Numlock News: July 11, 2025 • Pterosaur, Tether, Birkin

By Walt Hickey

Tether

The El Salvador-based cryptocurrency company Tether Holdings has said it owns about $8 billion worth of gold in a Swiss vault, coming in at around 80 metric tons of gold. This would make Tether Holdings one of the largest gold holders in the world, outside of banks and countries. Simply put, I am begging companies — especially those in the crypto business — to stop simply using Neal Stephenson books as a playbook. This is like the third time this has happened, and I swear to god if one more company tells me about a sunken gold shipment off the coast of the Philippines or a sequestered math-based pseudo-monastic environment, I am going to scream.

Mining.com

Birkin

The Birkin Bag — the specific one, the first one that set the template for all Birkin Bags to come — sold for US$10.1 million, instantaneously becoming the most successful bag ever sold at auction. The leather bag was the result of Jane Birkin asking for a slightly larger bag on an airplane in the vicinity of the guy who then ran Hermès in 1985. The 8,582,500-euro total includes commission and fees, and Sotheby’s did not publish a pre-auction estimate. This number crushed the previous record of US$513,000 set for such a container.

Ian Youngs, BBC

Netherlands

An incredible trove of 25 items has been tracked down by a detective specializing in historical documents, finding a cache of records from the Dutch East India Company and early modern European trading companies. Among these documents is a book detailing secret government meetings from 1592 to 1604, as well as ship logs from Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter. The items were discovered in the attic of an incapacitated person, and are believed to have found their way there by way of a thief who borrowed money from the attic’s owner.

Sarvy Geranpayeth, The Art Newspaper

Singapore Sling

There were 90 reported incidents of maritime crime in the Singapore Straits, which handles around 30 percent of global trade. This is an increase of 50 percent compared to the same period of 2024. That year, the maritime corrdior only recorded 57 incidents, or about 63 percent of all globally reported cases of piracy. Boardings are incredibly successful, with 95 percent of them succeeding last year.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Teens

A new study from the Pew Research Center found that in 2024, 46 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 reported they used the internet almost constantly. Another 47 percent said that they use the internet at least several times per day. All told, 51 percent of teens aged 15 to 17 use the internet almost constantly, and 95 percent reported having access with a telephone.

Pew Research Center

Pterosaur

A new study published in Science Bulletin tells of a pterosaur that fell out of the sky in what is now northeastern China about 120 million years ago. The unique sediment situation managed to preserve not just the bones but also the stomach of the bird. The fossil was found with a stomach full of plants, which would indicate that pterosaurs were occasionally herbivores. In the past, pterosaurs were found to consume animals.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

I’m In This Photo, And I Don’t Like It

A new study published in Waste Management argues that the food leftover in short-term rentals adds up. The aggregate value of food wasted by U.S. vacation rentals totals about $2 billion per year. This breaks out to $12 per night of short-term lodging, and comes out to 5.1 percent of the nightly rental fee. All told, the annual estimate is $2.3 billion spent on unconsumed food by the time a short-term renter’s vacation ends.

Emily Caldwell, The Ohio State University

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Numlock News: July 10, 2025 • Bioluminescent, Koalas, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository

By Walt Hickey

Waste

Eight groups from the American nuclear industry have signed a letter indicating that it is perhaps time to address all the nuclear waste that’s currently held at nuclear power plants around the country. They imply that it is to move forward with the plan to inter the waste deep underground at the designated Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. In general, nuclear waste isn’t a huge problem — all the spent fuel from the entire history of America’s commercial nuclear program would fit on a football field. However, with a possible reactor buildout on the horizon (fission notoriously doesn’t spew carbon into the atmosphere), there is an argument to properly settle on a spot to retire spent fuel. It’s not like there’s a lack of money — $50 billion has accrued in the federal Nuclear Waste Fund over the years to explicitly solve this problem — but there is a lack of will to be the guy that points at a spot on a map in a swing state and say “that’s where all the nuclear waste should go.”

Alexander C. Kaufman, Field Notes

The Price of Vibes

If a restaurant wants to play music, it actually has to pay an annual fee to a Performing Rights Organization (or PRO) to prevent being sued by the musicians. The big two PROs are ASCAP and BMI, which represent 90 percent of musical compositions, and SESAC represents the other major player. It’s hardly the most glamorous part of the music industry, but it drives a lot of revenue. ASCAP is the only one that publicly shares collections data, and revenue has risen from $935 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2024. That said, the restaurants on the other side of that transaction are smarting, especially as new PROs emerge and more bills have to be paid. The National Restaurant Association says the average member pays $4,500 per year to license music. A large hotel that hosts occasional live music would probably pay $5,000 to $20,000 per year to a single PRO, and would spend to the order of $80,000 a year if the hotel is paying all of them.

