Have a great weekend!

Figs

The direct-to-consumer era of startups had lots of contenders attempting to send underwear, mattresses and all manner of apparel through the mail, but many of that cohort of companies have died off, been scooped up or pivoted to crypto or AI. Figs, which sells scrubs to both medical professionals as well as people looking for functional loungewear, remains solid: Last year revenue was a robust $631 million, and the company expects that to rise by 20 percent this year, and given that the standard set runs for $94, they’re moving a whole lot of scrubs.

Srinidhi Ragavendran and Audrey Wan, Bloomberg

Charged

Geely Auto, the Chinese automotive manufacturer, revealed tech on Wednesday capable of charging an electric vehicle battery from 10 percent to 70 percent in only 4.5 minutes, a significant development for the company, putting it in a rare club that consists of auto manufacturer BYD and battery maker CATL as having a five-minute ultrafast charger. Geely’s tech can take a car from 10 percent to 97 percent in eight minutes 40 seconds, which would indeed beat the BYD tech that takes an EV from 10 percent to 97 percent in nine minutes, but still lags behind the CATL model that takes a vehicle from 10 percent to 98 percent in just six minutes, 27 seconds. The fastest-charging EVs available in the United States take about 20 minutes.

Chan Ho-Him, The Associated Press

Streaming

It can sometimes seem like there are dozens of streaming services vying for your subscription dollar, but that’s not entirely right. There are, in fact, hundreds. Parks Associates tracks 370 streamers in the United States and 234 in Canada, and based on their data, once you separate out the various spinoff or subsidiary streamers, you’re talking 336 standalone streaming services in operation, up from 243 streamers a decade ago but down from a high of 366 in 2022. Thanks to consolidation, acquisition and the invisible hand of the market reaching for the remote, we’re actually down 10 subscription streaming services last quarter alone, with BET+, CTV Throwback and Movies and OHL Live all getting absorbed by larger libraries, FIFA+ moving to DAZN and FanDuel Sports straight up going bust.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

United Nations

While the efficacy of diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly is debatable, its high school imitation is thriving, with Model UN rebounding following the pandemic. While there are a number of programs that run the simulated summits — International MUN Association and National MUN among the largest — overall, the tide is rising, with 16,790 participants in 2025, up from 7,993 in 2016. Even while other politics and debate extracurriculars have shut down or declined in popularity as the national temperature is turned up, Model UN has sidestepped the quagmire of arguing teenagers by widening the questions to more complex and less domestically politically ossified international geopolitical questions.

Magdalena Del Ville, Bloomberg

Convenience Costs

A new analysis of 153 consumer complaints alleging overcharges at convenience stores Circle K and 7-Eleven reveals what appears to be a pattern of mislabeled pricing or upcharges at the register, which critics of the chains allege is a consistent practice across many stores. A California inspection found that between 2023 and 2025, 7-Eleven stores in LA County failed 335 of 909 price accuracy inspections, a failure rate of 37 percent. Over the same period of time, Circle K failed 35 percent of government price-accuracy inspections in Florida and 62 percent in North Carolina.

Jocelyn C Zuckerman, Barry Yeoman, Byard Duncan and Sophie Sullivan, The Guardian

“Tough On Crime”

A new study analyzing “tough on crime” policies found that election years for district attorneys saw statistically significant increases in per capita admissions and months sentences to state prisons. From 1986 to 2006, admissions were up three percent when it was an election year and district attorneys were attempting to burnish their bona fides to the general public. That’s equivalent to 63,000 additional prison admissions over the course of the period.

Northwestern University

Paris

Excavations beneath Paris’ Hotel-Dieu hospital have uncovered a remarkable archeological find, a 20-meter-long wall that is a meter high and had been buried four meters deep in a courtyard that dates to the Gallo-Roman period. It may illuminate some circumstances around the early days of Paris. The structure, made of stone and wood, may have been part of the ramparts of Lutetia that were built by the Gallic Parisii tribe that lived along the Seine. Carbon dating of charred material dates it to between 10 and 200 BC, which would indeed include the time frame of the Battle of Lutetia in 52 BC, where Julius Caesar reported that the Gauls set fire to the town. This furthermore confirms that French people were competently building barricades in the streets of Paris from the city’s infancy, defining a core civic value and municipal pastime that would persist for centuries to come.

Jérémy Tordjman, Agence France-Press

This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Alex Davies who is out with a new book, Kobuk the Destroyer and Other Tales from the Wild Unseen World of Test Engineering. We talked about the early testing of airplanes, including the sacrifice of many chickens, and the bear that inspired the title Kubok the Destroyer. You can find the book anywhere you get books, in any format that you read books.

Subscribe now

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition!

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Wonka

Quaker Oats financed the 1971 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in exchange for the rights to use the Wonka name on confectioneries. In 1988, Nestlé took over the brand and continued to produce Wonka-branded items until 2015, when they phased it out amid declining sales. In 2018, Ferrero bought up Nestlé’s confectionary business for $2.8 billion, but not even a Timotheé Chalamet movie was enough to make the Wonka brand worth resuscitating; in the meantime, Ferrerro had managed to turn Nerds — originally a Wonka-branded item back in the ’80s, but since turned into a brand in their own right — into a legitimate phenomenon in the candy space with the Gummy Clusters in 2020. Now, timed to the release of a reality show called Wonka’s Golden Ticket, Ferrero is relaunching the Wonka line with four new products. It’s exactly what the author intended with his cautionary tale warning against the ills of binge consumption, greed and watching too much television: promoting Netflix.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Go Fast Boats

In times of seemingly unstoppable inflation, nothing is more encouraging than firms large and small working together to streamline a supply chain and work relentlessly to reduce prices for their customers, with the very best managing the task without sacrificing quality. Nowhere in the economy is this accomplishment more clear than in the EMEA divisions of large pharmaceutical sales. I specifically refer to the fact that the cocaine trade is doing amazing in Europe these days thanks to drug traffickers smuggling in vast amounts of blow by using sophisticated speedboats capable of outracing Spanish authorities blasting through the Strait of Gibralter. The fiberglass smuggling boats can reach 60 knots, are built in secret workshops in Portugal and with a crew of four, will loiter off the coast in international waters for weeks awaiting cargo deliveries that weigh tons, at which point they’ll run them into Spain evading the patrols and from there on to Europe. In Spain, a kilo can sell for $15,000, down from $35,000 two years ago and $45,000 pre-pandemic. One reason for that great pricing is that transportation costs are way down, with the speedboats charging 12 percent fee on the cargo compared to the 21 percent when logistics are handled by gangs in the port of Algeciras moving shipping containers. Spain has allocated $230 million over the past decade for its Campo de Gibraltar security plan; every three-ton shipment of cocaine yields something like $250 million in retail sales.

Sune Engel Rasmussen and Antonio Pampliega, The Wall Street Journal

Cable

The traditional cable bundle has dropped to include just 31 percent of national households, with subscriptions to cable appearing in 40.1 million households. In the past five years, 31 million customers have dropped their cable, satellite or television providers, a 44 percent decline. As recently as the second quarter of 2016, 97.3 million households subscribed to the cable bundle, meaning that the net result of 10 years of churn comes out to a loss of 57.2 million subscribers.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Soy Sauce

Kikkoman is opening a third production facility in the United States, a 240,000-square-foot facility in Wisconsin that will produce soy sauce, teriyaki sauce and more seasonings. As American palates continue to favor Asian foods, Kikkoman has been a solid beneficiary, with its soy sauce brand — the marketshare leader in the U.S. — growing at an annual rate of six percent over the past decade.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Land Bridge

A new analysis of the sea floor surrounding Malta looked at what was once a land bridge connecting the island to Sicily. A 90-kilometer bridge once connected the two islands as recently as 13,000 years ago, when the Mediterranean was 120 meters lower than it is today. Sicily has been inhabited for as much as 16,000 years, but Malta has been permanently populated for only about 6,000 years. The land bridge is about three times the area of Malta itself, and may have been a marshy place that would have served as a conduit for wildlife and potentially a place for gathering resources, though not crossed by humans seeking a permanent home.

Hannah Richter, Science

Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Saturday, traveling more than five billion miles and making over 1.7 million observations over the course of its 36 years of service. The Hubble spent its 200,000th orbit on a bit of a sentimental observation, one related to its work measuring the expansion rate of the universe, the Hubble Constant. It imaged the galaxy cluster MACS J0417 (which is so large that it acts as a gravitational lens which magnifies the light of objects located behind it) specifically hunting for the reappearance of Supernova Athena, which the telescope discovered in 2025 and which is projected to reappear between now and March 2027. Its reappearance will help researchers determine the mass of MACS J0417.

NASA

Scripted

The number of comedies and dramas aired on broadcast television has roughly halved over the past decade, but appears to have leveled off this season. In the 2016-17 television season, 93 scripted shows aired on broadcast television, which fell gradually to 83 shows in the 2019-20 season, fell sharply during the pandemic to just 49 shows by the 2023-24 season and has since leveled off, bouncing up and down a bit but coming in at 56 shows this 2026-27 season. One thing preventing the bottom from falling out is that shows that do well on streaming often start on broadcast; half of the top 25 shows of last year on cross-platform ratings started on broadcast networks.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Fire Amoeba

Researchers looking for life in the scorching-hot geothermal pools of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California have found a fascinating creature they’re calling Incendiamoeba cascadensis, or “fire amoeba of the Cascades,” which was found in a lake that maintains a temperature of 47 degrees Celsius, or 116 degrees Fahrenheit. In subsequent lab studies, the organism continued to grow even at temperatures of 57 degrees Celsius and continued to reproduce up to 63 degrees Celsius, which are new records for eukaryotes. The study, published in Cell, contends that the amoeba may even be able to tolerate temperatures up to 70 degrees Celsius by morphing into a cyst. Changing form? Extreme, magma-fueled environment? They named it “Incendiamoeba”? My fellow Americans, we’ve done it, we’ve discovered a fire-type Pokémon.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Polo

Hurricane Polo in the Pacific has undergone a nearly unprecedented intensification thanks to hot El Niño water fueling the storm. What was a 45 to 50 mile per hour tropical storm as of early Monday became a 160 mph Category 5 hurricane on Tuesday morning; that intensity change, strengthening 110 miles per hour over a 24-hour period, was matched only once in the eastern Pacific according to records dating back to the 1970s, when Hurricane Patricia did it in 2015. Polo is the third Category 5 hurricane this season in the eastern Pacific, tying the record-setting 2018, 2002 and 1994 seasons.

Michael R. Lowry, Eye on the Tropics

Dams

Dam removals have been giving thousands of miles of rivers back to the creatures that once called them home; since 1912, over 2,300 dams have been removed from U.S. waterways, peaking at 108 dam removals in 2024 when 4,000 kilometers of waterways were reconnected. While much of the attention has been on salmon populations in the American West, lots of the action has been in the eastern United States where 1,100 demolitions have unblocked 32,000 kilometers of river. There’s still lots more to go — the 1800s were a boom time for mill-building, with 65,000 of them stopping up waterways, and still eastern fish runs remain blocked by at least 35,000 dams — but the effect of removing a dam can be remarkable. Within 12 years of demolishing two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River, six million river herring returned, double the figure of two years before.

Ben Goldfarb, bioGraphic

Satellite

Electronics manufacturer Sharp announced plans to develop an antenna capable of connecting to multiple satellite networks, pushing it into a space that had been dominated by proprietary equipment like SpaceX’s Starlink, and potentially offering consumer choice and ease of switching. The move is strategic in part because the company, which is from Japan, believes that there will be a large slice of the satellite internet market that doesn’t necessarily want to rely on either an American or Chinese option. The satellite communications market is projected to double by 2033 to $223 billion.

Kyoko Hariya, Nikkei Asia

Smoking

In 1987, a smoker had a 3.4 percent chance of dying within five years, and as of 2023, a smoker had a 4.9 percent chance of dying within five years. This seemingly paradoxical result, demonstrated by data from the 1987 to 2013 waves of the National Health Interview Survey, presented not because it’s any more dangerous to be a smoker now than it was before — the age-specific mortality rates are generally the same over the decades studied — but rather because the smoking population is getting older as young people don’t pursue the habit at the rate they once did. As a result, you get data showing a public health statistic getting worse (the overall mortality of smokers) thanks to broader data showing a public health statistic getting better (fewer younger, healthier people deciding to smoke).

Ralph Lawton, Harvard University, Ellen Meara, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, and Jonathan Skinner, Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine

Uranium

Three years ago, uranium producer Cameco invested $2.1 billion in a 49 percent stake in Westinghouse Electric, the company that builds nuclear power stations, trying to shore up the finances of a crucial customer that had been meandering in a world that didn’t want to build large nuclear power stations. Well, they really nailed that, as the renewed interest in extracting carbon-free energy from rocks has revived Westinghouse, and that share would be worth $24.5 billion if Westinghouse indeed proceeds with a $50 billion U.S. stock market listing. Westinghouse’s pipeline for AP1000 reactors stands at 91 opportunities, of which as many as 20 are in the United States. Such a surge in interest would also be a boom for Cameco’s core uranium business; global reactor requirements are expected to increase from 64,500 tonnes of uranium annually to 143,900 tonnes by 2050.

