Numlock News: April 1, 2026 • Splitter, Converse, Terabits

Apr 01, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Courtesy reminder that today is a bad day on the internet, don’t believe everything you read out there!

Super Smash

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is projected to open to $175 million to $180 million over its first five days of release, and some estimates on the higher end project it’ll probably come in closer to $190 million to $200 million. The movie is expected to bring in another $175 million abroad, all but certainly snatching the biggest debut of the year. The first film made $204 million in its domestic opening and another $173 million abroad. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hits theaters on Wednesday. The film will continue the sprawling story told in the first movie, answering the lore behind the question of “What’s happening off-screen while our hero Waluigi is warming up playing tennis against these characters?”

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Bone Ash Apartments

China has two space problems, and one has become a solution to the other. The first issue is a property glut. Widespread construction and a saving strategy centered on buying up more apartments than one might need means a lot of buildings are empty. And property prices in the country can be incredibly low, as they have dropped 40 percent between 2021 and 2025. The other problem is that cemetery space is limited. These spaces come with just a temporary lease that must be renewed every 20 years. They can be pricey; a burial plot in Beijing's Changping Tianshou Cemetery will run you between 10,000 and 200,000 yuan (US$1,450 to US$29,000), with a tombstone pot starting at 150,000 yuan. Clearly, a market inefficiency has been revealed here. Now, authorities have begun to crack down on “bone ash apartments,” or the use of residential properties specifically for the placement of ashes, prompting a new law banning people from storing cremated remains in empty apartments.

Ella Kipling, BBC News

Converse

Nike’s Converse brand of skate shoes has been declining, as sales approach a 15-year low. Converse sales appear to be coming in at an estimated $1.27 billion this year, the lowest since 2012 when Converse posted $1.32 billion in sales, and well under the recent peak of $2.43 billion notched as recently as 2023. Nike may seek to unload the brand to Authentic Brands Group, one of those perennial buyers of brands that had been sliding out of the trendy realm among them Reebok, Dockers, Champion and Nautica. Now I’m just speculating here, but perhaps Converse is dealing with the inevitable problem an arch-support-lacking shoe brand experiences when its longtime consumer ages into their thirties. Perhaps Converse is simply podiatrically incapable of sustaining brand loyalty in the absence of performance-enhancing orthotics.

Lily Meier and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, Bloomberg

Hop Water

Beer brand Constellation will acquire Hopwtr for an undisclosed amount, snatching up a product that has been just one year away from dominating the beer industry for each of the past 10 years: the fusion power of brewing. Sales of nonalcoholic beer were up 22 percent in 2025, and hop water has long been held as a promising element of that sector. That said, it’s never really materialized as an actually solid business, despite breweries being delighted to produce the stuff as a byproduct of their ordinary business. Hop water generates about $28.5 million in U.S. sales. While that isn’t nothing, it does leave a bit to be desired.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Splitter

The iconic baseball pitch of the ’80s, known as the splitter, is back and better than ever. As of 2016, just 1.4 percent of pitches thrown across the MLB were splitters; last year, 3.3 percent were, and they’re showing up in clutch games at the highest echelons of the sport. In last year’s World Series, 11.4 percent of pitches were splitters. That pitch went out of style owing to an elbow injury epidemic, and many believed it was a significant contributor to the increased need for Tommy John surgery. This was incorrect, as new data indicate that this was more of an unrelated correlation (velocities were rising at the same time) rather than a causation, as a splitter puts less torque on an elbow than throwing a fastball.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

Volunteers

A pair of bills has passed the House and Senate of Tennessee that will extend an explicit exemption to public records requests: playbooks utilized by the coaches of Tennessee state schools. In 2019, the state passed legislation that exempted “information relating to game or player integrity” from public records requests, in the hopes of getting out ahead of a legal betting boom on college sports that could hypothetically allow a clever gambler to FOIA the call signals or practice recordings of the University of Tennessee. That law was due to sunset in July, and the new bill passed 74-6 in the House and 29-0 in the state Senate. While I’m sure fending off sign-stealing via records requests is a totally real concern for the Volunteers (8-5 in 2025, lost in the Music City Bowl), the very real concern is that getting financial transparency from athletics departments is already an uphill fight. Legislatures throwing up new legal excuses to delay the release of public records is a valid cause for fear, particularly as colleges begin to steer money towards these athletes directly.

Daniel Libit, Sportico

Light

Researchers have pulled off a new speed record for data transmission along a commercially-installed fiber optic cable, hitting a transmission rate of 450 terabits per second, or 450 trillion bits per second. The data transfer was along an existing London cable connecting a laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data center in Canary Wharf and then back again. Such a rate would be enough to stream 50 million movies simultaneously, and was 10 times faster than seen in current commercial networks. The achievement was the result of new custom hardware that allowed data to be sent along a spectrum of frequencies ranging from 1264 nanometers to 1617.8 nanometers, a much wider range than is typically available.

Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist

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