Ashley Carman and Aruni Soni, Bloomberg

Dr. Phil

Phil McGraw, the television figure best known as “Dr. Phil” in some circles and “somehow only the third-worst cultural force Oprah Winfrey unleashed upon the population” in others, is in a legal kerfuffle over his television network as it undergoes financial problems. His Merit Street Media is in bankruptcy court and is suing its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting. The network reaches 65 million homes, but boy howdy is it not resonating in them. Merit TV averaged 27,000 viewers during primetime in 2024, ranking 130th among broadcast and cable networks. This audience number means that Numlock News might actually be punching down on Dr. Phil here. As of the second quarter of 2025, the audience is down to 17,000 primetime viewers.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Streaming Wars of Attrition

In 2021, Netflix programs accounted for 80 percent of all the programs that made Nielsen’s weekly list of the top 10 original shows on streaming at some point in the year. The streamer is followed by Disney+ (8 percent), Hulu (5 percent) and Prime Video (5 percent). By 2023, Netflix’s share had slipped to 69 percent of those shows, then 62 percent in 2024. So far this year, Netflix is responsible for only 52 percent to make Nielsen’s list, which compares the performance of streamers as best as can be. The rise of multiple other streamers has been devouring a market that Netflix once dominated, with robust competition from Prime Video (13 percent), Hulu (10 percent), Paramount+ (9 percent), Apple TV+ ( 7 percent) and yes, even Peacock (4 percent).

Entertainment Strategy Guy

Koalas

A new study tracking the fine-scale movements of koalas has found that they only spend about 10 minutes per day on the ground (heading down 2 to 3 times in a night) or about 1 percent of their lives. However, 66 percent of recorded koala deaths happen when they’re out of the trees and on the ground. This is a problem because extensive land clearance means that the tree-dwelling animal is forced to spend more time on the ground to move between sources of food. It forces these koalas to be vulnerable to dog attacks and vehicle strikes.

Society for Experimental Biology

Robots

There is a poorly-kept secret of the marble sculpture business: sophisticated robots emerging on the Italian scene have made it considerably cheaper and less time-intensive to produce stunning marble sculptures and reproductions of iconic works. A Robotor robot can sculpt stone based on a 3D model 24 hours a day and can prepare a piece of rock for human hands to bring in for the finish. The basic software costs $5,000 per year, encoding toolpath carving instructions that might be executed by a $200,000 sculpting robot that is actually a reassembled version of the standard $70,000 basic robot you might find on an assembly line. That’s steep up front, but pays out in short time. A machine-assisted reproduction of Amore e Psiche by Antonio Canova with manual finishing would take just 77 days and cost 64,000 euros in labor. This is in comparison to a solo manual process, which would take 132 days and cost 90,000 euros in labor.

Matthew Hart, Bloomberg

Haute Couture

At the Paris Haute Couture Week, the event where pioneering or experimental fashion gets revealed to the world, one particular dress produced by biodesigner Chris Bellamy in cooperation with researchers from the University of Amsterdam caught attention. The garment was created from 125 million living Pyrocystis lunula algae, and was bioluminescent, a first-of-its-kind “living look.” The dress is made from a gel material that contains the bioluminescent blooms, emitting light when it’s moved.

University of Amsterdam

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Numlock News: July 9, 2025 • Bayeux, Young Adult, Superman

By Walt Hickey

Forest

Federal records revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request have found that the government of Singapore owns approximately 5 percent of all land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The city-state’s sovereign wealth fund, The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, is the sole owner of 540,000 acres of forestland in the Upper Peninsula, much of which is slated for active timber harvesting. In Gogebic County alone, Singapore owns one-sixth of all land. From 2021 to 2022, GIC spent $450 million to buy the land from other companies. For perspective, Singapore itself is only around 182,000 acres in size.

