Numlock News: April 25, 2024 • Octocorals, Pinyin, Wizards

By Walt Hickey

Digital Books

Libraries pay extra when it comes to e-books that they lend out, and it can pinch them financially. For instance, Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me cost a library $17.81 to buy a physical copy directly from the publisher, but libraries paid $64.99 for an e-book and $59.99 for a digital audiobook. That’s significantly more than the $16.99 that a consumer would pay for an e-book and the $16.49 they’d charge for an audiobook. Those copies are also rented out one reader at a time, and the license to it is only for two years, at which point they need to buy new ones. This is all to say, please be sure to check out the e-book to my book You Are What You Watch from your local library as soon as possible.

Clare McGrane and Patricia Murphy, KUOW

Keyboard

A security research team analyzed pinyin keyboard apps that facilitate typing in Chinese and found that in eight of the nine apps there were vulnerabilities that would allow the contents of every keystroke to be accessed while the apps were communicating with the cloud. Most of the vendors fixed the reported vulnerabilities, which affected an estimated 1 billion users. Three of the apps — Sogou, Baidu and iFlytek — combined for 95 percent market share in China. The researchers believe that it’s very possible that personal communications have been surveilled as a result of the vulnerabilities.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Video Game

A new trend in litigation is to sue video game companies regarding “video game addiction,” a somewhat flimsy accusation that nevertheless has appeared in over a dozen lawsuits in North America naming many triple-A game developers. One firm, Bullock Ward Mason, is involved in 11 different suits. Many of the suits are filed by parents who claim that their child’s video game addiction has caused a suite of health and behavioral problems, linking obesity, physical pain and poor academics on the game companies.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Wizards

Hasbro earnings came in, and the company continues its trajectory toward being an unsuccessful board game and toy company that is attached to an insanely profitable card game called Magic: The Gathering. Sales in the toy division were down 21 percent year over year, while Wizards of the Coast sales were up 7 percent on the back of Magic. Wizards was responsible for $123 million in operating profit, while the rest of Hasbro in the aggregate posted a loss, and Hasbro finished with profits of $116 million.

Matt Phillips, Sherwood News

Taxi TV

The New York City Council voted to give ride-hailing companies the green light to put video ads in the back of Ubers and Lyfts, which had previously been banned. They did this given direct opposition from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and requires that at least 25 percent of the revenue from the ads goes to drivers. The law requires screens to have a volume control or off switch, which makes sense given the city’s experience with Taxi TV in the backs of yellow cabs over the past 15 years. Taxi TV is controversial, with 31 percent of respondents saying that Taxi TV being annoying is the single worst part of the taxi experience. The ad market for back-of-vehicle space could be impressive; while there are just 9,000 active, licensed taxis in New York, there are 100,000 ride-share drivers.

Patrick Coffee, The Wall Street Journal

Avars

The Avars were a horse-riding people from the Mongolian steppes that settled in what is now Hungary in 568 C.E., sticking around for a few hundred years during which they had the incredible foresight to leave absolutely no written history. That makes them a bit of an enigma, but a clever new study analyzing entire graveyards full of Avar bones attempted to reconstruct the family structures and generations that lived in this society. Genetic analysis revealed that they arrived in Hungary from Mongolia inside of a single generation, and the DNA sequences of over 400 skeletons from four cemeteries were able to produce a remarkable nine-generation family tree, stretching from one man buried around the arrival of the Avars all the way to 250 years later. All the males in the cemetery were descended from a few adult men with lots of grave goods, likely the community’s founders, while all the adult females buried there don’t have parents at the cemetery, implying they were not from the community, indicating a patrilocal community where women leave the home to find mates, which reduces inbreeding.

Andrew Curry, Science

Glowing

A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B argues that bioluminescence likely first emerged in octocorals, which are a group of soft corals. The new estimate that bioluminescence evolved in the ocean 540 million years ago is a substantial push back of the date of its origin, more than doubling it from the previously accepted estimate of 267 million years. Bioluminescence mechanisms are thought to have evolved about 100 separate times.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

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Numlock News: April 24, 2024 • Chartreuse, Muskrats, Chicken Soup for the Soul

By Walt Hickey

Chicken Soup

The sentence “Chicken Soup for the Soul lost $636.6 million last year” is certainly a weird one, but I must assure you it did in fact happen. The brand, which expanded beyond the initial short story collections and has become a streaming player in its own right, saw revenues of $294.4 million last year. The company owns Redbox, the kiosk-based DVD distributor with some 40,000 locations, which is doing very well with $112.7 million in revenue, up from $67.7 million in 2022. I’m just saying, if I knew that I could bet against this company when it was mostly known for collections of short stories about how much it sucks when your dog dies, I would be a millionaire today.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Cache