Colin McClelland, Mining.com

Cephalapods

In the 1990s, researchers discovered the Spencer Gulf breeding aggregation, a massive gathering of the meter-long giant Australian cuttlefish off the coast of Southern Australia, where a genetically distinct population of the cephalopod convenes to breed. This year, disaster struck when an algae bloom hit the coast, killing off lots of marine life and, scientists report, devastating the cuttlefish. The South Australian Research and Development Institute estimated that the Spencer Gulf population collapsed to just 1,811 adults, a 97 percent year-over-year decline. The population has taken serious hits before — in 2013, it fell from 150,000 to 13,500 animals and managed to recover to 247,000 by 2020. It won’t be until next year that we see whether enough survived to facilitate a similar recovery.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Noovie

National CineMedia, which was launched by major movie theater chains to sell ads before movies, announced that it will buy Captivate Holding, which is the company that puts ads in office elevators and lobbies. NCM emerged from bankruptcy after COVID-era disruptions, and while original owners AMC and Cinemark no longer have an ownership interest, the company is still responsible for the Maria Menunos-hosted Noovie movie trivia preshow that plays when you arrive way too early to the movie theater. With this $275 million deal for Captivate, NCM is angling to capitalize on yet another moment when a bored person can be plied with a softball trivia question in a tedious, liminal moment before they’re plied with an ad, mostly because they’re not really sure if it’s even worth taking their phone out.

Erik Hayden, The Hollywood Reporter

Scheme

Amway Corp and two affiliates will pay the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington $225 million to settle allegations that the multilevel marketing company and its affiliates made deceptive claims about how much money new participants could reasonably make. As it happens, most of the people who joined the affiliates after 2020 would go on to spend more money on training and Amway’s products than they actually made selling the products with their training. It is the largest settlement in an FTC action against a multilevel marketing company.

Jody Godoy, Daphne Psaledakis and Ismail Shakil, Reuters

Fakes

A London man was found guilty and sentenced to over three years in prison for orchestrating a counterfeit vinyl record operation, including two years and eight months for copyright breaches of 108 artists. The operation produced fake vinyl copies of albums and then flipped them through online marketplaces like eBay and Discogs; from 2017 to 2024, the operation generated 2,743,000 pounds in profit, and upon the execution of a search warrant in 2024, the Phoenix of Vinyl was busted with 2,791 vinyl records, lacquers and pressing equipment.

Thomas Smith, Billboard

MLB

As the Major League Baseball regular season approaches a close, the changing of the guard in team broadcast booths continues; this year, three radio or television broadcasters with at least 30 years of tenure will leave their roles, including the San Francisco Giants’ Mike Krukow, the Mariners’ Rick Rizzs and the New York Mets radio voice Howie Rose, who will leave after 32 years in the booth. This kind of thing is naturally cyclical; from 2003 to 2013, 12 different voices with over 20 years of experience left the booth. Still, there’s a ton of continuity among broadcasters; the current longest-serving active English-language MLB TV or radio announcer is Denny Matthews, who has been calling Kansas City Royals games on the radio for 58 years.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Yongsan Garrison

Following World War II, the United States military occupied the Yongsan Garrison in the middle of Seoul, and it wasn’t until 2018 that the forces moved into a new base in Pyeongtaek, returning 2.43 million square meters of prime real estate in Seoul to the South Korean government. That return was brokered in 2004, and in 2007 the National Assembly passed a law stipulating that the land be made into a large park, with the city looking for its own version of New York’s Central Park. That said, a new fight has erupted as affordability advocates want some of the land to go to housing. If just a fifth of the park’s land is converted into housing, the city might be able to build 60,000 units, which would be a relief given that Seoul condo prices were up 13.8 percent in June, and rents were up 1.3 percent.

Kim Jaewon, Nikkei Asia

Noisy

The maximum recommended occupational exposure time for 85 decibels of sound — which is about the sonic intensity of heavy traffic — is eight hours, and for every additional three dBA, that exposure time is cut in half. So, 88 dBA is recommended for four hours, 91 dBA for two, and at 100 dBA — basically a loud lawnmower, or a mediocre sporting event — only around 15 minutes. Noise exposure adds up over the course of a day, and can become a public health problem if it gets out of hand.

Laura Coco, The Conversation

Cucumber

Marine biologists who revisited a reef 24 years after an initial DNA sampling were astounded to find that an endangered sea cucumber — the black teatfish sea cucumber, to be specific — may have a lifespan that exceeds 100 years. It had been thought that the sea cucumbers might be able to live beyond the 10 or so years that had been commonly assumed. Scientists collected samples from 55 of the animals from a no-take zone of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, compared them to the DNA of specimens collected 24 years ago from the same place and then modeled their lifespan accordingly. Fully 33 of the specimens — 60 percent— were the same as those sampled back in 2000, indicating that they have very low natural death rates, live for at least 24 to 27 years on average and, given how little some of the recaptured animals had grown over the 24 years in question, may live for more than 100 years.

Australian Institute of Marine Science

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

Subscribe now

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Welcome back!

Black Lotus

A Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering card sold for $2.208 million at Goldin Auctions, a record price for a PSA Gem Mint 10 Alpha-graded Black Lotus card, though still behind the private $3-million sale of a CGC Pristine 10 Alpha Black Lotus in 2024. Rounded edge cut marks on the edge corners may have stymied the bidding on the sale, where the bidders may have differed from the PSA grader’s opinion of the card, which is only one of three such cards known to exist. The real star of the auction was a CGC 9 1998 Pokemon Japanese CoroCoro Comic Promo Holo Illustrator Pikachu, which sold for $2.806 million, triple what a PSA 8.5 version of the card sold for in June.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Resident Evil

Zach Cregger’s reboot of Resident Evil crushed expectations, making $60 million domestically and $48.3 million internationally, well exceeding expectations of a domestic debut in the ballpark of $40 million to $50 million. The reboot came five years after another reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a commercial and critical failure. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is still trucking along with $6.5 million domestically in its eighth weekend of release, last week surpassing Star Wars: The Force Awakens to notch the best-ever domestic release. Globally, it’s settling in at $2.45 billion, good for the third-best ever release.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Giuseppe Garibaldi

They say the two best days of boat ownership are the day you buy the boat and the day you sell it, so congratulations to both Indonesia and Italy. On Friday, the Giuseppe Garibaldi, a 180-meter-long aircraft carrier, arrived in Jakarta after a four-week voyage from Italy. The Italians are giving the ship to Indonesia for free because, as is common in boat ownership, literally any other option was ruinously expensive. Keeping the retired carrier cost five million euros in 2025, while dismantling it would cost 18.7 million euros. In order to just get the thing working, the Indonesian state news agency has indicated retrofit costs will rise to $900 million. The Navy aims to keep the carrier in service for another 15 to 20 years.

Chandra Asmara, Bloomberg

Brains

A new study published in Nature Neuroscience out of Stanford Medicine presents findings that the brain is in fact two distinct organs that evolved independently over the course of hundreds of millions of years. A real mystery in neuroscience has been researchers’ struggle to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory, which is the region of the brain that controls essential automatic functions like breathing, sleeping, heartbeat and the muscles of the face. That hang-up has made it difficult to research hindbrain diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and ALS, compared to other diseases that affect the forebrain or midbrain. The researchers discovered that the hindbrain follows a different developmental path during embryonic development, and the reason that attempts to make hindbrain neurons failed was that you can’t make forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells. The researchers found a similar two-origin brain pattern in chickens, zebrafish and even acorn worms; jellyfish, on the other hand, have two separate nervous systems at different ends of the body, and diverged from our ancestors 600 to 700 million years ago. The study argues that evolution resulted in two different neural systems converging spatially into one organ, even if it’s two separate pieces.

Krista Conger, Stanford Medicine

Law Firms

Older partners at law firms are not retiring, which has created logjams at the top of the legal profession and has sent younger ambitious partners jumping ship and getting poached by competitor rival firms promising senior positions. A third of lawyers in the United States are aged 55 or older, and 14 percent are over 65; given the nature of the work, it’s not uncommon to see some lawyers continue to practice into their 80s or 90s.

Erin Mulvaney, The Wall Street Journal

Root Of The Matter

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies identified 346 genes related to carbon storage and root growth, and over the past several years have designed new varieties of soybeans that have roots that dig deeper and penetrate the soil further. It’s a change that means roots may be able to access water under the top layer of soil during droughts, and will also have sequestered more carbon underground after harvesting than the current splayed-root soybeans. The change for steeper roots could also facilitate more crops planted in a smaller area. One hectare of deeper and bigger rooted soybean plants can store an additional metric ton of carbon annually; a gigaton of carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere by 2040 if deeper-rooted soybean, corn, cotton and canola crops are adopted.

Joshua A. Bickel and Annika Hammerschlag, The Associated Press

Ships

The Iran War has been a huge boost to China’s shipbuilding industry, with new shipbuilding orders in the first half of the year totaling 121.06 million metric tons deadweight. That’s 2.7 times higher than the same period a year ago, fueled by a surge in orders for tankers and other large vessels from countries in Asia dependent on Middle East oil; countries that fear a protracted conflict at the Strait of Hormuz would mean longer distances for crude oil from sources elsewhere, with those long distances potentially leading to shortages of ships. China’s global shipbuilding market share has now hit 82 percent, up 14 percentage points year over year; with 363.25 million tons deadweight of incomplete orders for ships, that’s construction work for seven years.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

Subscribe now

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alex Davies who is out with a new book, Kobuk the Destroyer and Other Tales from the Wild Unseen World of Test Engineering. He’s previously written for Wired and a book about the creation of self-driving cars, and now he’s back and writing about the world of testing.

We talked about the early testing of airplanes, including the sacrifice of many chickens, and the bear that inspired the title Kubok the Destroyer. The book is full of great anecdotes that thread the line between ridiculously creative but also bowing to politics and insurance.

You can find the book anywhere you get books, in any format that you read books.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Alex, thank you so much for coming back on. It is delightful to have you.

Hey. Thanks for having me back.

You are the author of a brand new book called Kobuk the Destroyer. It is all about the testing industry and how much effort goes into product engineering and product testing. And it is one of the most fascinating dives into an industry that I’ve put very little thought into that I’ve ever read and I’ve really, really enjoyed it. Do you want to talk a little bit about what got you on this specific topic?

Yeah, so a lot of my interest in test engineering was born out of my time as a reporter for Wired magazine where I covered the transportation field. And I spent a lot of my time writing about new products, new cars, new kinds of flying cars, hyperloops and all sorts of technologies. I found the best way to get them off their prescribed talking points was to ask them about the development of the thing, of the ideas that didn’t work, of the designs they thought would be the answer but that they had to adjust on the fly. And that got them typically talking about testing because testing is the work that takes you from invention to product.

The more I heard about testing, the more I would ask about testing. I’d go into interviews thinking, “I’m really interested in this product. I really wonder how they tested it.” As I did that, I started to see more and more that this is a whole world. This is a whole way of thinking. As I thought more and more deeply about it, I realized that testing is the work that underpins basically everything we buy, write in, use, interact with. Basically every product has been tested in some way, whether very well or inadequately. That dictates how we interact with it, and our lives are somewhat governed by the stuff around us. And that made me think it’s worth taking a proper deep look at this work.

You’ve been on, and we’ve interviewed you before. You’ve written a book before particularly about self-driving cars. And I really, really love that one because it was all about the early, early, early, pre-alpha testing of how you put a go-kart in the desert that has some self-driving system on it. It is this “fail fast, break things, learn a lot in the process” stuff. I really enjoyed the similarities in this book, where it was just like, “Millions of people fly every day, and in order to make sure that the process is safe, an inordinate amount of testing has had to be done, whether that’s bending the aircraft wings back or launching, I believe, a massive gelatin that vaguely resembles a bird at an engine.”

Yeah. And they actually use real birds. They shoot these gelatin birds two miles an hour into the jet engine. And that’s to make sure that the jet engine can keep running or shut down safely in the event of a bird strike. But the actual certification tests require you to use a real once living bird. And it’s typically a chicken.

Famously found at 40,000 feet.

Exactly. And that’s one of the things that I really learned as I dove into this world is it’s not just all really impressive creativity and rigor. It’s also a lot of trade-offs and negotiations, because the two key tenants of testing are what I call similarity and workability. Similarity is creating a test that mimics as closely as possible the real world. And workability making a test that’s reproducible, observable, practical. That’s like any scientific experiment, you want to be able to get reliable, consistent, good data from it. And that’s what workability is for.

Those things are in inherent tension because the more like the real-world you get, the less controllable it is. The more controllable the test is, the less it’s like the real world. And so the FAA tests for birds, what’s called the bird ingestion test, uses chickens because its standard says, “Look, we’re testing for a four-pound bird. It’s easy to get a four-pound chicken.” They’re very available. You can easily buy them plucked and frozen. You just thaw them and stick them in the cannon.