Simon D. Schuster, Bridge Michigan

Print

Sales of print books dipped slightly in the first half of the year, with total unit book sales coming in at 343.5 million books, down from 347.5 million books in the same half of 2024. The top-selling title of the year so far is Onyx Storm, which moved 2.03 million copies in two editions over the first six months of the year. It is followed by the nonfiction The Let Them Theory, which sold 1.76 million copies, then the new Hunger Games book Sunrise on the Reaping, which sold 1.69 million copies. Despite the success of Onyx Storm, sales in the romantasy category were actually slightly down. Religion books are still a winning category, as sales were up 16 percent over last year’s first half.

Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart, Publishers Weekly

Bayeux

France and Britain have cut a deal that will allow the Bayeux Tapestry to go on display at the British Museum next year. This will be the first time that the tapestry depicting the Battle of Hastings will be in Britain in nearly 1,000 years, as the country tried and failed to borrow the work in 1953 and 1966. The Medieval embroidery was created in the 1070s, consists of nine panels and was believed to have been made in Kent. However, it ended up in France and has been housed at the Bayeux Museum in Normandy since 1983. As you can imagine, it’s absolutely devastating to have a priceless and unrivaled artifact of your civilization’s cultural history stuck in the museum of another country, so our hearts truly go out to the British people who have had to endure this indignity for so very long. I’m told that Greece, Afghanistan, China, Ireland, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Rapa Nui, Italy, Pakistan, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan, Scotland, Iran, Iraq and Egypt also sent the British Museum their thoughts and prayers in this trying time.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

YA

A new analysis of 509 books that made the Young Adult New York Times Bestseller List from 2013 to 2023 found that the ages of the main characters of the books have been getting steadily older. This could potentially reflect the trend of many YA genre consumers being older than the traditional “young adult” audience of teenagers, with many readers well into their 20s or older. Of those 509 books, 316 revealed the age of the main character at some point. In 2014, the average age of a main character was 15.56 years old. By 2023, the average age of a main character in these books was 17.54 years of age, reflecting a persistent (if jumpy) trend over the preceding decade of characters getting older. Throughout the studied period, 90 percent of books had a character over the age of 15; if anything, though, that may just be a reflection of the reality that teenagers are less likely to read books featuring protagonists less mature than they are.

Ally Watkins, University of Mississippi, and Taylor & Francis Online

War, What Is It Good For

A new survey found that skepticism of U.S. foreign military intervention has surpassed approval ratings. A whopping 36 percent of respondents indicated that foreign military interventions worsen situations more often than not, 28 percent thought they neither improved nor worsened and only 17 percent thought they improve situations. The survey also asked about Americans’ retrospective analysis of the decision to intervene in multiple wars of the past century. The only ones to come in above water were the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Gulf War. The best way to figure out if a military intervention was vastly more condemned by Americans than approved is to simply ask, “How involved was Henry Kissinger in this event,” as both Vietnam and the Cambodian campaign come in robustly low when it comes to net approval.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Energy

A startling new report from the Department of Energy highlighted just how rowdy the future energy demand from AI data centers is poised to be. It found that parts of the mid-Atlantic and Great Plains regions could face 400 hours of power outages in 2030 under the combined worst-case scenario of large energy-demanding data centers growing unabated, fossil fuel plants closing quickly and new power systems coming online slowly. The PJM Interconnection — which serves Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia — is forecasting a 32 gigawatt increase in demand from 2024 to 2030, of which 30 gigawatts is from data centers.

Peter Behr, E&E News

Superman

Superman is projected to open with profits from $120 million to $130 million domestically and another $100 million internationally. The movie — which tells the story of an immigrant journalist who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still thinks that the American way is worth fighting for — had a budget of $225 million and is looking for a win at the box office.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

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Numlock News: July 8, 2025 • Saturn, Robusta, Tom Sawyer

By Walt Hickey

Our longtime friends at Garbage Day are doing three live shows in July at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I’m working on them. It’ll be a great time; more details at the bottom of the newsletter, and you should come! First show is tonight!.

Robusta

The price of robusta coffee beans, which are used in instant coffee and serve as a benchmark for the price of the beverage worldwide, has dropped to $3,459 per metric ton in the London commodities market — a low not seen since May 2024. The price of robusta peaked in February at $5,849 per metric ton amid concerns over the Vietnamese supply and rising prices for the higher quality arabica beans. However, the weather has evened out in Vietnam, turning favorable for the coffee crop. This year, the country is projected to produce 30 million 60-kilogram bags of robusta, up 7 percent year over year. Arabica is also getting cheaper, with contracts selling for 279.6 per pound as of late last week, the lowest level in seven months.

