Numlock News: October 8, 2024 • Secret Billionaire, Merchant of Death, Milton

By Walt Hickey

Tax

On February 28, 2023, the United States Treasury Department reported in its daily balance sheet that it got a $7 billion estate or gift tax payment. This is, needless to say, incredibly odd. Prior to then, the highest receipt was a $1 billion payment in 2017, and the kind of person who would need to die to necessitate that size of a bill would be worth between $17.5 billion and $40 billion. The thing is, we usually know who those people are, as that’d easily put them in the Bloomberg billionaire index and get them on Forbes. Even more so, that kind of wealthy person will often opt for some tax maneuvers to soften that estate tax blow by sequestering the money in trusts and whatnot. So, who was it? Given what we know, a low-key Texas fund manager who pulled off reliable returns for a large book certainly could have flown below the radar of the Forbes set.

Tim Fernholz, Sherwood News

Back to Work

A recently released felon with a cinematic life story has turned his life around and apparently found substantial success in the two years following his release from prison after founding a small business. Regrettably, it is Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer better known as the “Merchant of Death” and the inspiration for the 2005 Nicolas Cage movie “Lord of War,” who just two years after being traded back to the Russians was reportedly instrumental in brokering a $10 million arms deal to send automatic weapons from Moscow to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Bout denied involvement with the deal, which will send AK-74s — the upgraded version of the iconic AK-47 assault rifle — to Yemen. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bout became the architect of a massive international arms trade hawking ex-Soviet guns to destabilized nations.

Benoit Faucon, Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel and Alan Cullison, The Wall Street Journal

Milton

Hurricane Milton went from a mild little marine tempest to a cyclone that is freaking out meteorologists. Over Sunday night, the intensity increased from Category 1 to Category 5, its peak winds increased from 85 mph to 180 mph over the course of just 24 hours, it’s now the strongest Gulf of Mexico hurricane this late in the year on record, it’s one of just seven Atlantic or Gulf hurricanes to increase from Cat 1 to Cat 5 in 24 hours, and about 48 hours and 675 miles stand between it and Tampa Bay, a metropolitan area of 3.3 million people. The storm’s pressure came in at 897 millibars on Monday night, the fourth-lowest of any Atlantic hurricane on record.

Matthew Cappucci and Jason Samenow, The Washington Post

McCheese To Hamburglers: Drop Dead

McDonald’s is suing nine suppliers, including Tyson Foods, JBS and Cargill, alleging that they violated antitrust laws and conspired to artificially increase the price of beef for McDonald’s. McD’s claims they colluded to reduce the beef supply and keep prices high, and wants treble damages as well as a judgment affirming the existence of that conspiracy, which it says started in 2015 when the suppliers began reducing supply after a drought ate into profit margins. In 2020, the Department of Justice investigated a purported price fixing; in 2021, during the alleged conspiracy period, JBS USA alone had net revenues up 25.8 percent over the value in 2014.

Quinn Wilson, Bloomberg Law

Watching

A new report from the Center for Digital Democracy lays out how streaming television networks have become massive information dragnets, with viewer data being aggressively monetized and targeted through automatic content recognition software on millions of people. According to the reports, NBC Universal alone has data on 200 million adults in 90 million households, coded with 3,000 behavioral attributes. Disney, the report says, has access to data on 110 million households and 260 million devices.

Erik Gruenwedel, MediaPlayNews

Hidden Treasure

A book of riddles published in France in 1993 by Régis Hauser and Michel Becker contained 11 puzzles and a hidden 12th one, prompting decades of treasure hunting from a community of over 200,000 players across the world. The hunt is called “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” and appears to have come to an end last week with a reportedly successful find. The target? An owl made out of 3 kilograms (6 pounds, 10 ounces) of gold and 7 kilograms (15 pounds, 7 ounces) of silver, valued at somewhere around €150,000 ($165,000).

Diane Jeantet, The Associated Press

Aging

A new study published in the journal Nature Aging argues that humans are hitting the upper limit of life expectancy given advances in medical technology and genetic research. Specifically the study is talking about life expectancy as in the average number of years a baby might expect to live, not any particular outlier in one way or another. In general, that average figure has slowly improved, by about 2.5 years per decade in developed countries during the 1990s, but slowing to about 1.5 years per decade in the 2010s. That’s indicating that marginal increases in the average lifespan of large populations are getting harder and harder to squeeze out; for instance, even if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated, the average lifespan would only increase by around 1.5 years.

Mike Stobbe, Phys.org

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Numlock News: October 7, 2024 • Coraline, Cuckoo, Folie à Deux

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back! Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.

Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux was a surprising flop at the domestic box office, opening to just $40 million despite expectations of $50 million to $60 million last week, $70 million three weeks ago, and the 2019 opening of Joker which came in at $96.2 million. It’s a bad opening and the latest of several consecutive DC Comics movies to misfire ahead of the splashy reboot of that universe next year. The movie is at least doing decently overseas — making $81 million — but I wager the next time we see Joker on screen is either gonna be a Batman movie or a live-action Balatro adaptation.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Art Forgeries

For the past 50 years, the Van Gogh Museum has stepped away from discussions about forgeries of Van Gogh, a practice that ended in a shocker of a research piece published in The Burlington Magazine identifying three purported Van Gogh works that the leading research center on the artist has concluded are fakes. One is Interior of a Restaurant, which surfaced in the 1950s and was regarded as a second version of Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris, which Van Gogh painted in November or December of 1887. The giveaway that Interior of a Restaurant is faked is twofold: First and foremost, one of the colors is Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935, and second, the flowers include sunflowers, which wouldn’t have made it to November on tabletops and likely were an interpretation of the forger working from a black-and-white photo. Another potential fake — Head of a Woman, sold for $993,250 in 2011 — is now thought to be a copy made between 1902 and 1909 and squirreled away for a century.

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper

Coraline

The 2009 movie Coraline was re-released to cinemas this past summer and quietly racked up a record-breaking rerun, bringing in $53 million globally over the course of its 15th anniversary re-release. On one hand, this makes sense — all the weird teens who loved the Henry Selick adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book are now old enough to take their kids to see it — but that also is the highest-grossing re-release in the United States in the past 10 years, as well as the highest grosser in the history of Fathom Events. Now, because it’s spooky season, they’re just gonna release the stop-motion animated Laika film again into cinemas, because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Jordan Moreau, Variety

Mutation

Mutation is the key to our survival, the ability of life to adapt to new surroundings, fill new niches, and expand outward. Mutation is the reason we are the dominant species on the planet, at least for now. Mutation can be scary, can go wrong, but can also be a revolution. On November 1, those paying close attention will observe a mutation: 10 locations of Spirit Halloween, which hermit crabs defunct retail space into pop-up costume shops, will become experimental Spirit Christmas locations, a real Nightmare Before Christmas situation. If anything, this is a great way to reuse that massive pile of unsold Harley Quinn costumes as “colorful female elf” given Folie à Deux flopping. The real concern for me here is that when these suckers fold on December 26, it’s gonna be like the collapse of the Soviet Union, except instead of surplus AK-47s and black market shoulder-mounted RPGs, it’ll be surplus Santa suits making their way into the next generation of belligerantly drunk SantaCon attendees.

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Horses

Saturday was the last race day ever for the Singapore Turf Club, a 300-acre horse racetrack in the city-state of Singapore. The racetrack will be bulldozed and housing will go in, as a country with just over 6 million people and an area less than that of New York City contends with tradeoffs about space. Race-day average viewership fell from 11,000 in 2010 to 6,000 in 2019, and then the pandemic led attendance to drop by half. Even on the final day of racing, only about 10,000 people turned out, a third of capacity. It’s not as if Singapore has lost its love for racing, either; 270,000 turned out for the most recent F1 race. The racetrack joins the last existing 18-hole public golf course in Singapore in folding amid an increased pressure for more housing.

Low De Wei, Bloomberg

Amazon

The Amazon River is at its lowest level in ages thanks to below-average rainfall, with the river port at Manaus, Brazil, logging its lowest water level since 1902. The Port of Manaus is on the Rio Negro, a major Amazon tributary, and the water level was logged at just 12.66 meters on Friday, continuing its decline. Grain shipments have been halted on the Madeira River, another tributary, and the drought has impacted the hydropower plants responsible for the larger part of Brazil’s electricity.

Bruno Kelly and Jake Spring, Reuters

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Brood Parasites

Some birds have evolved to sneak into other birds’ nests and lay their eggs, leaving their offspring in the care of the other birds who then have to do all that extra work to care for it, an evolutionary phenomenon called obligate brood parasitism. Only 1 percent of all bird species do it, but it’s found in at least 100 species and has evolved no fewer than seven separate times in the history of birds. The parasitic birds — cuckoos are the classic, but also cowbirds, honeyguides and more — have evolved some particularly clever adaptations. The common cuckoo evolved to mimic the look of a predatory raptor to scare off parent birds, and the cuckoo finch looks like an innocuous nonparasitic bird. Nonparasitic birds take about 20 minutes to lay an egg, but a parasitic bird can pop out an egg in seconds, capitalizing on a potentially brief window to parasitize a nest. The parasitic hatchling also grows much, much faster than the host bird’s, and might be noisier or more demanding to boot.