But as you noted, birds don’t fly. The FAA has never recorded a bird on chicken encounter. It has recorded more planes hitting bearded seals than planes hitting chickens. One, by the way, one bearded seal. One poor bearded seal.

So there’s this tension in the test, and there are other little holes you can poke in it. As we noted, they use these gelatin blobs a lot of the time in R&D. And those blobs are good because they mimic the mass of a chicken, but they’re not a chicken, right? They even have pretty sophisticated blobs that inside them have things that mimic the bones and the tissues. But at the end of the day, it’s that thing. It’s a more controllable thing because each one is exactly the same as the next. So if you’re testing different iterations of an engine, it’s going to give you good, reliable data. But, again, you’re not using a real bird.

Then there’s the fact that we only test up to four-pound birds, whereas geese are one of the major problems. Geese are what took down Captain Sully’s flight with the miracle on the Hudson. He flew into a flock of geese. Geese are like 10 pounds.

So I talked to a risk epistemologist about this, and this is a guy with the perfectly fitting name of John Downer, who dove into this work and pulled a lot of these lessons out and, to be fair, drafting off of his research. What he told me was that it’s not that jet engines aren’t safe, right? The miracle on the Hudson flight, those jet engines did what they needed to do, which was shut down safely and gave Sully the opportunity to land his plane safely. They didn’t explode. And it’s not that planes are less safe than we think they are, but it is that maybe the test isn’t telling us quite what we think it’s telling us. And that’s a thing that’s worth keeping in mind.

It’s true of basically all testing. You have to think really carefully about what I am actually learning here. And that’s a lot of what I wrote the book to figure out.

Yeah, I liked how you also go into some of the history of different testing and how the testing itself can evolve as the testing itself is tested. Are there any memorable tests or examinations of various different kinds of tech that have evolved over the course of the life of the product as we’ve come to understand more about whether it’s the product itself or what can go wrong with it?

Yeah, so let’s stick with airplanes because it’s a really good example. A new airplane model goes through years and years of incredibly intense testing. It’s brought to the coldest places in the world. It’s brought to the hottest places in the world. It’s not just birds they’re firing into jet engines, it’s sand. And it’s not just sand, it’s sand from different deserts. That jet engine can handle taking off from Dubai and taking off from Phoenix.

The level of this is incredible. But when aviation was first becoming a thing at the start of the 20th century, nobody had the idea how to do any of this. They tried to figure out wing strength by just throwing sandbags on the wings while the plane was on the ground. They were like, “All right, it can take this weight and the plane’s about this weight. So I’ll figure it out.”

Some of the best early work comes from Jimmy Doolittle, who later became famous during World War II because he led the first bombing raid over Tokyo. And if you remember the movie Pearl Harbor with Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck, Jimmy Doolittle is played by Alec Baldwin in that. But when he was a younger guy in the 20s, he was a great pioneering pilot. He was actually one of the first graduates of MIT’s aeronautical engineering program. For his master’s thesis, he said, “The way we’re testing, we’re load-testing planes, which is essentially figuring out how many G-forces they can pull before the wings crack, with sandbags.” What people do who don’t even put the bags, they just put sand on the plane and move it around with rakes or don’t do any testing at all, which is true of some of these people who just build a plane and fly it.

Doolittle said, “I want to create for my master’s thesis a new way of testing airplanes.” So he got a Fokker plane and he created this regimen doing all of these tricks, essentially barrel rolls and inverted flying and he used accelerometers in his plane, which people didn’t really think about using for anything at the time. He created a regimen in which he figured out that the plane he was flying, which was advertised to be able to pull up to something like nine times its own weight, was really only able to pull about seven.

But the big takeaway was less the results of that specific plane and more this way of thinking about how do you actually test the thing? You’ve got to actually fly it. You actually have to mimic the forces that it’s going to undergo and get good measurable data. Not many people can say “My master’s thesis became a landmark paper in the world of aviation safety,” but Jimmy Doolittle could.

That’s amazing. Obviously, it’s funny. I think that tension is a key theme of the book. Can the aluminum tension hold over the course of the life of a product? But also, there’s a ton of tension between various different forces in the testing world. It’s a pervasive theme, I would say, in each of these chapters. Manufacturers and the organizations that test their equipment have a collaborative but also, to an extent, adversarial relationship. One of them is potentially going to destroy the ability of the other to make a livelihood off of the thing that they’ve created. What are some examples from the book about this tension coming into play?

Yeah, I talked to one guy named Michael Peck, who runs an actual reliability engineering lab where people can bring their products and he’ll test them. The thing he told me is that companies hate their own reliability engineers. Because they are the people saying that you can’t sell this thing or you have to fix this thing. They’re basically adding cost and complication to a product to make it safer.

My book follows the arc of the 20th century, largely, and comes into the 21st. But a lot of what we’re looking at is how tort law evolved and how the legal system essentially demanded safer products for American people. One is the lawnmower standard. The Consumer Product Safety Commission was created in the ’70s. This came out of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And it was a time when someone said, “Hey, what about if we have products that don’t definitely maim you?”

A lot of people were losing fingers to lawnmowers because lawnmowers have chutes and they would get clogged. You could turn off the engine, but it was a pain. So, people were just reaching in and being like, “I’m not going to touch the blade, I just need to clog this thing,” and off goes a finger. A lot of people were being hurt by this. The obvious answer that the CPSC came up with was you have to add a dead man’s switch to the lawnmower. If you take your hand off control to reach into the chute, it has to automatically stop. But then they got into this huge debate over how to make that happen. How quickly does it have to stop? Does it have to stop in one second? Does it have to stop in five seconds? And they did all of these tests.

Ultimately, the CPSC came up with a three-second limit. It did all of these human factor studies where it brought in test subjects and had them work fake lawnmowers and see how long it took them to take their hand off and go down here. What happened was the CPSC comes out and says, “Three seconds, that’s how fast it has to work.” Then consumer advocates come out and argue and file lawsuits and say “It needs to be faster than that, it needs to be a second and a half.” Then the industry comes out and says, “This is too hard to accomplish. It needs to be five seconds.” That’s a lot of the negotiation, you see.

And it’s the same thing like when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which governs car safety, creates a new crash standard. I looked at one example, which was created in the ’80s and ’90s, of side impact, basically getting T-boned, and the level of protection they wanted to offer car occupants. That came out in G-forces. Basically, they said, “We’re thinking about limiting G-forces to the people inside the car, to somewhere between 80 and 115 Gs.” They had numbers on this end of the scale that will save this many lives, so they said 80 to 115. Consumer advocates would say 70. Industry comes and doesn’t propose a number. The car industry unanimously said, this shouldn’t be a rule at all. But still, NHTSA compromised and came up with a level, a limit of 85.

That’s why I think standards are a really important part of this book. Because you see a warranty, you see a standard, and it can almost feel like it’s just preordained, or like this is definitely safe enough, but it’s always a negotiation. It’s a very human work of saying, “This is safe enough. This is reliable enough.”

There’s only so much that science can say. It is actually more of a political or legal issue. I was very intrigued by the fact that a lot of the origin of a lot of these laboratories was like the insurance industry or the casualty insurance and that kind of stuff. We’re attempting to use science to solve an actuarial problem that is ultimately going to be a political question.

Yes. The Underwriters Laboratories, which is the first company that turned testing into a business, was born out of insurance questions. Its founder, this guy, W.H. Merrill, was brought into the Chicago World’s Fair in the 1890s, where they were going to show off electricity. And electricity was the huge thing. It was all the rage, and there was going to be a palace of electricity. The people insuring the fair were like, “This is going to light everything on fire, and we’re not going to give you coverage.” So the fair brought in Merrill, who had just graduated from MIT’s brand-spanking new electrical engineering program, to come in and make sure everything was actually safe. And he came out of that with the idea of like, there’s a business here. And that’s why it’s called Underwriters Laboratories, because it’s labs-based and going to give insurance companies confidence that they can insure actual things. That’s how it started off.

Fascinating stuff, man. Really, it’s a very exciting book. The number of charming anecdotes I’ve come away from this book with are voluminous. There’s so much cool stuff in here. I do want to finish by talking about the eminent entity in the title of the book, Kobuk, and the magnificent talents of this particular employee of the testing industry.

I’ll start with the story of Kobuk. Before there was a bear named Kobuk the Destroyer, there was a bear named Kobuk, and before there was a bear named Kobuk, there was an unnamed bear in the Alaskan wilderness who lived with his mom and his two cub siblings. Kobuk’s mom was a classic problem bear. Problem bears is our euphemism for bears who are very motivated to get human food because they’ve developed a taste for human food. And that taste for human food brings them into conflict with humans, conflict that can be dangerous for people and for bears. Kobuk’s mom was a classic problem bear, and she led her cubs onto an Alaskan rancher’s land and began killing the free-range chickens for a meal. The rancher came out and shot and killed Kobuk’s mother and also killed one of the cubs. But Kobuk and his surviving sister, Nikina, weren’t killed. They were granted a life of leisure, and they were granted a new life at a bear sanctuary outside of Yellowstone National Park in Montana. This was a sanctuary for problem bears where they got to live in peace rather than in danger and couldn’t hurt people. But they also had to sing for their supper.

The best way to stop a bear becoming a problem bear is to keep it out of human food in the first place. That’s why if you go backpacking, you often have to use a bear canister that you put your food in that is basically impossible for a bear to open. If you go to a national park or an area with bears, you tend to find those garbage cans with the little metal lid over the latch, and you have to slide your hand all the way in there to pull the latch.

If you look carefully at those products, you might notice that there’s a little seal that says Certified Bear Resistant. They’re certified by bears at this sanctuary where if you’re a manufacturer and you’ve got a new cooler or bear canister or garbage can you think is going to keep bears out, you bring it there, you fill it with fish and honey and all sorts of things bears like, and you hand it to a bear. The bear gets up to one hour to break into that product. And if they can’t break in, it’s Certified Bear Resistant. If they do break in, one, they get to eat what’s inside, and two, you, the manufacturer, have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what went wrong. And Kobuk was really good at this. I talked to the guy who worked with Kobuk, and he was like, “That bear, man, he was so smart. He could get into anything. He could get into one of those garbage cans because you think, well, my whole paw doesn’t fit in here, but my claw does. And if I twist my body 180 degrees around and bend my arm back behind me, I can move it forward and get my claw in far enough to pop it open.”

He was called the destroyer because he destroyed egos. He destroyed human egos because all these manufacturers would think, “This thing’s great, I figured out everything a bear can do,” and nope, not Kobuk.

It’s such a great story. I have heard before that there’s a considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human, which is one reason that there’s so much difficulty sometimes with these trash cans. But it was just so great hearing that the actual bleeding edge of bear testing technology is this bear, Kobuk.

Before they had this program, which has been around for 20, 25 years, they used mechanical forces to recreate bear strength. They’d have a big block with a metal spike on it, and they’d have hydraulic things to mimic a bear’s strength. But it’s not enough to mimic a bear’s strength. You have to mimic a bear’s intelligence, and the best way to do that is with a bear.

The book is called Kobuk the Destroyer and Other Tales from the Wild Unseen World of Test Engineering. Alex, this was so much fun. I really, really enjoyed it. Thank you for writing it and thanks for talking to us.Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about it and where they can find it to purchase?

So you can find it at your local bookstore. You can find it on Amazon. It’s published by W.W. Norton. You can get it in hardcover. You can get it in e-book. You can get it in audiobook. And before too long, it’ll be out in paperback. But I suggest not waiting.

Amazing, all right. That’s going to do it, dude. Thank you very much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun. It’s always fun to talk about it, especially now that it’s done and I don’t have to keep working on it.

Edited by Crystal Wang

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Countdown

The 12-foot Home Depot skeletons are just beginning to emerge, and that can only mean one thing: It’s basically Christmas. Hallmark has announced its annual Countdown to Christmas programming block, the long-running series of seasonal light entertainment rom-com and mystery films. The outlet has announced that this year, it is releasing 34 new original movies as well as three new episodes of the Mistletoe Murders series. These include future classics such as Mistletoe and Mimosas, Return to Santa, Snow Globe Town, Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story and (in what I can only assume is an attempt to expand the network’s territory into novel religious territory) Eight Nights for Love.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Tired Mountain

A new study published in Science mapped seismic activity in Mount Mantap, which has seen 1,400 earthquakes from 2008 to 2025, increasing in frequency and magnitude since September 3, 2017. That’s an interesting finding because Mount Mantap is where North Korea conducted underground nuclear weapons testing, culminating in the last known nuclear test on September 3, 2017, when a bomb with a yield equivalent to 100 to 250 kilotons of TNT was detonated. This appears to have spelled the end for testing at Mantap, which has joined the cohort of geography known as “tired mountains,” a phenomenon first observed during the Cold War where the ground has become so fractured by underground nuclear weapons testing that it is no longer capable of trapping the radioactive gases from the explosions, which can lead to baseline increases in seismic instability like the kind seen at Mount Mantap today.

