Numlock News: April 16, 2026 • Dark Energy, Dinosaurs, SantaCon
By Walt Hickey
Con
SantaCon, the annual event where scores of belligerent inebriates in Santa costumes are unleashed into Midtown, is a well-known scourge on New York, mixing all the amateur-night-at-the-Jagerbomb-factory mess of St. Patrick’s Day with that 2010s vintage charm of postmodern flashmobs. A few years ago, the organizers of the event realized that their con had become a sufficient enough menace to grab the attention of the authorities, and they rebranded the bar crawl as a charity event where the registration fees of the Santas would be donated. Well, new allegations against the organizer of the event lodged by the Scrooges of the Southern District of New York appear to show that the charity bit was a scam, and just a fraction of the $2.7 million raised through SantaCon charity events from 2019 to 2024 actually made it to the charities. Instead, they were spending $365,000 on lakefront property renovations in New Jersey, spending $124,000 on leasing a luxury apartment in Manhattan, dropping $100,000 into a boutique Costa Rican resort and another $3,000 on a Michelin-star dinner.
Larry Neumeister, The Associated Press, SDNY
LIV Golf
After spending $5 billion on the upstart rival to the Professional Golfers’ Association Tour, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is getting skittish and is reportedly thinking about ending funding for the rivals. Overall, the existence of the rival promotion has been pretty good for golfers, even if they didn’t take Riyadh’s cash, as it prompted the PGA to increase its prize money in response: PGA’s combined prize money for the top 10 tour earners rose from $67 million the season before LIV launched to $124 million the year after, and now stands at $143 million as of the 2025 season.
Kurt Badenhausen and Scott Soshnick, Sportico
Self-Storage
As of 2024 there were 16,681,383 households renting a self-storage unit, up from 10,032,740 in 2005, and constituting a $60 billion industry. One recent phenomenon is that as the self-storage facilities become more common and communities begin to oppose the existence of the large, boxy facilities — places in 15 states had banned self-storage facilities since 2019 — there has been energy put into making them to blend in more. Some facilities even designed the exterior of their storage to look like rows of houses so as to fit in with suburban areas.
Fred A. Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal
Anime
There has been a sea of change in the structure of Japan’s anime production studios, as the high demand for anime and increased leverage of animators has meant that production is often completed in-house by permanently-employed workers rather than freelance or self-employed workers. According to a 2024 survey conducted by the Japan Animation Creators Association, the percentage of animators employed in a permanent capacity has increased from 16 percent in 2013 to 45 percent in 2024. At the same time, the percentage working on contract dropped from 24 to 13, and the portion working freelance dropped from 39 percent to 26 percent. This has resulted in better working conditions: the average working period per month has fallen from 262 hours (60 hours per week) in 2013 to 190 hours (44 hours per week), all while median annual earnings are up.
Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics
Dinosaurs
A new study had found that 30 percent of Americans reported loving dinosaurs, with 48 percent of adults under 30 either liking or loving the animals and 58 percent of adults aged 30 to 44 responding the same way. That was likely fueled in large part by the renaissance of dinosaur content in the 1990s, given the generally modest 34 percent of those aged 65 or older who like or love dinosaurs. The favorite dinosaur of 24 percent of adults was the T. rex, followed by the brontosaurus (seven percent), the triceratops (six percent) and the pterodactyl or velociraptor (each five percent). Overall, 16 percent of American adults are able to name five or more dinosaurs.
Fog
A 2010 study found, based on measurements of the weather event at airport weather stations in California, that the prevalence of fog has declined by 33 percent since 1951. This might be a problem because fog is an important source of water; in the redwood forests of California, fog might provide 40 percent of an ecosystem’s water over the summer. As a result, figuring out the impact of climate change on fog and the ecosystems it supports and obscures is increasingly important.
DESI
Yesterday the scientists working on the Dark Energy Spectroscope Instrument, or DESI, published the results of a five-year survey of the sky, which produced a 3D map of the universe with 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million nearby stars. The data set will be used to study dark energy, and given the first survey’s completion, some exciting results about dark energy are anticipated to be published at some point in the future. The instrument produces about 80 gigabytes of data every night and covered two thirds of the northern sky over a five-year period. While the data is being analyzed, DESI will continue scanning the sky through 2028, at which point it will begin revisiting parts of the sky that it was initially unable to capture.
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I hate storage units so much. For crying out loud people, why you gotta own so much crap that you clearly don’t need, because if you needed it it wouldn’t be in a storage unit!
Wondering if AI is writing some of the content as more and more typos are popping up…