Month: March 2007

Busy in the real world

All quiet here at Medary.com . . . I’ve been busy over at the sdsufans.com site[*1] , and on the road between Kansas City and Brookings keeping up with the South Dakota State women’s basketball[*2] team.  The Jackrabbits are making unprecedented noise in the Women’s NIT tournament[*3] , having defeated Illinois State in front of a near-sellout crowd, and will host the Indiana Hoosiers this Thursday in a game that was sold out in about four hours after tickets went on sale on Monday.  SDSU is in the third year of the five-year transition from NCAA Division II to Division I.  A transitioning team has never played in an NIT tournament, let alone win a game.  (Transitioning teams are not eligible to play in the NCAA tournament).

Plus, I’m making pizza tonight . . .

Inside the supermarket business

The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader has a story about Filbert’s favorite grocery store–HyVee[*1] , and its success:

Hy-Vee’s success can in part be attributed to its flexibility. Despite the company’s size, Hy-Vee has been nimble enough to change with its environment, said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior research analyst for Mintel.

“They’ve made a targeted effort to find out what the community needs and then provide it,” she said.

Each Hy-Vee manager tailors his or her store to the market by deciding which products the store will carry, determining how those stocks will evolve and setting the prices.

Hy-Vee’s proximity and customer service are important factors for Julie Ver Steeg, a Sioux Falls customer, but selection and the overall appearance of Hy-Vee stores keeps her loyal.

“I think Hy-Vee is a little bit cleaner than other stores, which is important to me with my son,” she said. “I think its just an overall appearance of a store and the food. The food there looks fresher, and the shelves appear to be cleaner.”

The RIAA Shakedown

The Recording Industry Association of America is demanding that 50 students at Ohio University pay $3,000 each[*1] to the industry group to avoid being sued for illegal downloading.

A letter to one Ohio University student told her that she distributed 787 audio files, putting her total minimum potential liability at more than $590,000. The minimum damages under the law is $750 for each copyright recording that had been shared, the letter said.

This is a big reason I simply don’t buy music any more.  I don’t care to support an industry that uses strongarm tactics, even when the shakedown is in the form of a letter from a lawyer.  The current intellectual properties legal system is broken.  Extracting thousands of dollars from college students won’t fix it.

Long-term study shows Atkins diet is best

Despite the best efforts of the nutrition community, the Atkins diet racks up more scientific support[*1] :

Overweight women on the Atkins plan lost more weight over a year than those on the low-carb Zone diet. And they had slightly better blood pressure and cholesterol readings than those on the Zone; the very low-fat, high-carb Ornish diet, and a low-fat, high-carb diet similar to U.S. government guidelines.

Stanford University researcher Christopher Gardner, the lead author, said the study shows that Atkins may be more healthful than critics contend.

. . .
At the end, Atkins women had slightly higher levels of HDL cholesterol, the good kind, and slightly lower blood pressure than those on the other three diets. Gardner said differences in weight loss likely contributed to those results.

As is usual in modern journalism when the conclusion disagrees with the conventional wisdom, the article spends more time trying to discount the findings of the study than it does reporting the study’s findings.

Captain America is dead

Killed by a sniper while emerging from a courthouse.  He was 66.
Yahoo News[*1] :

According to the comic, the superhero was spawned when a scrawny arts student named Steve Rogers, ineligible for the army because of his poor health but eager to serve his country, agreed to a “Super Soldier Serum” injection. The substance made him a paragon of physical perfection, armed only with his shield, his strength, his smarts and a command of martial arts.

In the comic-book universe, death is not always final. But even if Captain America turns out to have met his end in print, he may not disappear entirely: Marvel has said it is developing a Captain America movie.

So the body says, hey, there’s plenty of food . . .

Let’s start cranking out babies[*1] . . .

The report from the University of Michigan’s Mott Children’s Hospital said a multiyear study following a group of 354 girls found that those who were fatter at age 3 and who gained weight during the next three years reached puberty, as defined by breast development, by age 9.

“Our finding that increased body fatness is associated with the earlier onset of puberty provides additional evidence that growing rates of obesity among children in this country may be contributing to the trend of early maturation in girls,” said Dr. Joyce Lee, the lead author.