Tom Metcalfe, Scientific American

Idol

American Idol will be moving from Hollywood to Georgia, but a new analysis of the show and its rivals has determined that the era of cultural musical relevance for American Idol has long concluded, and that arguably, it peaked with the first season to begin with. During much of the 2000s, The X Factor and American Idol were legitimately capable of minting musical stars, with between 15 percent and 35 percent of finalists going on to score at least one top 40 hit. American Idol’s winners would go on to produce 35 Top 40 hits; The X Factor winners produced 21 hits, The Voice (U.S.) three hits and Pop Idol and The Voice (U.K.) none. While that sounds impressive, Kelly Clarkson was single-handedly responsible for 18 of those hits, and One Direction another 13, so it’s pretty top-heavy, and as we enter season 25, not since season 11 of American Idol has any winner produced a top 40 hit.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Medicaid

On January 1, Medicaid work requirements go into effect in the United States as a result of the OBBBA passed by the GOP in Congress, requiring non-disabled adults aged 19 to 64 to earn $580 in monthly income in order to obtain health benefits. A new closer read of the legislation — one from the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, no less — has found a conspicuous loophole in that law, though, finding that, technically speaking, the work requirement would be satisfied if a household had at least $580 in gross gambling winnings, owing to a decision by the law’s drafters to use Modified Adjusted Gross Income as the income definition for the purposes of the bill. MAGI includes sources of income ordinarily excluded from the more typical adjusted gross income, and one example is gambling winnings, specifically gross winnings, not net winnings, which will be important in a moment. Essentially, an individual could hypothetically satisfy the letter of the law’s work requirements by placing a $580 wager on a bet that pays two-to-one and winning. Even more intriguingly, one could technically satisfy the letter of the bill by placing opposing bets — for instance, finding an event with a 50-50 chance, placing a $580 bet on both teams — and even though one must lose one and win the other. Since it’s gross gambling winnings, technically the person would have de jure made a gross income of $580 and satisfied the Medicaid work requirement, even if they de facto break even. The AEI, for some inexplicable reason, considers this a problem and not extremely hilarious.

Kevin Corinth, American Enterprise Institute

Casual Fridays

A new survey found a significant difference in the perception of appropriate office attire between respondents 18 to 45 and those 45 and older. For men, jeans are one divisive point — while 81 percent of the younger cohort thinks they’re acceptable, just 65 percent of the older cohort does — but the real generational split is on T-shirts, which 73 percent of respondents 18 to 45 think are acceptable compared to just 39 percent of those 45 and up.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

The Kingdom And The Power

Burger King has managed an enviable turnaround, posting Q2 same-store sales growth of 8.5 percent, outpacing the rest of the burger field by nine percentage points and building on a Q1 where they grew 5.8 percent. This is attributed to the success of the Reclaim the Flame program, an initiative of the burger joint to assess what people thought sucked about Burger King and to fix it, a $2 billion effort that overhauled the look and logistics of stores and revamped the menu. It has worked remarkably well and has paid off for franchisees; your typical Burger King was producing $125,000 in profit for its owner before the revamp, but in 2023 and 2024, that popped up to $205,000.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Depth Charges

The Challenger Deep, the deepest stretch of ocean in the Mariana Trench, was surveyed by a Japanese research team using a multibeam echosounder. The goal was not simply to get a new record of the deepest point, but also to explore how that depth estimate can be affected by the observational challenges of trying to measure the seafloor nearly 11,000 meters down. That’s resulted in measurements with state-of-the-art equipment that nevertheless differ by more than 10 meters. On this particular survey, the exact same multibeam dataset, when processed using five different seawater sound-speed models, came in with a depth result that ranged from 10,914 to 10,932 meters. Furthermore, the 2° × 2° beam configuration emanating from the ship — by the time it hits the seafloor 11,000 meters below — is hitting a footprint of 400 meters in the along-track and across-track directions. The study’s estimate came in at 10,927 meters as the depth of Challenger Deep.

Chiharu Hosoya, Research Organization of Information and Systems

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College Football

A new analysis dove deep into estimated roster spending on college football teams in the Power 4 conferences, revealing which schools are and which schools aren’t spending big on their players. The highest-spending schools include Ohio State ($49 million to $54 million), Oregon ($48 million to $54 million) and Texas ($45 million to $55 million), while Boston College had the lowest range ($8 million to $13 million), followed by Duke ($12 million to $15 million). The average team with at least a 50 percent shot at making the playoffs is spending $41 million to $46 million. Diving deeper, the results couldn’t be more clear: All the teams spending more than your team are ruthless pay-to-play mercenaries violating the very spirit of the sport, all the teams spending less than your team are penny-pinching hangers-on who belong in Division I-AA, and your team has managed to deftly balance the unique compensation needs of scholar-athletes in these unique times.

Stewart Mandel, David Ubben and Sam Khan Jr., The Athletic

Lead

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it blasted thousands of papyrus scrolls in the library of the Italian city Herculaneum with ash, which turned them into carbonized husks. Lately, there’s been renewed interest in how to read the contents of those scrolls, which cannot be unrolled without damage, and there’s been some success lately with using artificial intelligence analysis of X-ray tomography of the scrolls. A new approach to decoding the scrolls has been published in PLOS ONE by a researcher who took a more direct approach, basically sourcing papyrus, putting it into a high-temperature furnace, and finding that they’re actually much easier to read if the ink contains traces of lead — which absorbs 25 times the X-rays of the surrounding charred papyrus — so researchers should consider looking for ones that contain traces of lead for easier decoding.

Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

T. rex

A new study published in Science Advances used dental material from Tyrannosaurus rex specimens to determine the body temperature of the theropod, finding that T. rex, an egg-laying reptile, nevertheless maintained a body temperature of 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit), which is roughly the same as humans. This differs from modern cold-blooded reptiles, which tend to run 28 to 30 degrees Celsius, and is much less than T. rex’s modern nephews, the birds, which stay from 40 to 43 degrees Celsius. The warm-blooded reptile lived in the Cretaceous, which was one of the warmest times in Earth’s history.

University of California, Los Angeles

Turnover

While there is almost certainly more turnover to come, before even the general election in November, there are 74 members of the House of Representatives headed out the door, the most since 1992. As it stands, 42 House Republicans and 32 House Democrats will not be rejoining the chamber at the start of the 120th Congress, the highest level of turnover at this point in the process since the ’92 cycle when 86 members were redrawn into new districts. The House banking scandal then fueled outrage, and even more went on to lose in the general. While there were 33 retirements and 11 representatives who lost their primary, this cycle was a particularly popular one in which to seek other offices, which 28 members chose to do, either reaching for a Senate seat (sought by 16), a gubernatorial office (sought by 10) or something else, even though just 13 made it past their primary.

Drew DeSilver, Pew Research Center

Debt

A new analysis of student loan repayment for 17 million borrowers who began repaying between 2020 and 2025 found roughly 500 schools where at least 40 percent of students aren’t paying back their loans. While elite higher ed tends to get the spotlight, the reality is that of the 500 schools with nonpayment rates of 40 percent or higher, 424 of them are private, for-profit schools, including many cosmetology and barbering schools, technical institutes, private vocational schools and many for-profit universities. Among public schools and private nonprofit colleges, the average nonpayment rate was only 15 percent.

Cory Turner, NPR

Sand Hogs

Sand hoppers are nocturnal crustaceans that live on sandy beaches, and in the aggregate, they’re moving a colossal amount of sand. Each sand hopper digs a new home every night, and researchers analyzing their behavior found that for every meter of coastline, about 21,450 sand hoppers were collectively moving 50 kilograms of sand every night. Across a 25 kilometer stretch of beaches in California, sand hoppers were moving about 310 tons of dry sand per day, which is as much sediment shifting as gets done by some rivers.

American Geophysical Union

Nancy Grace Roman

NASA’s new observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope en route to the L2 Lagrange point beyond the Moon, has enough fuel on board for 22 years of service thanks to extremely accurate and efficient maneuvering during launch, well more than the five years originally planned. The launch was very accurate: The first big burn of the control thrusters consumed 18 kilograms of hydrazine, well under the 200 kilograms allocated to that first burn preflight.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica and Evan Gough, Universe Today

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Merch

Milkshake retailer Starbucks has diversified into collectibles, with the beverage company’s latest limited-time-offering sculpture depicting Snoopy selling for as high as $200 on StockX, five times the $39.95 that Starbucks charges for the commemorative cup. Yes, while today’s consumers have moved on from the Hummel figurines and bone china of previous generations, commemorative glassware and value-holding drinking vessels will never truly go out of style. Starbucks has instituted a two-per-customer restriction on the Snoopy glass cups, which brings to mind the Bearista incident of last year; that cup continues to hold its value on reselling platforms, still going for around $55, well above the $29.95 MSRP.

Daniela Sirtori, Bloomberg

Ejection

The companies that produce ejection seats for aircraft maintain clubs for the people who have been launched out of an airplane on their equipment: a rumored, secretive group of pilots who have had to ditch. Martin-Baker, a British company that builds ejection seats, contacts ejectees and welcomes them to their club with a membership card, a certificate, a pin, a patch and an enviable necktie depicting the logo painted on the side of jets that warns passengers that the cockpit contains an ejection seat, a prized piece of apparel at air shows. By their count, their seats have saved 7,827 lives since the first successful ejection in 1949. They also offer a custom Bremont watch that retails for $5,000 but is offered to ejection survivors at cost.

Marcus Weisgerber, The Wall Street Journal

All Roads Lead To

The release last year of a sophisticated and detailed map of roads throughout the Roman Empire as of AD 150 has allowed interesting research into the networking of the Roman road system and the engineering behind the early highway. A new quantitative study dove into the details of that digital model, which depicts 299,171.31 kilometers of Roman roads. Researchers looked at how straight they were (pretty straight in general, with sinuosity averaging 1.048, even if major modern roads tend to be even straighter at 1.024 average sinuosity) and how much they inclined (90.57 percent of roads were within the limits of vehicular traffic at under 16 percent rise, with a median slope of 3.88 percent). The ancient roads also often line up with modern ones. Did all roads lead to Rome? In a manner of speaking: The Imperial road network data has 10,516 nodes (intersections and dead ends) and 14,901 edges (roads), and 24 out of 45 provincial capitals were in the top 20 percent of empire-wide weighted betweenness centrality, indicating that even if your road didn’t lead to Rome, it certainly led to their rector provinciae on the ground.

James Urquhart, New Scientist and Nature Communications

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B. terrestris

There are about 265 different species of bumblebee in the world, but the introduction of non-native bees can cause serious issues. Non-native bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are causing serious ecological problems in Chile, where they have caused a significant decline in the population of local pollinators, particularly B. dahlbomii, Patagonia’s only endemic bumblebee, which has seen its population decrease by (per some estimates) 90 percent. Chile approved the adoption of B. terrestris at scale in 1997 as the country attempted to expand its agriculture industry. This affected more than just Chile — neighboring Argentina prohibited the import, but that didn’t matter as Chile’s use of B. terrestris meant that feral colonies have advanced about 200 kilometers into Argentina anyway — and from 1997 to 2022, the country imported 1,633,011 B. terrestris colonies and queens, and producers continue to import tens of thousands of colonies per year.

Jude Isabella and Katrina Pyne, bioGraphic

BORG

A new public health study looked into the BORG phenomenon on college campuses, in which one-gallon jugs are filled with alcohol and mixers into a beverage called a BORG, or a “blackout rage gallon.” The study found that the recipe does, in fact, tend to do the trick, with 98 percent of BORG drinkers interviewed getting buzzed or drunk, 29 percent reporting experiencing a blackout and 59 percent reporting they had said or done something embarrassing. That said, 68 percent reported that they did intend to use a BORG the next year.

Andrea King, University of Chicago

Apples

There are 2,500 varieties of apples in the United States alone, but only around 100 of those are raised commercially, and the apple industry relies on about 15 of them in particular. Any situation where a narrow group of varietals is planted is an invitation for disease, so the industry and the government invest in genetic research into apples as well as work cataloging smaller and more niche varietals of apples persisting in the wild, alone in orchards or off the grid. Sometimes this can lead to an exciting discovery, such as when several specimens of the feared-lost Drap d’Or de Bretagne apple, a varietal once prized in pre-Revolution France, was found in Maine in an area originally settled by French colonists.

Maryn McKenna, Scientific American

Goldmine

A new study looked at electronic waste products exported from the European Union and found that the waste contains significant amounts of valuable metals that are in high demand if they could be recycled more efficiently. The gallium in e-waste would be enough to reduce the EU's import dependency by 40 percent, tantalum quantities were 23 percent of total demand and the amounts of magnesium and tungsten in the electronic waste would be sufficient to replace 12 percent of imported supply.

