Hello.
I waited till my chickens hatched to count them.
But stuff still happens.
So what's up?
This is your annual reminder that physics is just our best guess.
A bunch of science people at Fermilab, a particle physics lab in the US,
may have discovered evidence for a fifth force of nature.
Or rather, they found measurements that imply that there might be something to do
with possibly the fifth force of nature that we don't understand.
It's all kind of up in the air.
While yes, our current model of physics does a pretty dang good job
at letting us calculate stuff, it's not perfect.
And sometimes we see things that we can't explain,
and we're like, oh, dang it, we're off by a little bit again.
So we've got four fundamental forces, right?
Gravity, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.
But there might be a fifth one that acts on muons.
Muons.
Moana?
So moanas are like electrons, except they have a different charge.
They don't last very long, and they move in a predictable pattern,
except sometimes they wobble in the wrong way.
And then we're like, ah, dang, that's not physics.
It's not my physics.
That's someone else's physics.
And so the science people are watching these moanas do their thing,
and they're like, well, this might be a new force.
Anybody else?
New force?
Yeah?
So don't worry, we're not about to upturn all of physics
and change all of reality or anything anytime soon.
But it's just a reminder that physics is a model of how we think things work.
Not a hard and fast rule is just like, this seems right.
It seems pretty right.
The big crypto boy is going to jail.
Sam Bankman Freed, head crypto bro from FTX, is going to jail
because he was previously just awaiting trial under house arrest.
But then the state was like, eh, he's doing some witness tampering.
The witness tampering that he was doing was leaking his ex-girlfriend's
diary entries to the New York Times.
She is also very not good and is also a part of this whole debacle
and has also already pled guilty.
And so the state is calling this witness tampering,
and they're putting him in jail until his trial.
If you're not familiar, FTX was this big crypto firm
that was supposed to be like the big secure crypto bank and exchange
and all this stuff.
It was supposed to be like the messiah of crypto apps.
And turns out it was still a crypto thing.
And so it was just rife with fraud.
It collapsed in what people referred to as bigger than Enron.
And this dude is now like one of the biggest white collar crime boys ever.
Hey, fuck the Sackler family.
Hey, say it with me. Fuck the Sackler family.
You don't need to know who they are to hate them.
But here's who they are.
They're the people who caused the opioid crisis.
I mean, that's giving them a lot of credit,
but they are the family behind OxyContin.
You know, the opioid crisis one.
They are the family behind Purdue, the pharmaceutical company
that has now filed for bankruptcy because they were sued to hell and back
because the opioid crisis that they did.
You know, the whole pushing addictive and harmful medication
onto people who were seeking medical help.
That little ditty.
And then they made billions of dollars off of it.
And now they're trying to get shielded from liability for what they did.
A settlement from this whole thing included a stipulation
that the Sackler family themselves could not be held liable for what they did.
However, the Biden administration stepped in right before this closed
and said, A.O. Supreme Court, can we hit pause on this?
Because we've got some more arguments to make because these people should be held liable.
So notably from the class action perspective,
this would delay actually getting the payout.
But people in the class are like, yeah, can we actually hold them responsible?
And so a lot of people are OK with this, you know, wait a little bit on the money
to hopefully get more justice, possibly.
But it's not a done deal.
The Sackler family might still be able to weasel their way out of this
because they're a bunch of billionaires after all.
And that's how that works.
Speaking of just like the dumbest lawsuit.
All right. So, you know, the Internet Archive, have you ever heard of the way back machine?
You ever use that to go look up an old web page?
If not, the Internet Archive is just an online archive of stuff.
It's a nonprofit that's just trying to preserve as much as they can online and offline.
They have a bunch of projects just trying to keep things available.
It's almost like they're an archive on the Internet.
Anyway, they've got a project going on right now called Project 78
that's trying to digitize an archive, both physical and digital copies
of 78 RPM vinyls from like way back from dead artists like Frank Sinatra.
The goal is to take these vinyls and preserve them as is,
including all of their faults or scratches or any recording artifact
instead of just having the digitized masters from wherever else.
So they made the recordings of it and they put it up on the Internet Archive.
And now they're being sued for over $400 million by a bunch of record labels.
Record labels are saying that the archival thing is just a smoke screen
and that the Internet Archive wants to undermine copyright law
and do online streaming for free.
They're just trying to give people free access to art, the horror.
Can you imagine the irreparable harm that would befall the recording industry
if someone could listen to a free copy of Frank Sinatra on the Internet?
It's really just a horrible way to live.
Let's get our best and brightest legal minds on this straight away.
On this day in 1901, Gustav Whitehead claimed that he was the first person
to achieve powered flight.
He didn't. And most historians agree that he didn't.
But I wanted to talk to you about this for a very specific reason.
As I was digging through the things that happened today,
I was reading the Wikipedia article on this flying machine
and the whole claim that this flying machine was the first powered flight.
The article is noted as disputed.
And when I clicked through to the discussion page amongst Wikipedia editors
to talk about the article, someone was a little passionate.
I am not making fun of this person.
I genuinely appreciate the passion with which these people approach their work.
Let me read you a quote of a description of this article from an editor.
The title of the entry was,
This article is a disgrace to Wikipedia.
Quote, I am frankly astonished that an article so clearly and unambiguously written
in a manner intended to facilitate the dubious claims
of those promoting Whitehead's supposed flights
has been allowed to stand in the condition it is for so long.
Get him, lightning round.
After implementing a 4% tax on people making over a million dollars a year,
Massachusetts is now able to feed their schoolchildren breakfast and lunch free of charge.
Weird.
A massive and shocking house explosion in Pennsylvania has left five dead
and there are ongoing efforts to figure out what the hell caused it.
The gas company says that all things were seemingly normal around there
and the electric grid has been turned off
and they said it might take literally years to figure it out.
YouTube continues to ratchet up their war against ad blockers,
now rolling out a thing that delays you from watching your video
if you use an ad blocker.
Jeff Bezos has purchased a home on an exclusive man-made island
with super high security off the coast of Miami.
It's commonly referred to as the billionaire's bunker.
They literally have armed guards 24-7
and are considering installing a laser perimeter.
Gotta keep the pores out.
And finally for today, the Hunter Biden probe continues to go on
as the Department of Justice in the US has appointed a special counsel to look into it.
We have a lot of special counsels now.
I want to be a special counsel.
Hey, can I be a special counsel?
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content,
and an ice cold glass of lemonade.
My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on Wednesday.
Take care and be well.