Numlock News: April 24, 2026 • Everest, Springfield, Staten Island

Apr 24, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

The Simpsons

California has become desperate to hold on to fleeting jobs in the television and film industries, and the studios based in Los Angeles are electing to film their movies and shows outside of the historical production area, opting for cheaper shoots in Canada, the UK, or whichever state is offering the juiciest incentive at this particular point in time. As a result, Sacramento has decided to play hardball and will offer those very same shooting incentives to preserve the behind-the-camera crew jobs and local acting work that serve as the lifeblood of the industry. One of the 38 movies granted subsidies from the California film office is, in fact, The Simpsons Movie, which will get $21.9 million for shooting the film in the state. Given that The Simpsons Movie is animated, it’s not entirely clear in the math how that will benefit the sound stages logging a 62 percent occupancy rate, but that which cannot be explained with the science of Professor Frink can likely be explained with the arts of Mayor Quimby.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

The Way Is Shut

The icefall doctors who prepare the ropes and ladders on Mount Everest ahead of the climbing season are reporting that there’s a big block of ice in the way and they’re having trouble doing their jobs. There is a 100-foot high unstable chunk of glacier blocking the path that sits 600 meters below Camp 1. This late in April, the icefall doctors working for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee — which secures the ropes as far as Camp 2 — normally would have already fixed the route all the way up to Camp 3, but because there is a colossal block of ice in the way, they have had to wait it out. Scaling it was deemed too risky, an alternative route to Camp 1 would be too challenging and the Department of Tourism is weighing options that would include airlifting teams to Camp 2 by helicopter so they may begin to open the route above the ice block while they wait for it to melt.

Ashok Dahal and Simon Fraser, BBC News

Traffic

Since 2022, traffic cameras have caught one specific pickup truck speeding through school zones and running red lights over 547 times in the borough of Staten Island, with the vehicle receiving 187 camera-issued tickets in 2025 alone — an average of one every other day. Based on the data, this vehicle is piloted by the second-most-reckless driver in New York City. The truck — a 2022 RAM 1500 — weighs at least 4,775 pounds, and the tickets are only automatically given when a vehicle is going 11 miles per hours above the legal limit. Based on Department of Transportation data, a city driver who received more than two moving violations per year is 40 times more likely to cause a crash that results in death or serious injury than a driver who never does; this driver has received between 116 and 180 moving violations in each of the past four years. Since 2022, that is $36,650.02 worth of speeding tickets. Streetsblog, curious as to why nothing has been done about this and why the law or consequences does not appear to apply to this particular car, discovered that the driver of that RAM 1500 is, naturally, an officer in the New York City Police Department.

J.K. Trotter, Streetsblog

Odometer

A new study published in the Journal of Marketing Research looked into how the specific number on the odometer of a used car impacted the eventual sale of that vehicle, and found that left-digit bias — the phenomenon when $1.99 feels materially cheaper than $2 — has a big effect on pricing and sale timing. Based on DMV records of 4.8 million used car transactions in Texas from 2014 to 2021, cars that were just below a 10,000-mile odometer threshold sold 6 percent faster than cars just above that threshold.

Hope Reese, University of Texas at Austin

Glass

A study of wine packaging published in the journal Cleaner and Responsible Consumption found that while consumers did indeed tend to appraise wine sold in a glass bottle more highly than wine sold in other packaging, perceptions are changing and consumers are open to new options. Aluminum was the second-most popular choice for wine packaging (with those in the study assigning a 19.3 percent to 26.2 percent discount for aluminum-packaged wine compared to glass) followed by PET plastic packaging (a 31.1 percent to 36.9 percent discount) and then — bad luck, Franzia — a 38 percent to 54 percent discount for flexible bags.

University of Arkansas

Cigarettes

Several countries in Asia have lagged behind their peers when it comes to reducing tobacco use, and one reason is that in many of those countries, the very same government trying to rein in smoking is also the owner of the tobacco company. The Japanese government owns a 37.6 percent stake in Japan Tobacco, the largest player in the domestic market for cigarettes, and collected 156.05 billion yen in dividends (not to mention the tax revenue) from the tobacco business. China’s government fully owns China National Tobacco, which has a 96 percent market share, and India’s government has a 28 percent stake in ITC, which dominates the business. Those conflicts of interest have made it hard to build the kind of political coalition necessary to unwind lucrative investments and commit more fully to smoking cessation.

Kenji Kawase, Nikkei Asia

Coral

Submersible robotics have demonstrated promise when it comes to restoring coral reefs. One device, the Deployment Guidance System, is the first automated underwater coral planter, which when attached to a boat can identify suitable planting sites for coral autonomously. The pricing is great: each DGS should be able to plant about a million coral seedlings over the course of its operational lifetime at a cost of $1 per seedling, well under the $8 per seedling commonly paid by coral restoration projects today. Coral stressing robots are also under development; under lab conditions, coral can be gently heated and put under temporary heat stress in order to toughen up the fragments, where they can then be replanted in the reefs to multiply and produce resilient descendants. Researchers envision a suite of underwater robots able to maintain and preserve these reefs.

Ryan Hesketh, bioGraphic

In the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Alex Mayyasi from NPR’s Planet Money, the beloved podcast that invented an entire version of audio storytelling, who is out with a brand new book from the show called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life, a delightful anthology all about the ways money and the economy affect nearly everything in our daily lives. The book is available wherever books are sold. Alex is a regular contributor to the Planet Money podcast, writes his own Substack, and will be out with a his next project, the Gastronomics podcast available on Spotify, soon. Check out our interview here.

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