Nils Pauliks, The Conversation

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

The weekday version of Numlock is and always will be free. That said, this thing costs money to produce and edit, and we don’t hit you with any ads. We’re able to do this — no ads, free for all, something neat every morning — only because lots of readers of this newsletter have chosen to pay to subscribe. They get a Sunday edition!

If you like Numlock, this is the best way to support it, and this week is the best week of the year to subscribe, because we do our biggest discount of the year for one week in September:

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Oil!

Costco has hiked the price of its private label Kirkland Signature motor oil and capped the amount that customers may buy in an attempt to stave off hoarding and reselling. A five-quart two-pack now costs $58, up from about $30 it had been selling for last year, and customers may buy two boxes per week. It’s also limiting purchases of Mobil 1’s one-quart six-pack to five per membership. A barrel of Brent crude hit $109 on Monday, up from under $72 in July; with diesel and gas prices going up sharply, oil companies make more profit when they refine crude oil into diesel or gasoline instead of motor oil, and the incentives are aligning for a possible supply crunch in motor oil.

Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press

Wild Dogs

A pack of male African wild dogs from Zambia’s Kafue National Park went out in search of mates, settling into new territory after undergoing one of the longest recorded land journeys made by an African mammal. The males’ circuitous odyssey across Zambia to a new home near the top of the Great Rift Valley Escarpment took them 419 kilometers from home as the bird flies, but a journey that ended up being 4,126 kilometers as the wild dog meanders.

Phie Jacobs, Science

TBD

An Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis of Flock Safety search logs for its fleet of automated license plate readers found specious reasons provided for thousands of searches made by cops across the country. The analysis found that officers around the country punched in reasons for searches that included “LOL”, “LMAO”, “idk” and more as justification to query the surveillance system. More than 30 agencies ran over 6,300 searches with the Orwellian reason of “TBD,” which is short for “to be determined,” and the data included a large number of reasons that were just button mashes on the keyboard. In one incident appearing in the data, a Goshen Police Department officer searched 6,474 automated license plate reader networks, including data from 82,413 cameras, with the justification “idk”. Naturally, Flock took this abrogation of the right to protection from unreasonable search seriously by removing the text box that said “reason” and making it into a dropdown menu so that the cops can stop embarrassing Flock when this data gets released.

Rindala Alajaja and Dave Maass, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Woolly Rhino

The woolly rhinoceros died out 11,000 years ago, and a new analysis of 183 fossils from across the Eurasian continent has determined that unlike the woolly mammoths, whose genetic diversity emerged in high-latitudes, the woolly rhinoceros’ genetic diversity emerged in temperate regions. The recovered 29 mitochondrial genomes and 14 nuclear genomes indicate that the species’ genetic diversity evolved in the temperate parts of Eurasia about 460,000 to 420,000 years ago during a glacial-interglacial transition, and the Altai region in what is now southern Russia near China and Mongolia was likely a longtime refuge for the species.

Paul Arnold, Phys.org

Garbage Time

The volume of blowout games is growing in Major League Baseball, with this season already seeing the sixth-highest share of games decided by at least 10 runs (4.51 percent), the fifth-highest share of games decided by 15 or more runs (0.59 percent) and the eighth-highest average margin of victory (3.58 runs) in the modern era (since 1970). This, combined with the league-wide strategic push toward maximizing the overall utility of pitchers, has led to the emergence of the non-pitcher closing pitcher. Last Friday, when the Cincinnati Reds were on the tail end of getting smoked 20-0 by the Milwaukee Brewers, instead of sending a person whose profession is “baseball pitcher” to the mound, they sent out a position player just to get the team out of this game without tiring out their bullpen. Position players account for 0.36 percent of all innings pitched this year, an all-time MLB record, double the 0.19 percent seen in 2021 when the trend began to take off. As recently as 2006, zero innings were handled by a position player. This, in turn, is leading to a dubious trend: 0.9 percent of all MLB runs this season were allowed by a non-pitcher pitcher, as batters are delighted to harvest cheap dingers off the meatballs they throw.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Malls

Malls are, if not back, at least doing alright these days after a Darwinian bloodletting that saw 200 mall closures since 2008. Compared to other real estate, the 900 or so remaining malls are doing rather well; since 2022, the private market value of malls, according to Green Street, is up five percent. Meanwhile, the same statistics for other forms of real estate are down, some slightly (healthcare down seven percent, industrial down eight percent) and some down sharply (offices down 33 percent).

Kate King, The Wall Street Journal

Straits of Magellan

Concerns about the state of the Panama Canal and the long lines to traverse it have some shipping companies weighing the Old Ways: sending a ship around South America by way of either Cape Horn and Drake’s Passage or the Strait of Magellan. After all, that’s how we did it before the canal; how hard could it be? Very, very hard, marine insurer Swedish Club is taking pains to remind people, insisting that even as rainfall runs 34 percent below historical averages in Panama and inflows are 44 percent below normal, the logistical situation at the Panama Canal would have to get exceedingly dire indeed for a go around the continent to be a superior option. First off, there’s a reason it’s not called Drake’s Easy Tropical Journey Through A Managed Canal, and going through an open ocean route through some of the harshest weather conditions in commercial shipping — heavy seas, violent vessel motions — and the talents of crews who are more accustomed to the canal route will be tested on that kind of voyage. Second, the Straits of Magellan are indeed more sheltered, but their narrow channels and the potential need for a pilot under Chilean regulations may form a bottleneck of its own if that route becomes more popular.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Welcome back!

The core weekday version of Numlock is and always will be a free offering. That said, this thing costs money to produce and edit, and we don’t hit you with any ads. We’re able to do this — no ads, free for all, something neat every morning — only because lots of readers of this newsletter have chosen to pay to subscribe. They get a Sunday edition!

If you like Numlock, this is the best way to support it, and this week is the best week of the year to subscribe, because we do our biggest discount of the year for one week in September:

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Impractical

Practical Magic 2 underwhelmed with $30 million domestically and another $16 million abroad, which, after adjusting for inflation, is basically what 1998’s Practical Magic pulled. That’s an issue because Practical Magic flopped in cinemas and only gradually built up into the cult favorite it is today. Still, it did become the first film to usurp Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the box office after six weeks at the top and a relatively weak crop of new movies attempting to kick off the fall. Sometime today, Spider-Man will probably become the highest-grossing film in the history of the domestic box office, given that it’s a million shy of The Force Awakens.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Company Town

It’s often a sad sight when the mill gets sold, the factory shuts down or a crucial industry picks up sticks and goes elsewhere, leaving the workers and the community that thrived with them behind. I say often because very few people are shedding tears over the swift decline of Sihanoukville, the Cambodian beach town that became the epicenter of a global scam industry. The resort town was forced to adapt after the pandemic wiped out the hotel and casino business that put Sihanoukville on the map, but regrettably, that pivot was into a scamming industry that generated $12.5 billion annually in Cambodia, roughly half of the country’s economic output. A crackdown closed 600 illicit sites and detained 30,000 suspects, with 58,000 foreigners being deported and another 242,000 leaving voluntarily as the work dried up. Those cybercrime syndicates have since moved on to Sri Lanka and Africa.

Philip Heijmans, Bloomberg

Solar Cells

A new study published in Joule found that solar cells can be designed to operate for years under 10 meters of water. The solar cells were able to generate 324 mWh of energy — which could charge lithium-ion batteries — when submerged, and could operate at 10 meters down for 5.5 years. This is interesting because it offers a potential solution to the somewhat tricky logistical question of how to supply power to aquaculture operations.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Tesla

The Trump administration killed off the federal electric-vehicle tax credit, and while it caused some short-term pain, it’s ultimately been great for Elon Musk’s Tesla. Yes, the company has seen a downturn in sales, with just 325,351 U.S. sales so far, down 16 percent year over year. But the end of the tax credit has shellacked the rest of the auto industry, where the overall EV market is down 30 percent. This has allowed Tesla to claw back some market share; once 80 percent of EV sales, Tesla’s market share hit 41 percent in 2025 when other automakers entered the market, but as of August 2026, it has bounced back to 52 percent of the U.S. EV market.

Christopher Otts, The Wall Street Journal

Vibecoded

The coding applications of LLMs have been relatively quick to materialize, and one result is that there’s been a surge in mobile apps released thanks to developers who can work faster or more efficiently as a result of the tools. The number of apps available on Apple’s App Store was up 30 percent last year. Thing is, though, just because there’s been a surge in apps doesn’t mean that anyone actually finds them useful or desirable; downloads were up just three percent.

Paul Ford, The New York Times

Glaciers

The Glacier Extinction study did exactly what it says on the tin and projected exactly how much warming each of the world’s glaciers will be able to tolerate before transitioning from geology to oceanography. A new tool, the Global Glacier Extinction Explorer, uses that data to directly map where and when the glaciers near you are projected to disappear under different levels of warming, building on a recent study published in Nature Climate Change. The extent of the warming will have a big impact on glacier survival: at 1.5 degrees Celsius, about 2,000 glaciers per year will disappear at peak extinction; by 2100, half of today’s glaciers might yet survive if temperatures are held to that level. That drops to just 20 percent of glaciers at 2.7 degrees Celsius, and just 10 percent at four degrees Celsius.

Koen Stein, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Air Conditioning

The air conditioner manufacturing industry is overwhelmingly based out of Asia, and companies like LG, Daikin and Midea have had a banner year as Europeans adopt cooling technology that was once generally unnecessary in their climate. For Midea, the PortaSplit — which costs about 1,000 euros and is appealing for renters because it’s a powerful system that can be installed temporarily without demolishing any walls — was a big hit in Germany, while Daikin is looking at an increase in European sales by about a fifth. In Germany, air conditioner sales are projected to hit 380,500 units this year, up 80.2 percent year over year, with portable unit sales up 112.9 percent. Those manufacturers also see lots of room to grow: Less than 20 percent of German homes have air conditioning.

Jens Kastner, Nikkei Asia

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to artist Morry Kolman about their latest work, Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader. Morry’s mod adds Flock cameras into the GTA V. Morry’s art has always been particularly incisive and useing clever, digitally-driven techniques — take his film, MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, or the Webby-winning Traffic Cam Photo Booth.

You can find Morry at WTTDOTM.com and any social media with the handle @WTTDOTM.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Morry, thank you so much for coming back on.

Of course.

You are an artist who works in lots of different exciting mediums, whether it’s the medium of traffic cam or the sky and stars itself. We’ve talked a little bit about your work in the past. I am very, very excited that you have a new project out. And I would love to hear a little bit about what you’re working on with Grand Theft Auto and Flock.

Just yesterday, I released a mod for GTA five, called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader that puts 235 Flock cameras into the in-game map of Los Santos 235. By the way, is exactly one 10th, the amount of Flock cameras currently installed in Los Angeles, which Los Santos is heavily, heavily based on. The cameras are real working cameras, they are modeled to look pretty similar to Flock cameras. As you drive around the map, they take pictures of you that you can export.

They also obviously report you to the cops if you’re currently wanted by them. But very often, they will also just report you to the cops, even if you’re doing nothing wrong. Specifically, every time you pass in front of any camera, there is a one in 20 chance that you get a police chase started, even if you’re completely innocent.

And that was made to reflect the fact that Flock has a history of misreporting innocent civilians as criminals or potential criminals. And literally leading to situations where people are pulled out of their car at gunpoint. Even when they are completely law abiding and 100 percent in the right with the exception of their license plate getting misrecognized by one of these private surveillance cameras.

I want to talk a little bit about the technology that you’re talking about, because there are a few people and few artists that I know who have worked in the field of automatic cameras as much as you have. The specific cameras that you’re talking about, that you implemented in this very, very cool mod, are Flock cameras. And these are automatic license plate readers.

In the past, you’ve done traffic cam cameras, things like that. You seem very interested in the surveillance field. I’m interested in what made these cameras get on your radar. What makes them different from some of the other more conventional surveillance technology that we’ve seen in the past?

Well, I think, for one, Flock is a private company, right? I don’t like police cameras being everywhere, but at least the police report to the mayor, or the governor, or some public figure, Flock cameras are private cameras that get sold to local governments. They’re pitched to local governments to say, “We can increase your bottom-line revenue or top-line revenue by just increasing the amount of tickets that you can send out, etc.” But the governments don’t control that data. Flock is the one that ingests it and then they can use it for other purposes, which we as people and citizens often have very little, if any access, and oversight into.

Flock continuously is exposed to be selling this new data and one way or another, they keep on collecting data that they say they’re not collecting, selling data that they say they’re not selling. When I see an $8-billion private surveillance company, I see something with a target to hit artistically, at the very least.

It’s not just the camera. It’s the technology behind it — the fairly sophisticated algorithm – but also the people who control it. They’re the customer, they’re not the product.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And you cannot petition a Flock camera in the same way that you can petition a precinct, right? Flock is, again, a private company, and unless they have a court order to do something, they’re not going to do it.