Machika Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Lilo & Stitch

The live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch has become the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of the year, surpassing the $954 million made by A Minecraft Movie in seven weeks of release. It has racked up an impressive global total of $972.7 million. The current top-grossing movie of the year, though, is not out of Hollywood. The $1.9 billion made at the box office for China’ animated film Ne Zha 2 had set a tough-to-beat total. The only movie that might have a shot of beating Ne Zha 2 this year is Avatar: Fire and Ash, which drops December 19. The two films that preceded Fire and Ash made $2.92 billion and $2.32 billion, respectively, so it may be a real nail-biter.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Afar

In eastern Africa, three rift zones meet at the Afar Triangle, a tectonically active area of the continent. However, a new study published in Nature Geoscience finds that this zone is being ripped apart by rhythmic pulses of molten rock from underneath the surface. Based on an analysis of 130 rock samples from volcanoes in the region and the chemical composition of those rock samples, the researchers surmise that a single plume in Earth’s mantle has been moving upward in pulses that are ripping up the continent above.

Nora Bradford, Scientific American

Tom Sawyer

Yesterday saw the permanent closure of Tom Sawyer Island in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, an iconic attraction that has existed since the park opened and is slated for demolition. Rivers of America opened in 1971 with the rest of the park, while Liberty Square Riverboat and Tom Sawyer Island opened two years later in May 1973. The last raft of guests departed for the island at around 7 p.m. on Sunday and returned at 7:42 p.m., followed by a raft of park employees. In a move that is being praised by historians as “yep, pretty much how it actually happened in actual American history,” the Rivers of America will be demolished in favor of two attractions related to Cars.

Katie Francis, WDW News Today

Animals

A new analysis of the anthropomorphic animal protagonists of the top 30 children’s picture books of each decade — a dataset of 821 animal characters — sought to understand why some particular kinds of animals had persistent gender skews of the “dogs are boys, cats are girls” style. Birds, ducks and cats skewed more female than male. However, frogs, wolves, foxes and elephants skewed significantly more male. Overall, 66.2 percent of the animals were identified with the pronouns he or him, 31.1 percent with she or her and barely any were identified with they or it. The common animal with the biggest skew was the frogs, which appeared 17 times across all the books and were 94.1 percent male. I really must insist that this discrepancy is possibly related to some deplorable stereotypes about princes. I thought we had societally moved on from these stereotypes with the advent of republicanism and the belief that the most disgusting thing about a frog prince was the amphibian’s implicit belief in the divine right to rule

Melanie Walsh, Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee and Jan Diehm, The Pudding

Impact

Every year, around seven asteroids or comets impact Saturn, a big planet with a big gravitational field that is bound to munch on your occasional object. Still, actual imagery of these moments of impact is non-existent, as we’ve never been able to point a camera at Saturn at the right moment. This kind of event can be marvelous — just look at the imagery we snagged of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet plunging into Jupiter back in ’94 — and a new announcement by a contributor to the DeTeCt project may have just found a winner. The project uses software to analyze images of Jupiter and Saturn to look for such impacts. Now, astronomers are seeking anyone with footage of Saturn taken on July 5 between 9 and 9:15 a.m. UTC, which would be needed to confirm that this isn’t just an equipment bug.

Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist

Netflix

Jaw-dropping data has come out of Netflix last week as the platform boasts of its anime viewership. According to the streamer, half of its audience (or around 150 million households) watches anime content on the service, which is not the jaw-dropping part; everyone watches anime at this point. Netflix further touted the milestone that 33 anime titles appeared on its Top 10 list, which was double the figure of 2021, but that’s also not the shocker. No, the obscenity was the reveal that 80 percent to 90 percent of Netflix members watch anime dubbed, a brutal blow to the morally right side of the decades-long subs v. dubs war and a revelation that will set the movement back years.

Naman Ramachandran, Variety

Ryan Broderick and the crew at internet culture newsletter Garbage Day are putting on three live shows this summer, and Numlock is a part of them. If you’re in NYC and looking for something fun, learn more about it here and get tickets to the first (tonight!), second and third shows. It’s going to be very, very fun.

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Numlock News: July 7, 2025 • Wisdom, Dinosaurs, Hudson’s Bay Company

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Our longtime friends at Garbage Day are doing three live shows in July at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I’m working on them. It’ll be a great time; more details at the bottom of the newsletter, and you should come! Tomorrow is the first one.