Sofia Quaglia, Knowable Magazine

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Numlock News: October 4, 2024 • Seance, Charizard, Dubrovnik

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Ghosts

While many companies are jumping into autumn with the classics — perhaps adding a touch of pumpkin spice to a staple product, or alluding to a festive design — Boston Beer is going in a new direction, literally selling an “At-Home Séance Kit” to summon Sam Adams, available for $18.03 from their website. Naturally, selling customers the means with which to rip the very soul of Samuel Adams from the beyond, tearing the shade of the patriot from whatever chasm of perdition or field of Elysium which it has heretofore been bound, offering any fan of their middle-shelf lager the mechanism by which to summon the ghost of Adams, it is a bold strategy and you do have to give it to them for originality. It’s a rather prosaic convocation all things considered, including just a candle, two pint glasses, a vial of Boston dirt, and hops used to produce the beer. Obviously anyone considering an attempt to wrench the wraith of a founding father ought to have considerably more paranormal preparations in place, not the least of which should include a circle of salt, iron to bind, and of course a readily available pornographic magazine in case you accidentally summon Benjamin Franklin and want to rock his world.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

SS U.S.

The SS United States was launched in 1951, originally designed as a troop carrier during the Cold War that could move 14,000 troops 10,000 miles without needing a refuel. It holds the transatlantic speed record, though the top speed of the ship has historically been considered a military secret. It’s been languishing at Pier 82 in Philly since 1996, but recently the pier operator raised the rent for the ship and attempted to evict it, leading the nonprofit that owns it to try to come to an arrangement for a dignified future for a vessel that has a storied place in American maritime history. The solution has arrived, and it’s to be sunk and used to make an artificial reef in the Florida Panhandle, which will come at a cost of $10.1 million. After sinking, it’ll be a home for marine life as well as a diving destination off the coast of Destin-Fort Walton Beach, making the world’s fastest ship into the world’s largest artificial reef.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Oysters

A new analysis of centuries of documents reports that wild oysters used to be incredibly plentiful in Europe, and that centuries of harvesting and the emergence of powerful dredging equipment destroyed vast, vast areas of oysters. About 1.7 million hectares of seafloor around Europe were once covered in abundant quantities of oysters, based on an analysis of 1,600 records from 15 countries. Today they live in sparse clumps, rarely occurring at a rate of one per square meter.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Cans

The port strike subsided altogether quickly, but a key paradox of the United States port system remains — namely that the predominant export of the United States is empty containers. About 75 percent of inbound containers return to their origin empty, as the United States is overall a highly successful services economy that imports more finished goods than it exports. Lots of the U.S. exports filling containers are things you might not expect: The leading containerized export are paper products such as wood pulp, which made up 10 percent of the 12 million loaded containers exported.

Francisco Velasquez, Quartz

The Heart of the Cards

In 2022, eBay bought TCGplayer for $295 million, which at that point had authenticated and graded 115 million trading cards, of which 32 million had been handled in 2021 following the explosion of trading-card collecting as a hobby. In 2020 the company saw triple-digit growth as homebound people with disposable income bought up a bunch of holographic Charizard cards to appease an inner child. Now, the 280 people who work on sorting, researching, shipping and receiving all those valuable pieces of cardstock are unionizing, as 60 percent of them make less than $19 per hour while business is booming. I say give it to them, as the last time there was an unscrupulous trading-card company with little regard for working conditions we got KaibaCorp, and we all know how that turned out.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Algae

Researchers have managed to use algae to track the historical record of seismic activity in the Adriatic Sea. We know that in 1667, an earthquake nearly destroyed the city of Dubrovnik, the main port city in the heart of Ragusa at the time and today in modern-day Croatia. Researchers out of the University of Zagreb looked at the algae Lithophyllum byssoides, which accumulates calcium carbonate and builds out a rocky substance called the algal rim, which layer by layer can be indicators of changes in sea level. This new study argues that algal rims can also identify historical earthquakes, and were able to not only confirm that 1667 earthquake but also strong earthquakes alluded to in literature in 1395 and 1520, as well as multiple earthquakes that hit between the fourth and sixth centuries.

Vedrana Simičević, Hakai Magazine

Color

The market for food coloring is projected to increase from $4.6 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2028, thanks to rising demand from home chefs, who want to make vibrant and visually catchy snacks and treats that pop on social media, and large food brands who want to do the same. As the saying goes, we eat first with our eyes, and the desire is to make food look more interesting and eye-catching. That’s also in spite of some measures from localities that are banning some of the more vibrant dyes, such as California.

Elizabeth Flood, Food Dive

This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday edition, I spoke to Eric Berger, author of the brand-new book Reentry and senior space editor at Ars Technica. Eric is a stellar writer and my go-to when it comes to hearing about space industry news. I was super excited about his book. We spoke about the major players of the space industry, the inspiration behind SpaceX and its impact on geopolitics, and how Elon Musk could risk it all. Berger can be found at Ars Technica, and the book can be found anywhere books are sold.

