My friend V told me about her favorite place in Japan to eat and If I was there I am sure it would be mine too.

It’s a place called Sweets Paradise. It’s an all-you-can eat dessert restaurant, and for those who enjoy sweets it must be basically heaven on earth!

Sweets Paradise is like a chubby kid’s dream come true. The premise or “CHALLENGE” is simple: you pay ¥1,480 (about $15.00) and they give you 90 minutes to gorge yourself into a diabetic coma on, as the sign says, Cake! Pasta! Sandwich! Drink!

A quick guide to visitors to Japan on a budget (or lovers of all-you-can-eat deals in general) here are the characters to look out for when scanning restaurant signage

The characters 食べ放題 (tabehoudai) mean “all you can eat.

”
Similarly, the characters 飲み放題 (nomihoudai) mean “all you can drink.”


The characters バイキング (baikingu) mean “Viking” and is a slang Japanese term that refers to a “buffet.”

“Dessert Viking” is the theme at Sweets Paradise. The term “Viking” probably has its origins in the more appropriate Swedish word, “Smörgåsbord.”

V says everything is delicious…I hope to check it out on my next trip to Tokyo, of course after my sushi fix and midnight ramen run.

Of course Japan would come up with this one….tire manufacturer Yokohama is now selling a tire model made with 80 percent non-petroleum material, substituting orange oil as the primary ingredient to make vulcanized rubber.

The new tire is called the Super E-spec™ and has already received the Popular Mechanics Editor’s Choice Award in 2008. Yokohama will initially market the tire for hybrid car models such as the Toyota Prius.

“The eco-focused dB Super E-spec mixes sustainable orange oil and natural rubber to drastically cut the use of petroleum, without compromising performance,” Yokohama vice president of sales Dan King said. “It also helps consumers save money at the gas pump by improving fuel efficiency via a 20-percent reduction in rolling resistance.”

Orange oil is considered sustainable because it is produced from a renewable resource. The same philosophy of reducing petroleum use is utilized in producing plastics from corn starch or vegetable oil. I love the new drink cups made from corn starch except they have been melting in my car with all this heat this summer!

Yokohama has yet to release the environmental impact of disposing these tires, which typically provides an environmental concern. The petroleum in traditional tires can burn for months in a landfill and is difficult to extinguish. These fires also release black smoke and toxins into the air. Yokohama has not specified whether the orange oil will biodegrade over time. Let’s hope they will.

The process for recycling tires involves devulcanizing the rubber, which would essentially remove the oil and extract natural rubber. Because this is an expensive process, used tires are often shredded and turned into playground surfacing or additives for the soil in sports turf.

Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords.

The 12-character era of online security is upon us, according to a report published by Georgia Tech.

The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours.

But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

“The length of your password in some cases can dictate the vulnerability,” said Joshua Davis, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech research Institute.

It’s hard to say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist who also worked on the project.

The researchers recommend 12-character passwords — as opposed to those with 11 or, say, 13 characters — because that number strikes a balance between “convenience and security.”

They assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to try 1 trillion password combinations per second. In that scenario, it takes 180 years to crack an 11-character password, but there’s a big jump when you add just one more character — 17,134 years.

Passwords have gotten longer over time, and security experts are already recommending that people use full sentences as passwords.

Here’s one suggested password-sentence from Carnegie Mellon University:

“No, the capital of Wisconsin isn’t Cheeseopolis!”

Or maybe something that’s easier to remember, like this:
“I have two kids: Jack and Jill.”

Even though advances in cheap computing power are making long, complicated passwords a necessity, not all websites will accommodate them, Boyd said.

It’s best to use the longest and most complex password a site will allow, he said. For example, if a website will let you create a password with non-letter characters — like “@y;}v%W$5″ — then you should do so.

There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, but there are 95 letters and symbols on a standard keyboard. More characters means more permutations, and it soon becomes more difficult to for a computer to generate the correct password just by guessing.

Some websites allow for super-long passwords. The longest one Boyd has seen is at Fidelity.com, a financial site that lets users create 32 character passwords.

This summer has been hot, 103 this week and more on the horizon.Now after running my air conditioning on “frigid” for the past three weeks I hear the unfathomable…having your air conditioner running during those hot summer days helps keep you cool and comfortable, but it can also make you fat!

A review of data on possible causes of obesity states that it just may be true.
How?

Modern technologies — such as air conditioning and heating — help keep us in “the thermo-neutral zone,” a temperature range where we do not have to regulate our body temperature.

When our bodies are above or below this zone, we increase the amount of energy we spend, which “decreases energy stores,” such as fat.

This is just one of many potential factors that could be driving America’s obesity epidemic, according David Allison, director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham who was probably reporting from his air conditioned lab.

Besides the usual suspects such as fast food and a lack of exercise, he argues that any number of things could be making the problem worse, such as sleep deprivation, taking certain medications, or even quitting smoking — and snacking instead. Yikes he has me pegged.

This was a great treat…we went to see his work at the High Museum in Atlanta this week…

His art and his personality were larger than life. This exhibit brings together a stunning collection of more than 40 paintings, plus film, sculptures and photographs—many never before seen in public.

According to the High’s team this exhibition shares for the first time the diverse body of work that Dalí created in the last forty years of his career. Reinventing himself during the 1940s, Dalí used his art to visually explore science, psychology, and religion—as he often said, painting the subject matter of his time.

Wish I had continued painting after seeing this…

Museum of Modern Art features 32,000 art pieces on iPhone app | MobilizeWorldwide on Xanga

I am a poor at texting even parked in the car…my friend sent this along to me from her hometown’s chruch.