Random News Stories

[pietillidie]

[What'sinaname]

^ correlates with the decline in bowling. I guess there are fewer people that need to vacuum a 16 pound bowling ball.

[Skids]

A few weeks ago, when the powerball jackpot had just hit the $100 million, I had this vivid dream that I bought the winning ticket from Belmont Forum shopping centre. The place is miles away from my house now, I did grow up not far from there, but hadn't been near the place for 30 years.
Been there 3 times in the last 3 weeks . This time it was to buy $2600 worth of systems and powerpicks for a syndicate of 26 of us at work.

I drove a different way today, thought (wrongly) I'd avoid the morning traffic.

Anyway, i stopped at a set of lights in Morley, right next to a house that brought back memories.
Greg lived there in the 80's. He was an apprentice chippie for the same maintenance company I was completing my plumbing apprenticeship at, there was a dozen of us young blokes doing different trades.
He was part of a team, fondly dubbed the A Team, who used to do daily rounds of multiple institutions in the Perth metro carrying out routine maintenance tasks - fix; doors & windows, painting, gardening etc.
It wasn't long before the company worked out that after the A team had visited, items were going missing. A trap was laid and Greg was busted at home, in the shower, trying to scrub the ink off his hands that had been planted on some cash.
He wasn't a 'bad' bloke, young and stupid maybe. I wondered how that fatal error, which saw him immediately fired, effected the rest of his life. I never saw him or heard of him again.

[nomadjack]

[David]

I know stuff like this happens all the time (and particularly in America), but here's another frankly jaw-dropping account of police entrapment – in which secret agents more or less encourage a target to plan terrorist acts and then arrest them for it – from Australia:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/03/australian-undercover-police-autistic-13-year-old-fixation-islamic-state

[Skids]

Just updating one of the daughters cars. Picked up a nice cx5 diesel for a fair price. I hadn't been near a car yard for years.

Back in the early 90's I had a bit of a financial windfall and enjoyed a few months off work. When I decided to get back to work, a relative with a car yard talked me into selling cars. It was a shit job, I lasted about 12 weeks. But I did see some funny things.

Early one Saturday these two old Italian gents rock in. Looked like local market gardeners in their overalls. They drive a few cars and the salesman sold them a V8 WB one tonner. A few days go by, nothing happening, the salesman starts chasing things up.
These two gentleman had been driving around, buying cars everywhere! They'd actually put small deposits on 9 cars in a fortnight. The sales mobs got a bit stroppy, signed contracts etc. But soon backed off when they became aware that, one of the gents sons, was a high up gangster of some clan.

[Culprit]

^^ Funny thing, my late brother worked at a Car Yard run by the Mafia. Used to get good deals. On weekends when they were opened they had a few escorts (I don't mean the cars) visit regularly. Some nice sales went down with added incentives. :

[What'sinaname]

Will we see another light sentence for a woman raping a boy?

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/married-teacher-admits-to-sneaking-into-14yearold-students-home-to-have-sex-in-his-bed/news-story/0c95733b1346cd6a1eb495cea9617ce0

[roar]

Hope so.

[What'sinaname]

Chernobyl might have been the best thing to happen now that we can study wolves genome that prevents cancer.

[Jezza]

[pietillidie]

^Nice find, and quality researchers by the looks.

There has also been quite a lot of recent work using viruses to attack cancer (e.g., https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023/oncolytic-virus-blocking-tgf-beta ).

As a replication problem, nailing cancer has always been inherently dependent on us better understanding the fundamentals, such as genes and viruses, and having something like machine learning to crack the code. Here's hoping we're set for a breakthrough.

[pietillidie]

^The posts above on car yards and the mafia somehow reminded me of an Aussie movie I'd forgotten about but loved as a teenager: The Big Steal.

I'm scared of watching it again because they're never as good as I remember!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF4zsEsAVl4

[stui magpie]

[pietillidie]

^It's the mechanics of the change that's the opportunity. They know canine genes pretty well, so they can study changed and unchanged populations, try to isolate the protective change, and see if they can simulate it (artificially and experimentally, not through decades of breeding), or at least learn from it. The genetic overlap between mammals is huge, so it's like a giant natural experiment that no one needs ethical approval and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct. And cancer's cancer — a cell DNA replication error — whatever the species.

It's hard to fathom, but very small differences result in very different species. Here's an article from several years ago: