It appears as though the cells cannot distinguish between the cells being replenished with oxygen and cells that should be programmatically killed, like cancer cells. Rather than helping, the return of oxygen to the cells actually causes more harm.
Dr. Becker’s research continues to study this process, and how to best revive a patient. His suggestion is to slow the uptake of oxygen, rather than increase it. Among the possible solutions for slowing oxygen uptake is putting patients on a heart-lung bypass machine to continue circulation until the heart can be safely restarted. Dr. Becker has also developed a slurry solution of ice and salt that can be injected into the bloodstream to induce hypothermia. Research has shown that lowering the body temperature to 33°C (91.4°F) can slow the chemical reactions started by reperfusion.
Overall, the research is very interesting and I am excited to see what it turns up. Of course, I also wonder what this means for organ donation with heart attack patients. I don’t even know if organs from a heart attack patient are generally accepted for organ donation, or if the lifestyle that led up to the heart attack makes these organs undesirable for donation. I already wonder how and where doctors draw the line when it comes to continuing to try to save a patient and calling a patient’s time of death to ensure that the organs are still viable for donation. Maybe that’s just what happens on TV?
Note: I had a much better write-up for this article, until my browser decided to stop loading pages and it prevented me from copying to the clipboard what I had already written.
For my second YouTube post of the morning, Nick Heidfeld pilots his BMW F1.07 on the Nürburgring. According to the video’s description, this is the first F1 to run the course in years. Heidfeld makes it look easy:
Now, I think I’m a pretty good driver, but in no way do I think I am prepared to run the Ring at anything more than a stroll.
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