Lars Emil Bruun was a simple man who loved two things: controlling much of the butter trade in Denmark a century ago, and also coins. The man, who lived 1852-1923, racked up a collection of 15,000 coins, 4,600 medals, 330 banknotes and 1,800 book titles, and when he died he insisted that his collection must remain intact and stowed for exactly 100 years, after which it may be sold. The time for the fateful auction of coins and medals has come, and the first tranche of objects will come up for auction this autumn. You’ve got Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and then you’ve got the coins from the various brief colonies of those places like Tranquebar in India. Indeed, the origin is pretty charming; the reason for the century-long wait is that Bruun wanted his collection to be the backup to the Royal Danish Collection of Coins and Medals as a redundancy, and if in a century the state’s collection endured it’d be time to hawk the family numismatic jewels. Anyway, all his heirs seem kind of mad about the whole thing.

James Tarmy, Bloomberg

Music

The year-end report from the RIAA confirmed that the business in Latin music is only going up, with total revenue increasing from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $1.4 billion as of 2023 and the overall share of music that is Latin music rising from 5.5 percent in 2020 to 7.9 percent last year. In general, the growth rate of Latin music is vastly outpacing the overall music business. Most of that is on streaming, which makes up 98 percent of the revenue in Latin music, roughly $1.3 billion last year.

Isabela Raygoza, Billboard

‘Treuse Got Me Loose, Gone On Patron

The Carthusian monks have managed to make headlines, first after the Chartreuse they produce became abstruse when they indicated that the monastery will dial back their liqueur production to focus on other matters such as God, but now again after the actual numbers emerged and it turns out global Chartreuse sales hit 1.6 million bottles last year, doubling in the U.S. since 2020. The monks have gone so far as to open a visitors center in Paris. That’s weird, especially for Americans who have been on quests to find the good green stuff for the past year. The story of Chartreuse will always be fascinating. As recently as 1983, the Carthusians earned just $287,000 selling 1 million bottles of Chartreuse. Now, it’s far, far more.

Aaron Goldfarb, VinePair

Suit

A new proposed class-action lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., federal court has three fans of Madonna suing over the artist’s late starts to her concerts, alleging disrespect for fans and a violation of law. The suit alleges that Madonna appearing onstage at 10:40 p.m. when the date cited 8:30 p.m. as the start time on December 18 and 19 breaks the promise of what the tickets were sold for and is a cognizable injury. The suit follows a similar one filed in New York. That said, if “it’s annoying to have to ride the train late at night” is a tort, then I’m Williams Jennings Bryant.

Bill Donahue, Billboard

Pulp

Over the past two decades, paper packaging volumes are up 65 percent. Now, the good news is that more and more of those boxes are made from ex-boxes and ex-ex-boxes, thanks to the versatility of paper pulp. Lock, stock and barrel, about 54 percent of pulp used to make paper packaging was recycled paper, 43 percent is made from new forest fiber, and just 3 percent is made from alternatives like wheat straw and bagasse. The fear is that we’ll pave paradise and make it a cardboard box, but all told, paper packaging is but a fragment of actual deforestation and it’s probably the plastic air sacs we should be worried about.

Kate Lindsay, BBC News

Muskrats

I think I speak for all of us when I say that the consensus opinion is that beavers are great, we dig what they’re doing, and the whole “make a dam and improve the forest as a whole” thing is an awesome angle that we’re all rather proud to support. Well, the zeitgeist is moving onward, and the new thing is muskrats and all they contribute. They build dams, they breed extensively, and they are regrettably struggling: Since the 1970s, populations have fallen by at least half in 34 states, and in many states between 90 and 99 percent.

Brandon Keim, Hakai Magazine

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Numlock News: April 23, 2024 • Mondo, Hydrox, Wingspan

By Walt Hickey

Hydrox

The packaged cookie business is a $9 billion category, and more than $4 billion of that is Oreo alone, owned by CPG colossus Mondelēz, with not only the flagship Oreo and the crucial Double Stuf line but also an armada of different flavors and iterations of the cookie that dominate shelf space in the grocery store. That domination, competitor Hydrox argues, is sufficient to warrant antitrust litigation, as the rival to Oreo contends that the tough cookie intimidates retailers into hiding, misplacing or moving Hydrox to exile in the cookie aisle. It’s not the first time Hydrox’s allegations of hegemony have hit the courts, as in 2018 they sought $800 million from an official complaint with the FTC. Calling Hydrox the David to Oreo’s Goliath is somehow charitable, as Hydrox sales as recently as 2017 were roughly $500,000, so a triumph here would be more like David’s gut bacteria successfully slaying Goliath with a hurled mote of dust.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Mondo