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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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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Numlock News: October 3, 2024 • Pink Floyd, Elephants, Voyager 2

By Walt Hickey

Money

Pink Floyd is selling its recorded music, name and likeness rights to Sony Music for $400 million, one of the largest deals for an artist’s library and one that comes after several decades of infighting among the band. The deal does not include songwriting, which is still held by the band members who wrote the songs, and locks down one of the most valuable remaining catalogs of music at Sony, which has spent over $1 billion bagging the catalogs of the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Queen. Unfortunately, there is simply no song in existence, let alone one by Pink Floyd, that accurately captures the motivations of why a band might accept $400 million for their music — none whatsoever.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Voyager 2

The Voyager 2 space probe, launched in 1977, is 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away from Earth. It’s slowly but surely running out of power, and in order to extend the life of the spacecraft, NASA switched off its plasma science instrument, which measures the flow of charged atoms. The plasma instrument on its counterpart, Voyager 1 — which is 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth — was turned off in 2007. There are now four remaining instruments left operational on Voyager 2, and it’s currently estimated to keep sending back data through some point in the 2030s.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

Rainforest

The rainforests in the Republic of Congo are home to elephants and gorillas, and those animals as well as other megafauna spend time moving between different muddy, open clearings of grass and sedges called bais. These neat areas are visible in satellite imagery, and only recently has the network of bais become clear. Researchers identified 13 known bais and analyzed 2 million camera trap images, finding that they’re crucial gathering grounds for many different kinds of animals seeking nutrient-rich soils, roots and grazing. The team used LIDAR-equipped drones to scan the forest, tracking down trails connecting 220 known bais to find thousands more hidden ones. According to the study published in Ecology, they managed to find 2,176 throughout a national park the size of Connecticut.

Zhengyang Wang, Scientific American

College Presidents

College president used to be a relatively cushy gig, glad-handing bigwigs fleecing rich alumni for donations and cosplaying as a medieval scholar once a year at graduation, living life one tasteful spread of canapés at a time. Then students expected them to do stuff, and then donors and alumni got mad at them for considering doing that stuff, and then other donors and alumni got mad at them for not doing that stuff, and then governors and the board started calling, and all of a sudden this plum gig is getting dicey. The average tenure of a college president was 5.9 years as of 2022, down from 8.5 years in 2006, and it’s been a boom time for the job title of “interim college president,” which is what you call the person who steps into that crucial role of canapé consumption between the “resigning in disgrace” day and the “this whole thing blows over” day.

Melissa Korn, The Wall Street Journal

Connectome

A diagram of the wiring of an animal’s brain is called a “connectome,” a process that’s incredibly labor intensive and difficult to do. This was first accomplished in 1986 in the well-studied nematode C. elegans, connecting 302 neurons. Since then there have been partial connectomes of fly, mouse and human brains, as well as a connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Since 2018, researchers have been working on building out the connectome of the adult D. melanogaster, and a nine-paper package published in Nature yesterday pulls that scientific miracle off, setting the stage for larger connectome works in zebra fish and mice. There are 149 meters of wiring in a fruit fly’s brain, which is the size of a grain of sand, and it has 54.5 million synapses and 140,000 neurons, of which there are 8,400 types. It’s a huge deal.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, Science

Methane

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a recommendation that the U.S. invest between $150 million and $400 million over the next three to five years on tech to remove methane from air. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes in at 420 parts per million and methane just 2 parts per million, but ton for ton, methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas on a 20-year span and responsible for a third of all global warming at the industrial level. The engineering difficulty is precisely that ppm situation: Right now, there isn’t any tech that can remove methane at concentrations below 1,000 ppm, and again, methane is just 2 ppm in the general atmosphere. Methane removal tech is in use at big emitters like pipelines and landfills, but even so, that’s just 21 percent of methane emissions.

Warren Cornwall, Science

Corner Store

Neighborhood-based retail like small corner stores accessible by a quick walk rather than a drive to a central shopping district are making a comeback. It’s in part thanks to the pandemic, which made people spend lots of time in their own neighborhood, but helped along by changes in zoning in several cities that are making it possible to open up small shops and restaurants in residential neighborhoods, mixed use that has in many places been exorcised from the zoning law by overzealous car-centric planners after World War II. The math is basic: A 1,200-square-foot shop needs to clear about $1,000 per day in sales to make rent and pay market wages, which means it’s got to be within a quarter-mile of 1,000 households, opening up a lot of parts of midsized cities to potential new shops.

Linda Baker, Bloomberg

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

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

Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018