The other thing to mention is that Flock obviously is one of the biggest automated license plate reader companies. It is not the only one. But because they are in the news so much, and because they’re definitely one of the larger, if not the largest ALPR company in the United States, I wanted, as a way to bring awareness to all ALPRs, to choose the thing that has for better or worse become the household name of them.

Now Flock obviously gets a little bit of their attention. I want to talk a little bit about the medium that you chose, a game mod. What prompted that? Obviously, the level of immersion is deeply interesting. And the familiarity of the cityscape is very, very cool. Why did you choose? And how did you work with this particular medium?

I originally had a different idea for a game mod I wanted to do in Grand Theft Auto, which was all around replacing the cars in GTA with cars that have actually been seized by the U.S. government or actually used in crime as a way to take that immersion aspect that you’re talking about a step further and give people a way to learn about how government seizure works.

But that idea was both technically and conceptually complicated. I was talking to one of my friends, and we were talking about Flock in the context of Grand Theft Auto. And I was like, “Oh, that’s the idea. That’s what it has to be.” Putting Flock cameras in GTA is not only technically easier because you’re only ever dealing with one model, which is the one single model of a Flock camera.

But also the logic is way simpler. And importantly, it works really well with the medium because it has a gameplay aspect to write. The thing that you do in Grand Theft Auto all the time is drive around, you’re in cars so often in that game. And sometimes you’re in cars and you’re a criminal, right? Sometimes you are actively being wanted by the cops, and you’re trying to avoid them. But oftentimes, you’re just trying to get across town.

And I was like, how can I make people feel how annoying these cameras are? How can I give them a sense of like, “Wow, I’m going about my day doing nothing wrong, because for once in my playthrough of GTA, I’m actually trying to not arouse any suspicion, I’m just going to go to my house.” Then suddenly you have a helicopter after you, because you drove past 10 Flock cameras, and sure, nine of them didn’t do anything. But one just decided today’s the day that this guy gets a huge police chase coming after him.

I wanted a game that millions of people have played, I wanted something that dealt with both criminal, but also civilian activities. And I wanted something where you could feel the impact and irritation of these cameras in the way that you play the game. For the record, I didn’t really play GTA before making this mod. I’ve been playing it with the mod on the entire time.

And holy shit does it make the game way harder. I’m trying to mind my business because, again, there’s 235 of these cameras. They’re everywhere. I have found myself learning where they are, and I put the cameras in the game, right? I found myself figuring out which streets I didn’t put them on so that I can go drive down those streets so that for once in my life, I can make it across town in peace.

I feel like it’s probably something that especially people in communities or cities, towns, neighborhoods, etc where cameras have a larger presence, I’m sure there are other people that are thinking along the same lines where it’s like, “Hey, let me take this back road just for so I’m not being watched the entire time.”

I really like art that can make you change your behavior and feel deeply, deeply immersed in it. It sounds like you’ve done a very cool thing.

Yeah, yeah, I did. After a certain point, I coded in like a misreport slider, just so I could, again, make it across town once or twice. It’s been a ton of fun.

Also, this is a complete side note. But one of the great things about doing this mod now is obviously part of the reason I chose Grand Theft Auto as the medium. Aside from just the fact that you’re driving around in cars a lot is that as much as Flock is in the media right now, Grand Theft Auto is obviously extremely in the media right now. It was a perfect marriage of two different things: Flock and the anticipation for GTA Six.

Because I haven’t played GTA before, this mod has given me a very nice personal gift of having a very enviable position as it comes to GTA. I get to play it for the first time and have the complete opposite experience as anybody else who has ever played that game, which is “Wow, this game is amazing. I can’t wait for the sequel to come out in two months.”

That’s so good.

It’s like suckers. I can’t believe you waited 13 years.

Oh, that’s funny. Well, listen, a word of caution. I had the great pleasure of getting into the Game of Thrones books the month before A Dance with Dragons came out and then look at what happened after..

Yeah, very true. Your Winds of Winter is nowhere to be found.

Nope. Good luck on GTA VIII. But yeah, you really couldn’t have picked a better time to talk about these two particular trending topics, man.

Yeah, I mean, that’s half of it, right? A lot of my art is obviously geared towards virality, I often think about virality as just another medium to work with. If I had made this project in 2024, the point would have been the same, but the impact would have been wildly different. And that’s just always something that I’m thinking about in my work.

What is not like ambulance-chasing trends, but what is in the consciousness? What are people ready to hear an argument about? What are people ready to listen to and ready to experience? And then what can I give them? How can I take that readiness, take that preparation and openness and give them something to chew on, to think about, to share, to impact them, etc.

Yeah, I thought it was really clever to launch it with a trailer. That felt very in keeping with how games are announced. And even if people don’t actually download the mod or don’t actually play the game, you’ve been able to make an artistic statement just through a trailer embedded in a tweet, which is oftentimes how people can vicariously consume these games.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had so much fun making that trailer. I’m not gonna lie, aside from the small feature tweaks, development stopped like a week and a half ago. And most of my work the past week was just making sure I had really good shots for everything in the trailer.

I also love that song. I think that song goes so hard, one that I discovered basically a decade ago, and I’ve been wanting to use it in something ever since. When I was watching the character Michael shoot the Flock camera with the rocket launcher, I was like, “There’s only one beat that goes hard enough for this. I need Spark Master Tape on this right now.”

Amazing, man. So I will encourage folks to check this out, whether it’s the trailer, whether it’s the game mod, or anywhere else. But Morry, where can folks find you? And where can they find your continued work?

Great question. I am findable on pretty much any social platform you can think of. My handle is WTTDOTM, short for Welcome to the Desert of the Meme, which is my college meme page. I’m also available at WTTDOTM.com, which is my personal website. It also has my portfolio and other work that I’ve done. That’s where you can find me.

Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Edited by Crystal Wang

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Have a great weekend!

Sugar, We’re Going Down

It was more than they bargained for, yeah, as General Mills, Mars and McKee Foods are suing a group of sugar companies, alleging that they conspired to artificially inflate the price of sucralose, jacking up the price of the sweet stuff to all-time highs by coordinating prices. From 2017 to 2024, the bakeries and confectionaries — McKee makes Little Debbie, if you’ve not heard of them — all purchased billions of dollars worth of sugar from the companies, including from 2022 to 2024, a combined $1 billion worth of sugar from United Sugar, U.S. Sugar, American Crystal and Minn-Dak as well as $200 million worth of sugar from ASR/Domino. They are seeking treble damages. The sugar producers who are defending in the lawsuit control 65 percent of the sugar market, with the sugar business posting $13.5 billion in revenue in 2024 — the very year that they became the target of approximately two dozen antitrust lawsuits.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

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Lead

There are still 1,300 public water systems that have been cited by the EPA for blowing an October 2024 deadline to inventory water lines that might be leaching lead into drinking water. Overall, 6,300 water systems serving 3.8 million people have still not yet submitted the required list. Most of those 6,300 water systems — 84 percent — provide drinking water to 500 or fewer people. There are about four million homes and businesses in the country that are still connected to water utilities by a lead pipe, according to the latest estimates. Ambiguity is also pretty common, with 3,500 water systems not knowing what their service lines are made of, and one in five service lines being made of unknown materials, as lapses in record-keeping continue to pose an issue for utilities.

M.K. Wildeman, The Associated Press

Eggs

Researchers discovered a clutch of titanosaur eggs at an unexpectedly high latitude at a dig site in Argentina, expanding the possible range in which large sauropods might have lived. The 225 eggshell fragments were found in southern Argentina and have been dated to 68 million years old. At the time, that would have been at a latitude of 55 to 60 degrees south, making them both the southernmost definitive evidence of dinosaur eggs and the highest latitude sauropod nesting environment. This is interesting because it means that some of the largest animals that ever lived were sufficiently adaptable to survive at high latitudes, possibly venturing there during warm summers before heading back towards the equator for the winter.

Katie Hunt, CNN Science

MLB

Major League Baseball teams signed 12,700 international rookies from 2012 to 2026, and most of them were from either the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, which were responsible for 84 percent of all signings in 2026. The combination of an enormous payday in the United States has warped the economics of baseball development in the Dominican Republic, and a chance at that kind of opportunity can send families into debt in order to get promising players a shot at the MLB. One issue in particular is early handshake agreements between scouts and families that can make those teenage players targets of moneylenders who persuade undereducated parents to sign away portions of future bonuses in exchange for high-interest loans.

Gus Garcia-Roberts, ProPublica

Mercury

Mercury’s complex surface has wrinkles that indicate the planet was at one point larger than it is today. A new study found that Mercury may have lost 19 kilometers worth of total diameter since the formation of the planet, an estimate that would mean it shrunk by 10 percent to 30 percent more than originally thought. The original estimated shrinkage was a four to 16 kilometer reduction in size, but due to the vast number of impact craters on the planet’s surface, it was tough to get a read on those wrinkles in some areas.

Sasha Warren, American Geophysical Union

Cookies

U.S. cookie sales are projected to hit $18.9 billion in 2026, as growth slows to 1.2 percent amid pressure on discretionary spending, reduction in snacking frequency and naturally the vile and pervasive libel that cookies are “a sometimes food.” One significant impediment for cookies is that there are now simply other snacks, and as customers demand novelty, the cookie has a vast amount of competition. Brands are adapting to that quest for novelty by throwing recipes on the sides of cookie boxes and other snacks, pitching ideas about recipes that the original product might be fashioned into.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Grand Theft Auto

The video game industry is on track for a banner year, with Newzoo’s 2026 estimate for video game revenue coming in at $213.9 billion thanks in major part to the forthcoming release of Grand Theft Auto VI. It’s not just sales of games getting a boost, but also a boost to console sales coming in anticipation of GTA 6, without which console revenue would actually decline. The report flagged that high prices for memory are weighing on gamers this year. That said, researchers also say that the cure for high prices is high prices, and if that doesn’t work, the cure is to release an incredibly popular vehicle-hijacking simulator the same year that truckloads of graphic cards and RAM chips are en route to obvious, irritating warehouses, and something tells me they’ll figure something out.

Isabelle Farina, Variety

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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WPBL

Revenue for professional women’s sports is projected to hit $3 billion this year, up 340 percent in four years, thanks in large part to growth in established leagues like the WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League. Upstart leagues are attempting to get in on the surge in interest as well, with the Women’s Professional Baseball League kicking off its first season back in August and the playoffs kicking off last night. The WPBL draws from a particularly international set of players. Because baseball in the United States is not an NCAA-sanctioned sport, nearly half of the 65 players in the league hail from abroad, with 11 from Canada, eight from Japan, five from Mexico and four from Australia. The salary cap for each team is just $95,000 over the eight-week season.

Callie Maddox, The Conversation

Window

The age of permissive return policies has quietly ended, as companies tighten up their protocols around what they will accept as a return, when they will accept it and in what manner they’ll compensate the customer. Right now 68 percent of retailers are charging a fee on returns at least some of the time, up from 43 percent of retailers five years ago. Return windows are getting shorter, dropping from 39 days to 37 days on average over the past two years, and at larger brands, dropping from 43 days to 38 days. Returns are tough for retailers — processing returns costs, on average, 27 percent of the purchase price — and the margins aren’t there to keep up with the overly generous policies.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

Epishelf

A new study confirms fears that the last epishelf lake in Canada has indeed permanently drained and cannot recover, signaling the permanent loss of a millennia-old ecosystem. An epishelf lake forms when an ice shelf dams a layer of freshwater above seawater connected to the ocean, and the Milne Fiord epishelf lake on northern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut was a textbook example. In July 2020, the ice shelf broke apart, losing 45 percent of the area and destroying the barrier holding the ice water in place, causing the lake to vanish by that autumn. By July 2022, brackish water had fully replaced the freshwater, and there has been no recovery since, meaning that a system that took millennia to form was wiped out in a matter of months.

Lou Corpuz-Bosshart, University of British Columbia

Bittersweet

A new analysis of 7,384 films sought to track the evolution of endings, finding that the percentage of movies with happy endings has declined from 56 percent in the 1990s to 48 percent today. That’s not to say that unhappy endings have come to corner the market — unhappy endings went from 12 percent of film endings in the 1990s to 17 percent in the 2000s, only to drop right back down again to 13 percent of conclusions in the 2020s — but rather the very steady rise of movies that end bittersweet. Those have increased steadily from 26 percent of movies in the 1980s to 35 percent of films in the 2020s.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Gondwana

Gondwana, the continent that would eventually form into the supercontinent Pangea during the time of the dinosaurs, is getting upgraded to a supercontinent itself in a new study that claims that it encompassed 80 percent of all Earth’s land 550 million years ago. This also calls into question the theory that supercontinents emerge periodically every 500 million years, with the established timeline putting the Nuna supercontinent 1.8 billion years ago, Rodinia 1.2 billion years ago and Pangea 335 million years ago. “Supercontinent” is the somewhat arbitrary line where a continent encompasses 75 percent of all continental crust; Gondwana was previously believed to have just 64 percent of known land.