Your new favorite athlete is Armand “Mondo” Duplantis, a 24-year-old Olympic pole vault athlete who was born in Louisiana and competes for Sweden. Mondo is the best at what he does, and on Saturday broke the men’s pole vault record at a meet in China by clearing 6.24 meters, which is a jump of 20 feet, 5 inches, in what is really a breathtaking bit of athletics that you really should check out. The best part, though, is that this is in fact the eighth time that Mondo has broken the record, and he has done so in back-to-back meets. Rather than just move the bar up to where he thinks he can hit it, Mondo has been imitating Ukrainian Sergey Bubka, who in the 1980s and 1990s moved the bar up by the minimum one centimeter every time. This way, the vaulter doesn’t just break the record, but he gets to break the record many, many times in a row — Bubka broke the outdoor record 17 times — which is not only extremely cool, but contractually means they get a monetary bonus for breaking the record each little time rather than just the big one.

NBC Sports

Contact

After months of dead air, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has got the Voyager 1 probe successfully returning usable data about the status of its engineering systems following a memory problem. After months of analysis the issue had been traced back to the flight data subsystem and the malfunction of a single chip. On April 18, they sent the first of three commands to move code to a new location, a command which took 22.5 hours to get to Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours back over the 24-billion-kilometer distance. On April 20, they got the first proper status update in five months, and over the next several weeks they’ll relocate and fix the other portions of software, at which point the hope is Voyager 1 will resume sending back science data.

Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Board Games

Sales of hobby board games fell off from their highs of $440 million in 2021 to $390 million last year. The biggest declines were seen in older, more evergreen games; the best example of that format, Wingspan, fell from 279,998 copies sold in 2022 to 208,506 copies sold last year. That’s a sign that for some of the most significant games, they’ve simply begun to reach their addressable market, as in everyone who would conceivably want to own, say, Ticket to Ride probably already has it at this point. This could pose an issue for publishers, as second printings tend to be where the real money is made, and if there’s diminishing demand that could be a problem. In the card game space, which fell from $160 million in 2022 to $135 million in 2023, edgy games (Cards Against Humanity) are in decline, while lightweight party games (like, say, Codenames) are on the rise.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

MSG

New York’s Madison Square Garden, which has a capacity between 12,000 and 18,000, is a dream venue for many artists, and every year a new crop of artists makes their MSG debut. When exactly an artist is proven to be ready to take on MSG is an interesting math problem for promoters and the band’s managers. It’s an evolving data problem that many are trying to solve, particularly as the pre-pandemic algebra has become more like calculus given shallow interest produced by streaming platforms, volatility in the New York scene in general, and access to more and deeper data than ever before. For instance, one manager’s rule of thumb is that if a band can put up two nights at Radio City (capacity 5,700) or two Central Park Summerstages (about 5,000) and sell them quick, that’s a sign an act is ready for the Garden. When Lake Street Dive did two shows at Radio City in 2022, the fact that they sold 10,000 tickets across both shows, and upon inspection only 31 people attended both shows, meant they were ready for the Garden.

Elias Leight, Billboard

Bubble Tea

A bubble tea boom in China has been minting billionaires, with the market for freshly made tea hitting 108.3 billion yuan in 2022 and projected to rise to 201.5 billion yuan by 2025. Today the third-largest bubble tea chain in the country — Sichuan Baicha Baidao Industrial Co. — goes public in Hong Kong, and it’ll make its founders’ 73 percent stake worth on the order of $2.7 billion. Tea is a huge market; rival Mixue Group is valued at 23.3 billion yuan, and contends that it’s the second-largest drink chain in the world after Starbucks with its 32,000 outlets in China and 4,000 abroad.

Pui Gwen Yeung and Venus Feng, Bloomberg

Ump

Major League Baseball umpires are under ever escalating scrutiny, particularly any ump that consistently performs on the lower side of the accuracy spectrum, given new advancements in identifying blown calls. One who raises consistent fan ire is Ángel Hernández, who at 93 percent of pitches called accurately since 2020 is the eighth-worst performing umpire in the league out of 64 umps who have called at least 85 games in that time. Some of it comes to a few spectacularly rough games — a Pirates-Nationals game presided over by Hernández last year was the single worst game on record since 2019, with an accuracy rate of 83.9 percent — but it’s mostly just the zero-sum nature of umpire decisions clashing with improved accuracy of the robo-umps.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

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Numlock News: April 22, 2024 • Ghosts, Crocs, Quasi-Moon

By Walt Hickey

Next Big Thing

Terence Reilly made his name as the guy who made Crocs, the brand of clogs, into a genuinely hot item over the course of a five-year stint as chief marketing officer. In 2020, he bounced over to a new job over at a company which also successfully managed to ride marketing lightning: Stanley, which saw its 40-ounce water bottles jump from a $73 million business in 2019 to a $750 million business last year. In a big shakeup, the executive has now jumped back to Crocs, this time as the president of the shoe brand Heydude, which was acquired in 2021 at a price of $2.5 billion. Heydude enjoys a similar aesthetic reputation as Crocs once did, and as of 2023 was posting $950 million in sales. And, just because I’ve always wanted to appear in the cynical “before” montage in a documentary about an eventually successful brand, I’ll go on record here saying that I’d never be caught dead in a pair of Heydudes, and they’ll never catch on.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Swift Sales

