Hello. I cannot come to the phone right now.
Because stuff has happened.
So what's up?
A not-so-super conductor.
If you have been anywhere near online discussions about science recently,
you may have heard about LK99.
LK99 is a material that has the potential to be a superconductor at room temperature
and just completely upturn the entire concept of energy as we know it.
And it's probably not real.
There's been a lot of discussion about this because if it was real and if it worked,
it really could change humanity.
But it does... I don't think so.
The research paper that everybody's talking about came from a Korean lab and was published on Archive.
ARXIV.
Let's talk about that real quick.
Archive is an online preprint server.
It's a place where you can submit papers that have not been peer-reviewed.
If you ever hear of something that sounds too good to be true,
a miracle cure for cancer, unlimited energy, anything like that,
and the source is on ARXIV.org...
Wait.
Just because it's published there doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
But it also doesn't mean that it's been peer-reviewed and confirmed and accepted.
You do need credentials to publish stuff there,
but just because something is published there doesn't mean that it's fact.
It's just... a paper.
There is a very big difference between I wrote a paper and put it on the internet
and the global science community has peer-reviewed and validated the claim.
And so a lot of discussion about this miracle substance
and a lot of discussions that kind of work the same way,
just wildfire, taking over the internet discourse,
they tend to point back to this website.
I had multiple people in my comments asking me to cover this,
and I didn't.
Be... because of this.
All I'm saying is make sure you understand the sources that you're using before talking about them.
ARXIV is not a fake news website,
it's just a repository for papers that have not yet been necessarily confirmed.
Which is why, despite having a bunch of people making videos that went viral about it,
the world economy has not been overturned yet.
But boy howdy doesn't make a catchy headline. Let's move on.
Wildfires in Maui, spread by hurricane winds,
have completely leveled the historic town of Lahaina in Hawaii.
It has been completely burned to the ground.
There are still ongoing fires, they are being contained,
but this is still happening.
Dozens have been killed, thousands have been displaced,
and this is among the biggest natural disasters in the history of the island.
It was the perfect storm of fire starting in nearby vegetation,
and then hurricane force winds just whipping it around
and spreading it faster than anybody could respond.
The smoke in the air and the winds and the weather in general
made it so it was virtually impossible to get rescue choppers in the air.
People were jumping into the water to get away from it,
and so the Coast Guard is helping out, looking for people.
This is a horrifying disaster that shouldn't have happened,
but it did happen and there's not much we can do,
but try to send aid where we can.
If you want to donate, my recommendation would be to give money to the Maui Mutual Aid Fund.
It's an on-the-ground group that's doing mutual aid on the ground.
You can search that, I'm also going to include links to that
and multiple other donation options in today's newsletter,
as well as the description of the YouTube version of this show.
I have no transition.
Um, like, damn.
So let's instead just talk about the UK,
and how the UK Technology Minister wants to read your texts.
I mean, not literally, but I mean basically.
Michelle Donnellan, who's effectively big technology girl in the UK,
is saying that we should not have encryption be so encrypty.
Long story short, while we've got COSA in the US,
and I made a video about that a while back,
the UK is no different.
They want to make it so that it's harder for you to have privacy
from the government snooping on what you're talking about.
End-to-end encryption is more and more prevalent these days
in a lot of popular messaging services like iMessage and WhatsApp,
and I would recommend using Signal instead, but still.
They don't like that, because they can't see what you're saying.
And so they're like, nah, nah, we just need to protect the children.
We want to know if you're sending bad pictures of kids to each other.
That's why we have to see everything.
It's always save the children when they want to take away your privacy.
That's just a song that I wrote for you.
Here's a quote from Michelle.
Quote, technology is in development to enable you to have encryption.
As well as to be able to access this particular information,
and the safety mechanism that we have is very explicit
that it can only be used for child exploitation and abuse.
That is a lie.
I mean, maybe it's not a lie.
You could probably construe like a hashing algorithm for images and whatnot,
as like not seeing your personal information.
It doesn't matter.
That's not how it works.
You don't have conditional encryption.
You don't have encryption except for certain material.
If you have an accept, then you don't have encryption.
No, it's totally going to be safe.
Just ignore this back door.
It is very much a give-and-take-a-mile situation.
End-to-end encryption works.
And while you should be thoughtful about who you are trusting
to be the provider of an end-to-end encryption service,
like WhatsApp is still owned by Facebook,
it still helps a lot.
True zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption means that only you
and the recipient can read your messages.
Unless, of course, somebody just shows the messages on their phone to somebody else.
But it does mean that the service and anybody else
is not capable of intercepting your message and reading it.
There's not going to be anybody going into a database
and downloading all of your messages.
It's just impossible.
At least with our current technology.
But don't worry, they're actively working on quantum computers.
And once they figure that out for realsies,
that encryption won't matter anymore.
Oops! That's a bit of an exaggeration.
But still.
Hey, so Africa's future is kind of up in the air right now.
To catch you up real quick, Niger had a coup.
They got rid of their sitting president,
and now there's somebody else taking the place
that is not very friendly to France and the US and the West in general.
This is because France and the US and the West in general
have spent a long time colonizing Africa.
And modern day Africa sure has a lot of countries
that are still like one degree away from still being colonized.
You know, just the classic,
we'll give you security in exchange for just you give us all of your resources.
So essentially where we're at right now is the coup in Niger
has support from some neighboring countries who are saying,
hell yeah, independence.
And other neighboring countries are saying,
no, we kind of need to stick with the West
and have international relations and all that stuff.
It's going to get messy.
France and the US have pulled out of the area
because it's suddenly not convenient.
And we're really just sitting back and waiting to see what happens next.
US and French politicians have said they haven't seen much movement
from the new leadership in Niger budging from, you know, their current position.
And there's murmurings between countries about,
oh, we're going to back this up with war if need be.
So we may be at historic points in the history of Africa,
but, you know, maybe it's time to let African countries
be African country instead of just proxies.
This day in the year 3114 BCE marks the start of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.
You may know it as the Maya Long Count calendar or just the Mayan calendar.
Remember the whole 2012 end of the world thing?
That kind of.
That wasn't the end of the world.
A lot of historians are saying that's really a shitty interpretation.
Apparently, if we got to the end of a long count,
it would have been a huge party, not the end of the world.
But long story short, our Gregorian ass calendar just has like a looping year system thing.
Their calendar said this is like the creation date,
and then we're just going to count from there using our own system.
Long counts are sort of like a measurement.
They're like a big chunk.
And one of them would have ended in 2012.
So if you're an ancient Mayan, let me know.
Lightning wrap.
Dianne Feinstein is back from the hospital again because she fell.
Retire.
Lawyers are now reviewing several more complaints
brought against Lizzo for sexual harassment.
This is on top of the original complaints.
Disney announced that they're going to invest in ways to crack down on password sharing
and also it's their turn to raise their streaming pricing rates.
In the ongoing Reddit bullshit, the subreddit Male Fashion Advice,
which I obviously don't frequent, has completely imploded
as their moderator staff were kicked out by Reddit administration
and then replaced with people who have no idea what's going on.
Actor Keith David will be replacing the late Lance Reddick,
voicing Zavala in Destiny 2.
Eyes up, Guardian.
And finally for today, WeWork may be on the brink of collapse
as their stock is really not doing well
and they just announced that they're not sure if they're going to be able to continue operating this way.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content, and a heat advisory.
My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.