Paul Voosen, Science

Batteries

Battery installations in the United States hit 20.2 gigawatts in the second quarter of 2026, which puts the U.S. on pace for 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed this full year, 20 percent more than last year. Of those, 60.75 gigawatt-hours will be utility-scale, and 10.05 gigawatt-hours will be behind-the-meter, the latter category encompassing the kinds of batteries owned by homeowners and businesses, but this year in particular refers to those powering data centers. Indeed, home installations are down 16 percent in 2026 due to the killing of a tax credit.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Airbus

Airbus has over a 50 percent market share in China, with the country’s roughly 30 airlines flying 2,370 Airbus jets. It’s facing stiff competition, though, and has cut its forecasted number of narrowbody jets sold to Chinese airlines down by 500 units to 7,480 jets over the next 20 years, and 8,830 planes overall in general. The rival consuming its market share? No, not Boeing, but high-speed rail, with China aiming for 70,000 kilometers of high-speed rail by 2035, up from 50,000 kilometers today, with the rail system serving as a serious and viable alternative to jets.

Danny Lee, Bloomberg

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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The Walking Dead

Five producers of the AMC hit The Walking Dead have made a deal with the networks for a $120 million settlement, avoiding a federal trial set for October. The lawsuit traces back to 2017, when the producers alleged that AMC pulled off some Hollywood accounting related to an innovative definition of “modified adjusted gross receipts” to deprive them of a cut of a franchise that generated billions of dollars and propped up the network for years. The producers had a setback in 2022 when a judge ruled they were not cheated, but in the intervening period, AMC cut a deal with series creator Frank Darabont for $200 million, which opened up a new line of legal argument.

Gene Maddaus, Variety

Television

From 2022 to 2025, the number of United States-produced linear television content orders fell from 1,773 to 1,304 shows, a decline of 26 percent. That’s a big drop, but it’s a pretty solid hold compared to the bloodbath among streaming shows, where orders fell from 1,144 shows in 2022 to just 678 in 2025. On television, the bad news has mostly been on cable: Network orders dropped from 408 to 352. But on television, where subscribers are down 56 percent since 2016, the number of series orders dropped 33 percent, from 1,295 shows to 877 shows. Since 2024, 52 percent of all new scripted series were franchise-based, as networks go for sure bets rather than take any risks.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Probiotics

A new study found that consumption of probiotic supplements has increased sharply over the past several years, while just consuming generally probiotic foods is otherwise flat, with fiber intake not meaningfully changing over the course of the study from 2009 to 2023. People do love those supplements, though: Probiotics are up 287 percent among adults from 2009 to 2023, and up 786 percent among people under the age of 20. The percentage of young people taking probiotic supplements increased from 0.63 percent in 2009 to 5.58 percent in 2023.

Sam Page, University of Michigan

Reservoirs

Half of the United States’ 90,000 reservoirs are more than a quarter filled with sediment, with the country having lost eight percent of its water storage capacity, according to a new study. The capacity of the nation’s reservoirs peaked in the 1970s, and slowly diminished thanks to sediment buildup. It’s a problem not just for storage capacity — huge water reservoir investments by definition get worse every year — but also for hydroelectric components in dams since the sediment can cause damage.

Kyle Stock and Kyle Kim, Bloomberg

Battery

The warranty of electric vehicle batteries typically covers eight years or 100,000 miles (160,000 km), where the manufacturer is required to provide a replacement if capacity goes below 70 percent. According to a new study, the median health of a battery after 150,000 kilometers is actually pretty great, with the batteries for 20 popular EV models all coming in between 87 percent and 94 percent of their original capacity. The median state of health was between 91 and 97 percent after 50,000 kilometers and 88 to 95 percent after 100,000 miles. The best performer was the EQA from Mercedes-Benz, which had a median 94.0 percent capacity after 150,000 kilometers, followed by the Hyundai Ioniq 5 (93.8 percent) and the BMW i4 (93.6 percent).

Kana Inagaki and Clara Murray, Financial Times

Renoir

Two paintings by the impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir were stolen from the Renoir Museum near Nice. Thieves attempted to steal four paintings but dropped two as they fled, with the museum’s alarm triggering at 5:48 a.m., prompting a police response within five minutes. The museum has a collection of 13 Renoir paintings and 40 sculptures. According to authorities, the stolen paintings, Madame Colonna Romano (1910) and Jeune femme au puits (1886), have an estimated value of $9 million.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

Rocks

A new analysis found the location of the quarry for the Devils Arrows in northern England, which are 23-foot-tall, 25-ton stones that constitute the tallest surviving prehistoric stone row. The researchers accomplished this with a low-impact sampling method that used tape to grab tiny mineral grains from the stones without cause damage. It turns out that the stones were likely taken from a challenging landscape 18 kilometers away. Given that this was done sometime around 2000 BC, that’s no small feat.

Curtin University

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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Metal

Nickel and copper have been priced at a consistent ratio since the beginning of large-scale nickel mining in the 1800s, with nickel costing on average 2.85 times as much as copper on the London Metal Exchange since 1987. Lately, though, that’s fallen to 1.17 times the price, nearly even, and by one measure, copper is actually costing more than nickel. Nickel’s selling for about $14,500 per metric ton, and while the LME price for copper is $14,200 per ton, add in the treatment and refining charges and copper’s going for $15,112. One reason is processing innovations that allow the mining of Indonesian nickel laterites, opening up new, cheap ways to mine nickel, while new copper mines have been rare; demand for nickel surged thanks to robust interest in electric vehicles.

David Fickling, Bloomberg

We’re So Back

Domestic box office sales from May 1 to Labor Day came in at a remarkable $4.76 billion, the second-highest on record, behind only the 2013 summer box office high-water mark of $4.755 billion. This was also the first summer on record where each month saw over $1 billion in box office receipts. In the final weekend of the summer, Spider-Man: Brand New Day made $23.5 million, and given its momentum and $923 million so far, it’s on track to break the domestic box office record of $936 million set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Meanwhile, The Odyssey continues to do solid business thanks largely to IMAX, which accounted for a remarkable 30 percent of the film’s total box office and $486 million globally.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

CD

Sales of CDs are booming, with the RIAA reporting that 17.5 million CDs were sold by the music industry in the first half of the year, up 45.7 percent year over year, fueled in large part by BTS and young listeners preferring them as collectibles. While they’re not quite vinyl — which moved 26.5 million units for $543.8 billion — that is still a $171.1 million revenue stream for the music industry. According to the report, half of buyers of CDs do not in fact own a CD player.

Terrence O’Brien, The Verge

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Organ

Organ donation is considerably rarer in Japan, China and South Korea than it is in other wealthy countries. In Japan, organ donation after death requires documented consent before death or approval from family members, which limits the number of donors; Japan had just 1.3 cardiac-death and brain-death donors per million people in 2024. By comparison, that figure is 53.93 donors per million in Spain (which presumes consent unless an objection is registered explicitly while living) and 49.7 donors per million in the United States. This has sent Japanese patients in need of organs overseas, and in some cases, turning to intermediaries who broker organs.

Saho Nakagawa, Nikkei Asia

Merger

In 2024, Duke University announced plans to close its herbarium given the costs associated with necessary upgrades. Last week, a new home for the 850,000 plant specimens was announced: UNC, which will be adding Duke’s plants to its own substantial collection to create the third-largest university research herbarium collection in the country with 1.7 million specimens, behind only Harvard’s and Berkeley’s.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Outro

A new analysis of 2,284 albums from across 70 years found a distinct shift in the ending songs of albums. On average, final songs were 18 percent longer than other songs on a record, and tended to be relatively unique compared to the other songs on an album. In the 1950s — when there was a rule to put loud, bass-heavy songs earlier in an album and quieter ones later because the stylus has less groove to work with on vinyl — over 60 percent of songs ended on a quiet acoustic track. That declined steadily, bottoming out at 16 percent ending that way in the 1980s, but recovered slightly back to 30 percent in the 2010s and 2020s.

Mitchell Stirling, Significance

Onigiri

Stores outside of Japan have had success selling onigiri — rice balls often stuffed with meat that are a staple meal for people on the go in Japan but had not really caught on abroad until recently. Sales of onigiri-making machines were $15.6 million in 2021, with 65 percent of that coming from Japan; by 2032, sales are expected to rise to $40.9 million, with only 45.5 percent in Japan as the food grows in popularity.

Yurika Yoneda, Nikkei Asia

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

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Have a great weekend! We are off on Monday in observation of Labor Day, have a great long weekend.

Angels

The Los Angeles Angels are up for sale, as the embodiment of MLB owner socialism hits the market. Nobody has squandered talent quite like the Angels ownership, taking prime years of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and turning it into absolutely nothing. The only good thing to come out of Arte Moreno’s stewardship of the team was Tungsten Arm O’Doyle. Since 2012, the Angels have had the single worst ratio of dollars per Wins Above Replacement spent on externally acquired players at $11.27 million per WAR. Anyway, ownership is selling the team at a valuation of $4 billion after buying the team off Disney for $184 million in 2003.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Podcast

The podcast industry is supported by just a few whales of advertisers. In the beginning, the entire industry was propped up by benefactors that specialized in delivering email, for some reason. Then, of course, things evolved, and for some reason, it was companies that enabled listeners to obtain postage stamps. Soon after, it was the direct-to-consumer underwear business, and then naturally, of course, the entire audio industry was propped up by mattresses for a solid couple of years. The fall of the house of Casper led to great chaos, in which any number of folk remedies, snake oil, mail-order powders and Gentlemen’s Aides moved in. Now, though, the most powerful person in podcasting is the woman who buys ads for BetterHelp, which has become the top podcast advertiser of all time, with $242 million spent on podcast ads since 2023, running ads on over 1,000 shows at any given moment.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Spray and Pray

Many colleges and universities are opting into the Common App’s direct admissions offering, where they can just offer admission to high school students who didn’t even apply to them. In the 2026-27 cycle, 236 schools are participating in the program, up from 215 in 2025-26 and 119 schools in 2024-25. The schools that tend to go for it are the private, less-selective schools that have been under the most serious pressure in this current environment. The acceptance rate among four-year not-for-profit schools has hit 70 percent as of 2023.

Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal

Follow The Denarii

A new study attempted to reconstruct the monetary circulation of the Roman Republic based on four million coins found in excavations. Those coins were found in 24,646 hoards and were linked to 5,167 pairs of minting and discovery sites. This data allowed the researchers to approximate broad flows of the Roman economy and its gradual monetization, a process that eventually replaced the straight-up trade or in-kind swaps that defined the informal economy of the Republic. While lots of interpretations place the Roman army at the forefront of disseminating currency among new territory, this study found that only when the provinces were integrated with the broader Roman economic structures did they really develop a permanent demand for currency.

Joao Silva, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

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Clams

A new analysis looked at the potential implications of climate change on mollusks, projecting significant declines in the size of certain organisms as a result, with the average body length of some declining by 16 percent. For mollusks, that can be a big deal: The projected 16.2 percent decrease in the average length of a Baltic Sea clam would correspond to a 41 percent decrease in the average body mass of the organism. The exception, the study suggests, would be cephalopods; in the Arctic Ocean, the size of octopus tusk shells would increase by 3.3 percent.

University of Helsinki

Drosophila

Scientists at Cambridge announced that they have mapped all 124 million connections of nerve cells in a male fly’s brain, completing an effort that saw the mapping of a female fly’s brain two years ago. According to the researchers, 95 percent of the cells are shared between the brains. Building the connectome — the list of neurons — has been an extensive and painstaking process that has culminated in this 3D map of the brain and nerve cord.

Pallab Ghosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News

Mercury

The BepiColombo mission to Mercury has hit a significant milestone, as the linked European and Japanese space agency spacecraft have separated as planned from the cruiser. Now 124 million miles away, the conjoined spacecraft will enter orbit around Mercury in November, and will split from one another in December. The mission was launched in 2018 and has travelled six billion miles, going to Mercury the long way; the planet is so very small and so very far away that it took nine planetary flybys to reduce BepiColombo’s energy enough to actually enter Mercury’s orbit.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

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N/A

Dollar sales of nonalcoholic beer, spirits and wine in the United States were up 14 percent in the 52-week period ending July 18, and in the three-month period up to June 27, sales of nonalcoholic beer hit $235 million. The thing is, while the phrase “nonalcoholic” sounds rather decisive, chemically it’s not entirely the case, and at times, that can cause issues for, say, people who have liver transplants and people who really cannot consume alcohol anymore. While many brands use phrases like “zero percent alcohol or zero-proof, regulations have anything with less than 0.5 percent alcohol as nonalcoholic. It’s somewhat expensive to get rid of that last trace of alcohol from the brews, and only a few brands — Budweiser Zero, Michelob Ultra Zero — go that extra milliliter. That has led to some legal issues, such as Heineken getting sued back in 2021 by buyers who said that Heineken 0.0 is, in fact, 0.03 percent ABV.

