Numlock News: April 18, 2025 • Chords, Caribou, Concrete

Apr 18, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

I Heard There Was A Sacred Chord

A new analysis of the 52 million chords used across 680,000 songs found that — to the expectation of anyone who’s strummed a guitar string or tickled the ivories — G major and C major were the most commonly found. I’ve never done either of those things — drummer, baby — so this information came as a surprising and delightful new fact. G major and C major accounted for 24 percent of all chords used, followed by D major, A major and F major. Turning their attention to chord diversity, analysts find that songs are getting less complex, containing fewer unique chords and a declining ratio of unique chords to total chords. That ratio has declined steadily from 13 percent in the 1930s to 8 percent in the 2020s. I suppose it does track that an era defined by the band Some Guy And His Orchestra, who performed music from a Tin Pan Alley fella who got paid by the note in a Depression-era WPA gig, would use every chord available to them.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Wall of Sound

Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer wanted to juice home-court advantage, so when he built the Intuit Dome, the developers designed a seating section known as “The Wall.” This was an unusually steep section behind the basket and adjacent to the away team bench, a section with no suites and only certified fans filling its 51 rows, which are cheaper too. It has had its intended effect: when opposing players shoot free throws at the basket in the vicinity of The Wall, they make those shots just 73.4 percent of the time, which is lower than the 76.1 percent made on the other end of the floor and drastically below the roughly 78.1 percent average visitor free throw percentage in the NBA, a 4.7 percent difference between the average and The Wall.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Jacked Up

Netflix reported revenues of $10.54 billion in the first quarter of the year, which was up 12.5 percent. This was a unique quarter in that Netflix has actually stopped relaying subscriber numbers, but the company did claim that membership growth and that big price hike — $2.50 per month in the U.S., to $17.99 per month for the standard plan — was the reason behind the profit jump. The company is projecting somewhere between $43.5 billion to $44.5 billion in 2025. Here’s the thing, though: most research firms actually think that Netflix lost subscribers this quarter, estimating that subs dipped by 670,000 total in the U.S. and Canada.

Julia Alexander, Puck

Merganser

The Brazilian merganser, a fish-eating duck that has been critically endangered since 1994, was estimated to have a population of just 249 in 2019. The Prague Zoo accepted 5 Brazilian merganser couples in October 2023 in an attempt to breed the animals in captivity, and the zoo proudly revealed the program has had its first major success. Two male and 3 female chicks were born in late January, the first of the birds ever born outside of South America.

Agence France-Presse

Cement

In 2023, carbon emissions from the cement industry came in at 1.57 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which was around 8 percent of global emissions. Cement is a crucial material the world over, but the process of making it is really carbon-intensive, and zeroing in on ways to produce viable cement with less disastrous emissions has been a persistent question. The Department of Energy awarded $1.5 billion in grants last year to 6 projects that are attempting to solve that issue, but the status of those grants is obviously in question given the recently, yet inconsistently imposed, austerity measures.

Ames Alexander, Floodlight

Drones

On your typical day in the United States, there are about 8,500 unmanned aircraft flying in the air, which is just a taste of things to come if the ambitions of the tech industry are any indication, as companies like Amazon dabble in drone delivery. Most of those are recreational drones, but if they do become commercially applicable, those numbers can get higher. The question then becomes how one can track that newly dynamic airspace and prevent mishaps or collisions. The NASA Aeronautics Research Institute spearheaded an effort that has grown into UTM, a system where drone operators share their intended flight paths with one another through a centralized network to ensure that a potentially crowded airspace under 400 feet doesn’t get too choppy.

Yaakov Zinberg, MIT Technology Review

Collective Memory

An individual caribou might not itself be a rocket scientist, but a new study that used GPS tracking data from 2009 to 2021 found that herds can, in the aggregate, make good decisions based on previous experiences. While 95 percent of the collared animals make it through the winter on the Seward Peninsula, the survival rate dropped severely after 2016. After this event, the most affected caribou herds decided instead not to overwinter in Seward, instead traipsing 500 kilometers away to the terrain around the Kobuk River, seemingly recalling that the adverse conditions in a place caused the deaths of other caribou and then avoiding it. This is particularly fascinating, because this phenomenon — individuals are often dumb, but large crowds have excellent decision-making ability — sure seems to be the exact opposite of what humans do.

Sarah Gilman, bioGraphic

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