Dinosaurs

Jurassic World: Rebirth had a stellar opening weekend, making $147.3 million in its first five days domestically as well as another $171 million overseas, good for a $318 million opening. Audiences love seeing movies about dinosaurs, and are apparently willing to white knuckle it even through this script to get their fix. That said, the domestic opening as a three-day weekend is actually down compared to the three Jurassic World entries that preceded it, which may be of mild cause for concern for the future of the franchise.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Loot

Two Americans are facing possible charges in France in relation to a scheme selling gold bars from an 18th-century shipwreck and then selling them for bullion. The ship in question is Le Prince de Conty, which sank off the coast of Brittany in 1746, only to be discovered in 1974 in 10 to 15 meters of water. In 1975, the wreck was looted, with some gold bars inside stolen. In 2022, a diver named Yves Gladu confessed to stealing 16 gold bars from the ship over the course of 40 dives from 1976 to 1999 and once more in 2006. An American couple, Eleanor and Philip Courter, have been accused of selling these gold bars. Investigators concluded that the couple had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total and had sold 18 ingots for over $192,000.

Agence France-Presse

Hudson’s Bay Company

Hudson’s Bay Company is a Canadian department store that is, thanks to a quirk of history, the oldest company in North America. It was formed in 1670 to exploit the fur trade in Canada. However, in March, the company announced it was bankrupt and was seeking creditor protection, which may bring an end to the firm’s historic run. That said, a company amasses a lot of stuff in a run like that; HBC has accumulated 1,700 works of art and 2,700 artifacts that a judge has allowed to be auctioned off in service of the debt. This has prompted protests from indigenous groups and a specific challenge from a representative of the 63 First Nations in the Manitoba province over the sale. Auctioning the art and artifacts would dissolve and scatter a collection that stands as a crucial singular archive.

Taylor C. Noakes, The Art Newspaper

HFPA

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is the group that began the Golden Globes, and the organization has been in a state of flux for the past several years. For years, the HFPA’s small membership held a solid grip on awards season, but a series of controversies in the early 2020s led the organization to not only cancel the Golden Globes for a year but also to overhaul the way that it operates. It cumulated in in Dick Clark Productions buying the Golden Globes and dissolving the group to reform as a for-profit LLC that oversees the awards. That year, the new owners offered the members either a $250,000 buyout or a $75,000 salary for five years (not a bad deal) only to renege and then cancel the salaries in February. This has sent the HFPA members up in arms, and last week, 55 of them voted to remove their organization’s president and seek to re-establish the organization under its original structure. Messy!

Cynthia Littleton, Variety

Cardiac Health

Heart attacks are becoming rarer and more survivable than they had been in years past. The proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks declined by 90 percent from 1970 to 2022, a period over which heart disease fell from causing 41 percent of adult deaths to just 24 percent. When hospitalized for a heart attack in 1970, a man over 65 had just a 60 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive; today, that’s about 90 percent. This is thanks to some broader societal shifts — for instance, the massive decline in smoking and the popularity and availability of statins to manage cholesterol — as well as the adoption of CPR and development of portable defibrillators.

Bryan Walsh, Vox

Wisdom

Overall, 53 percent of Americans have had their wisdom teeth removed, but there’s an interesting generational shift at play here. Just 26 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 said that they have had their wisdom teeth removed, around half the general rate for respondents as a whole. Some of this is the natural way of things — younger people have had less time for wisdom teeth to emerge and potentially cause problems, for one — but something more complex may be at play. This trend could be reflecting a shifting scientific consensus on wisdom teeth removal that started in the early 2000s, questioning the need for routine wisdom tooth removal.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Champagne

The Baltic Sea is complicated to navigate, with thousands of small islands complicating matters and a generally shallow average depth of 180 feet. It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 ships have sunk there. While lots of those ships were carrying cargo from the rest of Europe, one type of cargo is of particular interest: champagne. In 1998, a team of Swedish divers found the Jönköping, a wreck bound for St. Petersburg that had been sunk in October 1916 and was carrying 3,000 bottles of 1907 Heidsieck & C ° Monopole Goût Américan. This champagne was pretty much all that survived the sinking and turned out to be exquisite. You can still buy a bottle of it for around $150,000.

Olivia White, VinePair

Ryan Broderick and the crew at internet culture newsletter Garbage Day are putting on three live shows this summer, and Numlock is a part of them. If you’re in NYC and looking for something fun, learn more about it here and get tickets to the first (tomorrow!), second and third shows. It’s going to be very, very fun.

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·

Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·

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