A force to be reckoned with

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Home sales hit six-month high in May; New study finds older people are actually happier; LEGO launches its biggest set ever; and get ready for some new (old) Pink Floyd music…

Let’s get into it!

A large body of research suggests older people are happier, including several studies that collected happiness data across 149 countries and found similar trends throughout.

In fact, most in-depth studies and analyses of the broad term known as “happiness” have found the fleeting state hits one peak for most when they’re 20 to 34 years old, plummets for about 15 years, then starts rising again after 50, peaking in the 80s.

Jonathan Rauch wrote about this topic in his book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, and retired educational counselling professor Meg Selig followed up on it in her book, Silver Sparks, which broadly covers happiness and aging.

According to Selig, a study conducted in 2022 involved nearly 1,600 Germans between 10 and 99 years old, and it broke the participants into cohorts for the researchers to better understand what types of happiness (momentary/pleasurable vs long-term/life satisfaction-related) find or elude each cohort.

The study found momentary happiness tends to plummet as life goes on, because older people rely on and pursue it much less than the party-going youth.

It also found partnership, grandchildren, and being religious were contributory to life satisfaction-related happiness, regardless of age, and that poor health reduced happiness in younger people more than older people.

The San Andreas and San Jacinto fault lines are among the biggest sleeping giants on earth, especially given their proximity to heavily populated areas.

Fault lines are the spaces between tectonic plates that the entire surface of the earth rests on top of. When objects this size bump into or rub off one another, they cause earthquakes.

The San Andreas is more commonly associated with disaster lore, but both are capable of slipping and causing unspeakable damage. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last week found the southern regions of both faults are currently bearing more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years.

The authors didn’t make any sort of prediction for when the plates could slip, but said they are more poised to produce a significant quake than at any time in modern human history.

“The question of when and how the next major earthquake will occur in this region is one of the most pressing problems in applied geoscience,” said lead author Liliane Burkhard, a geophysicist and planetary geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

“Our results provide a clearer, physics-based picture of the current stress state of the fault system, and the framework we developed is not just applicable to California, but also for other complex fault junctions worldwide.”

If you thought it took long to complete the actual Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (144 years and counting), just wait ‘til you’re faced with LEGO’s soon-to-launch biggest set ever.

The company announced it will officially release a 12,060-piece Sagrada Familia in November, a completed version of which will stand two feet tall and display the stained glass window effect the world’s tallest church is known for.

It’s being launched in commemoration of the basilica’s architect, Antoni Gaudi, on the hundred year anniversary of his death.

“Our goal was to honour Gaudí’s vision with the utmost respect, capturing the rhythm of the basilica’s construction, its extraordinary complexity and ambition, and translating that into an immersive building experience,” said Rok Žgalin Kobe, LEGO’s Design Master.

His masterpiece actually was structurally completed earlier this year; however, the completion of the Glory Facade and the monumental staircase that will lead up to it are expected to remain works in progress for another eight to ten years.

For US$799, you can get yourself a LEGO version of the church and see if you can finish building it before the cosmetic additions to the real one are completed.

8-track tapes reached the height of their popularity in the mid-’70s, right around when Pink Floyd released Animals.

While a sonic masterpiece, the album was not conducive to the limitations of 8-track tapes. They were convenient for not having to be flipped or rewound, but the studio track lengths were fixed, and there were only four per tape.

For the song Dogs, it was simple enough—the band just split it in half and ran it over two tracks on the tape. For Pigs on a Wing (Part 1) and Pigs on a Wing (Part 2), it was a bit more complicated, because these songs acted as the album’s bookends, and were each only about a minute and a half long.

The solution was to combine them into one song to fit onto one track, bridging them with a guitar solo that was played by Thin Lizzy’s Snowy White, initially as a fun little test given by Roger Waters, but ultimately coming out so well that it was used on the album.

However, it was only recorded for the 8-track version, and when the medium ostensibly died in 1982, so did commercially available versions of the Snowy solo, frustrating Pink Floyd’s biggest fans for nearly 50 years.

Out of the blue, though, Pink Floyd released a compilation album last week, entitled 8-Tracks. After decades of wondering which of the buggers to blame, Snowy White’s Pigs on a Wing is available on CD, vinyl, and streaming.

Bustin’ up the box office

June was a good month for movies in the ’80s, and we’ll be testing your knowledge of some of those iconic blockbusters with today’s trivia 😎 🎥