In a single day, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has become her largest sales week for an album in the U.S. with 1.4 million copies sold, beating out the 1.359 million copies of 1989 (Taylor’s Version). That’s not even factoring in streaming equivalents, and only included CD, vinyl, cassette and digital download purchases of the album, so no funny business. The 31 songs generated 243.4 million on-demand audio streams just on April 19, and counting those streams the album earned 1.6 million equivalent album units. It’s easily the top-selling album of 2024 so far, beating out the 188,000 sales of Cowboy Carter handily. On vinyl alone it’s a juggernaut; the 600,000 combined sales of vinyl LPs on day one makes it already guaranteed to be the second-largest sales week in the modern, post-1991 era of vinyl.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

Historical Markers

The United States has over 180,000 active historical markers throughout the country, but little in the way of a national policy or code regarding what and who ought to be considered historical, or for that matter what actually happened that was commemorated. For instance, three separate states claim to have the site of the invention of anesthesia, two states claim to have Daniel Boone’s bones, two states claim to have sent the first telegram, and Texas inexplicably claims to be the site of the first successful airplane flight. Not to mention the material issues: Over 500 markers describe the Confederacy in glowing terms and 70 percent of markers that mention plantations don’t mention slavery — yikes. Some of them are barely history to begin with, including 14 markers memorializing a ghost, two markers about a witch, one about a vampire, and one about a wizard. California had one commemorating a dead mastodon that, upon further analysis, turned out to be a dead circus elephant.

Laura Sullivan and Nick McMillan, NPR

Uncrustable

Smucker’s brand of premade sandwich-esque ravioli called Uncrustables has been on a tear, reaching $686 million in sales in 2023 and poised to hit $1 billion in sales in 2026. Bought by J.M. Smucker Co. in 1998 for $1 million, the investment has repaid hundreds of times over every year. Since 2019, sales of the snack are up 136 percent, and last year sales increased by 34 percent alone. It’s building a third factory in Alabama on top of the two existing factories that are solely devoted to producing Uncrustables.

David Crowther and Millie Giles, Sherwood News

Ejiao

Ejiao is considered a luxury product in China, a substance that is extracted from donkey hides. The domestic donkey population in China has sharply fallen, so the demand has been met by exports from Africa. That has caused problems in rural areas, where donkeys that are essential for many farming tasks have instead been killed for the cash values of their skins, so much so that in February the African Union approved a ban on the slaughter of donkeys at its heads of state summit. Demand has gotten completely out of hand: In 1990, ejiao makers in China needed 200,000 donkey hides a year to meet demand, a figure that today is somewhere between 4 to 6 million donkey hides per year, or roughly 10 percent of the global donkey population, estimated at 53 million.

Michael Schuman, The Atlantic

“Moon”

Earth has a bit of a hop-on in asteroid 469219 Kamo‘oalewa, which ranges from 40 to 100 meters across and rotates at a brisk one rotation per 28 minutes. It follows an orbit around the sun, but it moves in sync with the Earth, so it’s sort of along for the ride with us. A new study in Nature Astronomy has a fascinating theory about the rock, even going so far as to point to its precise origin. The argument is that it’s from the moon, and that a 1.7-kilometer-wide asteroid hit the moon, creating the 22-kilometer-wide Giordano Bruno crater, which is the youngest large crater on the lunar surface. In doing so it ejected as many as 400 fragments the size of Kamo‘oalewa, and depending on how long ago that collision happened, some fraction of those still survives.

Daniel Clery, Science

Go East, Young Man!

Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta on the island of Java to a proposed new city called Nusantara on the island of Borneo, and the government has begun enlisting influencers to get young Indonesians excited to move to the new capital. Jakarta is overcrowded and, most significantly, it’s sinking at an alarming rate, so the hope is to coax lots of citizens to move to the as-yet unconstructed new capital. 1.9 million people are expected to move in from Jakarta. It’s not the first time a country built a capital from scratch — Brazil built Brazília in 1960, Egypt is building a new administrative capital 30 miles away from Cairo, and obviously no sane person would create Washington, D.C., where it is unless they were desperate to wrangle a national bank out of the cold, dead hands of Thomas Jefferson — but it is a big sell to the people of Indonesia. Half the country’s population is aged 18 to 39, so the hope is that the influencers can move the needle.

Michelle Anindya, Rest of World

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars

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