Jennifer Williams, The Wall Street Journal

Pablo Torre Found Out

The NBA has stripped the Los Angeles Clippers of five first-round draft picks, suspended team owner Steve Ballmer and fined Kawhi Leonard $700,000. This follows a league investigation of a scandal alleging a conspiracy to subvert the salary cap by giving Leonard a no-show endorsement deal with a team sponsor that paid handsomely. The Clippers were also fined $30 million and will lose their first-round picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033.

Michael McCann and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Forgeries

Paris prosecutors have requested a trial for the alleged architect of a criminal ring that trafficked forged art, and have requested a renewed arrest warrant for an Italian painter that they believe was responsible for producing the fake art. WARNING: The following alleged crime you are about to read is extremely European. In 2016, a painting of Venus that was being exhibited as a Cranach was seized by authorities from the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein and exposed as a fake in an art world fiasco that came to involve art galleries and museums around the world that authenticated and exhibited the works. Over the course of 15 years, the French prosecutors have retained 13 works designated as fakes after forensic examinations, and they are believed to have found the people responsible.

Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper

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Crunchy

The cyclosporiasis outbreak that has spoiled the appetite for iceberg lettuce around the country has prompted some restaurateurs to question whether lettuce is actually worth it at this point. It’s famously nutritionally bereft — typically less than one percent of the calories or protein in your standard lunchtime bowl — and at 95 percent water weight, isn’t adding a whole lot beyond fiber, texture and crunch. The tradeoff for that is considerable: Leafy greens are responsible for as much as 9.18 percent of foodborne illnesses, with lettuce responsible for 60.8 percent of those leafy green outbreaks.

Nathan Libbey, QSR Magazine

Talisman

A new survey found that 53 percent of U.S. adults believe they spend too much time on their smartphone, a percentage that rises to 70 percent among the 18 to 29 cohort. While 45 percent of adults have tried to cut back on their smartphone usage in the past 12 months, only 25 percent of those who made an attempt to dial it back considered the experience a success. Thanks to the Pew Research Center, we now have exactly enough information to turn a standard smartphone into a cursed item in Dungeons & Dragons 5e, offering +1 to insight, causing a level of exhaustion, requiring a DC 11 Wisdom check to realize it is cursed and a subsequent DC 15 saving throw to actually remove it.

William Bishop, Olivia Sidoti and Monica Anderson, Pew Research Center

License

An identity theft service was found selling digital scans of 153 million driver’s licenses from people in the United States and Canada, and they appear to be legitimate. The New Orleans field office of the FBI has launched an official inquiry into the Nexus service, and the data — which appears legitimate — is boasted to have come from an active breach of a major identity verification company. Over the course of 24 hours, the number of driver’s license records increased by 400,000, which would indicate freshly stolen data, some of which appears to have come from companies who rented cars to people.

Brian Krebs, Krebs On Security

Cupid

Venus currently has no moons, but it’s entirely possible it did in the past, according to a new study that modeled what could have happened if Venus did have a moon at some point. Venus revolves around the sun in a 225-day orbit, but rotates comparatively slowly, taking 243 Earth days to rotate one day. Earth’s faster spin transfers angular momentum to Earth’s moon, pushing it out a little bit every year. Venus, by comparison, would have angular momentum transferred inward, which would have inevitably calamitous implications for its satellite; a moon of Venus half the mass of Earth’s Moon could last 1.7 billion years, and one that is the same mass as Earth’s moon could last only 30 million years, after which, the hypothetical Venusian moons would reach a distance of 15,000 kilometers, pass the Roche limit, and get ripped apart. The bad news: Any evidence that this, in fact, is what happened has almost certainly been consumed by the volcanically active surface of Venus.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Shein

Fast fashion retailer Shein has hit public markets, finishing its IPO day in Hong Kong with a market cap of HK$193 billion (US$24.6 billion). For a company that has consumed a whole lot of attention, that makes it roughly the size of H&M, which has a $29 billion market cap. But that is still well under the largest players in the fast fashion space, Uniqlo (parent company Fast Retailing with a $136.5 billion market cap) and Zara (parent company Inditex, which has a $210 billion market cap).

Cissy Zhou and Lorretta Chen, Nikkei Asia

Leshp Freaking Go

They found the island: The mysterious floating island that appeared on Williston Lake reservoir in British Columbia in late July only to disappear in August has been found. According to B.C. Hydro, which manages the reservoir, an analysis of satellite imagery has located the forested landmass 30 kilometers northwest of where it was last seen in the middle of the reservoir. It is now resting on the north entrance of where the Ospika River flows into the reservoir, away from the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. The origin of the island has yet to be determined, but it’s believed that strong winds may have moved the 9,800-square-meter island across open waters after it broke free from the land thanks to high water levels.

Matt Preprost, CBC News

A Bridge Too Far

A federal judge has thrown out most of the remaining economic damage cases against Grace Ocean Private Ltd and Synergy Marine Group, the owner and operator of the Dali cargo ship that crashed into and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024. The city of Baltimore may pursue its claim regarding damage to a 72-inch water main under the river, and the county may continue its case that it has an interest in damaged waterways and shorelines, but ultimately, most of the original 54 civil claims have been settled or voluntarily dropped. With the dismissal of the economic damage claims from the city and county of Baltimore, as well as eight consolidated claims from insurers, longshoremen, energy, export, manufacturing, construction services, technology, sugar, molasses and publishing firms, this thing appears to be mostly resolved. So far, there have been civil settlements to the tune of $102 million with the federal government for cleanup costs, $2.5 million with the state and an undisclosed amount with families of victims of the incident. ACE American Insurance Co., which was the property insurer for the bridge, paid out its policy limit of $350 million.

Andrew G. Simpson, Insurance Journal

Dark Matter

Researchers at the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector are reporting an interesting result which may — it’s still very unconfirmed — be the first detection of a particle of dark matter. LZ is the largest detector of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) in the world, and it is 1480 meters deep in a former gold mine in South Dakota, with seven tons of liquid xenon attempting to spot a WIMP at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. They’re looking for particles that are stable, about 100 times the mass of a proton and interacting only with gravity and the weak nuclear force, as they don’t absorb or emit electromagnetic radiation. The LZ team, after expanding its search, found a single incident with recoil energy of 248 keV, a surprising result that nevertheless has the field buzzing; there’s still something like a one in 200 chance it’s a statistical fluke, but at the very least, it’s something after many years of a whole lot of nothing in the search for dark matter, which may make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe.

Adrian Cho, Science

Art

A new analysis found that the art market remains incredibly top-heavy and dependent on the world’s richest people to keep it afloat, which further entangles the world of culture to the whims of the markets. In 2025, 1,761 works of art (0.3 percent of all auction sales) generated 45 percent of all global auction sales by value. At the highest echelons, art behaves like a luxury good and has narrowed the collector base, as even upper-middle-wealth-tier collectors are squeezed out. In the first half of 2026, 150 works have been responsible for 60 percent of global auction sales.

Anny Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Great Filter

A group of private citizens announced a space mission concept called Fermi Explorer, attempting to build a minimum viable launch to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. They are attempting to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft with a one-kilogram payload that will get to the neighboring star system in under 80,000 years. They are trying to use existing technology to attempt something cheap that can be launched by 2029. The probe will be a tank of xenon gas attached to some solar panels with a few small scientific payloads. The mission would launch into low-Earth orbit on a rideshare mission and spend the next few years increasing its velocity by getting 0.42 astronomical units from the Sun and executing “perihelion pump” maneuvers, achieving an escape velocity after roughly 12 years, at which point it will have a velocity of 25 kilometers per second toward Alpha Centauri, arriving in 77,000 years.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Uncertain

There are just a few more weeks of playoff uncertainty left in Major League Baseball, as the window of opportunity closes for teams on the bubble. At the beginning of June, there were five teams with a 90 percent chance or higher of making the playoffs, seven teams with less than a 10 percent chance and 18 teams with an undecided fate. As of the end of August, that’s nine teams most likely in, 13 teams almost certainly out and just 8 teams left with between a 10 percent and 90 percent shot at the playoffs. That’s a lot of teams with a fairly certain playoff fate, with still weeks to go in the season.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

Filler Episode

The average quarterly spending on facial fillers in the United States fell to $850 million in 2025, down from $970 million in 2023, as people looking to get a little vitality in their face are dialing back the dosage. Global revenue for Juvéderm was down 15 percent year over year last year amid what those in the industry call “filler fatigue.” While people are cutting back on the standard hyaluronic acid dermal fillers, that doesn’t mean they’re finished with getting work done; much to the contrary, spending on facial surgeries, which includes nose jobs and facelifts, hit $1.8 billion in the first half of 2026, up 22 percent year over year.

Chavie Lieber and Sara Ashley O’Brien, The Wall Street Journal

Hair of the Dog

Scientists with the United States Forest Service injected 6,000 young elm trees with Dutch elm disease spores in an attempt to test resistance to the illness that has killed tens of millions of elm trees across the country. The infected trees will be taken care of in an orchard for the next 15 years, at which point their seeds will form the vanguard of an effort to replenish the population of elms in the country. Those young elm trees were bred from a group of trees in the Northeast that have survived the plague. Elm trees are ecologically significant; they tolerate flooding well, can survive frigid northern winters and help prevent flooding by sucking up water after heavy rains.

Amanda Swinhart and Patrick Whittle, The Associated Press

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Screens

New data from market researcher JD Power from a survey of 68,084 owners of new 2026 model vehicles found that the tech features in cars that scored the best were the ones that didn’t demand the attention and focus of the drivers. Smart ignition and smart HVAC systems were the most popular and had the highest satisfaction rates, with smart ignition registering only 2.4 problems per 100 vehicles. On the other hand, things like passenger screens — large screens in front of passengers — were useless, with a third of owners using them in the first 90 days of ownership, and just six percent using them every time they drive.

Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge

Library

Some libraries have experimented with ditching the rigid, and at times antiquated, organizational principles of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of taking a page out of retailers’ playbooks and organizing their shelves as one would a bookstore. Deschutes County, Oregon recently overhauled its library system and experimented with shifting up the organizational structure of its stacks in a pilot program to significant success. It started in 2017, when librarians reclassified the children’s picture books, moving from alphabetizing by author name and toward topic-based classification, a move that increased circulation by 20 percent. When they reorganized the law library, they notched a 10 percent jump in circulation. After those successful pilots, the library rolled out the initiative system-wide to great effect: The average circulation checked out at any given time jumped from a Dewey average of 20 percent to almost 30 percent, with the circulation for adult nonfiction benefiting the most, rising from 15 percent to 27 percent thanks to the change.

Patrick Sisson, Fast Company

Alfalfa

The federal plan for the lower Colorado River basin will demand a 1.25 million acre-feet cut in water usage annually by 2028. For Arizona, their cut is enough to serve 2.3 million households per year. For others, it is enough for some grass. Most of the Colorado River is used to grow food for cows in one way or another: In the upper Colorado basin, 70 percent of the water goes to alfalfa and other hay, and that’s 41 percent in the lower Colorado. Lots of that alfalfa goes to cows that are overseas, with 26 percent of the hay grown in California and Arizona being exported. When Arizona’s Colorado River allocation was cut by 300,000 acre-feet in 2022, lots of farmers with junior rights stopped planting or switched from water-intensive alfalfa (which fell 48 percent in one irrigation district) to barley (which grew 159 percent).

Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

Robots

Last year the humanoid robot industry moved 20,000 units, with China responsible for 95 percent of that movement. This year, China anticipates producing 100,000 humanoid robots, and Bank of America projects that annual shipments will hit 1.2 million annually by 2030. China is home to 150 humanoid robot companies, and the government supported those companies by buying $230 million worth of them in the first half of this year, up from $62 million in the same period of last year and $6 million in H1 2024. Power utility State Grid announced plans to spend $1 billion on robots, saying that each unit will save $74,000 to $119,000 in labor costs.

Laurie Chen, Eduardo Baptista and Ju-min Park, Reuters

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Forbidden Island, Maximum Difficulty

A verdant, tree-covered island appeared mysteriously in the largest reservoir in British Columbia, only to disappear shortly after it was spotted. B.C. Hydro and local residents spotted the forested landmass in Williston Reservoir with satellite imagery on July 21, confirming the new island in the reservoir — an islet that was about 70 meters wide, 140 meters long and 9,800 square meters in area. By August 5, the island was no longer visible and appears to have disappeared. The Williston reservoir was created in 1968 and is the seventh-largest reservoir in the world, and it is filled to the brim for the first time in 14 years; authorities say that the high water may have been a driftwood accumulation that formed over many years, allowing trees to take root in the debris that broke free as water levels rose. That said, any residents of British Columbia who may have recently entered into a desperate pact with the fae are urged to consult their contracts to ensure they have not failed their part of the bargain.

Matt Prepost, CBC News

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

Subscribe now

Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·

Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money · Proverbs · Manny Fidel · Ticketmaster · Conservation · Moneywall · Sizing · Hello, Sunshine ·

Welcome To The Family · Not-Ship · Prairie Graveyards · Hallmark Christmas · Power Soak · Tough Cookie · Bigfoot ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018