Jeers: to the heavy equipment bandits. Saturday marked the fourth time in a week that thieves used stolen heavy equipment to bash their way into buildings, this time using a front-end loader to rob a bank. Clearly there are some special skills involved, and it’s hard not to think that the same people might be involved. But if it’s really that easy to steal expensive construction gear to use in your latest heist, maybe equipment owners should be finding better ways to lock up their gear. One thing’s for sure: it brings a whole new meaning to the term “smash and grab.”
Cheers: to modern medicine — but gosh, it can also be a little sci-fi creepy. Doctors treating patients for cancer couldn’t know for certain that their patients are responsibly taking chemotherapy drugs when the patients are back at home and on scheduled chemotherapy pills. But now they can: by adding a sensor to the pills — about the size of a grain of sand — that transmits information to a patch the patient wears on their abdomen, doctors can see exactly when their patients took their medication. (The patch connects to a mobile app.) The sensor, which eventually dissolves in a patient’s intestines, can give doctors all kinds of information from heart rates to activity rates to when and how long they are sleeping. Helpful, but also a little invasively alarming.
Cheers: to recognition. St. John’s photographer Michael Winsor has been keeping a secret since last March — that his photograph of an iceberg off Ferryland was going to be featured on a Canada Post stamp. “It’s pretty cool,” Winsor told The Canadian Press. “Not very many photographers — very, very few — can say they had their image on a postage stamp.” Winsor finally had the opportunity to hold one of the stamps in his hands when they went on sale last Monday.
Cheers: to diversions. Here’s the “Falling Pecans” section of the state of Georgia’s property code: “(a) When pecan trees are grown on private property and the branches of the trees extend over public roads, streets, or highway rights of way, any pecans falling from any such pecan trees onto the public rights of way shall be the property of the owner of the pecan trees until the end of the harvesting season; and it shall be unlawful for any person to remove the pecans from any public rights of way during the harvesting season without the permission of the owner of the trees. (b) It shall be unlawful for any person, without the permission of the owner of pecan trees grown on private property, to pick or otherwise remove any pecans from the limbs or branches of the trees or to cause pecans to fall from the trees.” There. Now you can’t say you didn’t know.
