Numlock News: April 29, 2026 • Ohisama, Mesonet, Mars
By Walt Hickey
The Story of Everest
Mountaineers and “icefall doctors” have successfully cleared a route past a massive piece of ice that had been preventing them from reaching Camp 1, and they have already fixed ropes up to Camp 2, which lies 6,400 to 6,500 meters high. The 30-meter-high serac has still pushed preparations weeks behind schedule for a season in which 425 climbers have permits to summit the mountain; climbers will move out of Base Camp starting tomorrow. Clearing a path up Everest is a major annual endeavor, but an increasingly economically crucial one; the Department of Tourism said the climbing season will generate 924,222,675 Nepalese Rupees (US$6,114,955) in government revenue from the permits.
Phanindra Dahal and Olivia Ireland, BBC News
Fire Sale
Oregonians who buy nicotine pouches are paying a 65 cent tax on each tin because the state had a shockingly bad fire season in 2024 and was looking for a way to stash some money away for the next one. Wildfires burned 1.9 million acres in Oregon that year, costing the state $350 million in firefighting expenses alone; it had budgeted just $10 million. This has become a theme across the West as supercharged wildfire seasons overwhelm budgets that were at one point entirely sufficient. Idaho has $38 million budgeted, but a bad year could run them double that. Montana saw that the $40 million special account of 2008 was woefully below what may be needed; the legislature upped that to $152 million in 2023.
Mesonet
The 2,500 airports in America with weather stations constitute the backbone of the weather data network that fuels forecasts across the country, but there are lots of people who live more than 20 miles from an airport and therefore tend to get lower-quality weather forecasts than the rest of us. To fill in the gap, a network of 3,000 “mesonet” stations across 38 states constitute an intermediate network that can cover areas with inadequate weather monitoring stations. A new mesonet in Wisconsin, for instance, involved the installation of 78 new stations on three-meter tripods in open areas, and their installation is already resulting in NWS flash flood warnings in regions that might otherwise not have gotten an early warning due to reduced coverage.
Chris Vagasky, The Conversation
Cocaine Hippos
Breaking news on the Pablo Escobar invasive hippopotamus front; the son of an Indian billionaire has offered to buy them. For those inexplicably out of the loop on the most important story in the world, drug lord Pablo Escobar illegally imported a male and female hippopotamus to Colombia using the proceeds of his global pharmaceutical development and sales business. When he was killed in ’93, nobody wrangled the hippos from Hacienda Nápoles, so now there are hundreds of them thriving in the jungle. The government has tried a sterilization campaign, but recently indicated they will just euthanize 80 of the hippos. Enter Anant Ambani, the son of Asia’s richest man, who has announced that he is willing to take and care for the (one must assume remarkably inbred) population at his private zoo in Gujarat, and while Colombia has not yet commented, one must imagine Bogotá is willing to hear him out.
Planet
A new survey of Americans found that, beyond Earth of course, Mars is the favorite planet in the solar system, with 19 percent of respondents saying that the red planet is their favorite. This is followed by the deeply photogenic Saturn (14 percent), Jupiter (eight percent) and Venus (six percent). About seven percent of respondents wasted their ballots by saying Pluto, which is famously not a planet. Also 55 percent of people don’t have a favorite planet, what else is the point of all that astrology? I’m afraid this is a dismal and frankly ungrateful showing from Earthlings, who failed to recognize their silent protector, their constant guardian, the big guy himself Jupiter. Do you think that Mars is capable of capturing hoards of asteroids and safely marshaling them towards its Lagrange points? Do you think that Mars would take a comet for us if the situation presented itself? Do you think that Mars is the one thing standing between us and the barbarians of the Oort cloud? Sure, Gustav gave it the best entrance music, and it is inhabited entirely by robots, but if Mars is the bringer of war, consider it brought.
Grocery
A new projection from the Food Industry Association and NielsenIQ predicts that online grocery sales will grow to $452 billion by 2028. Already, most of the grocery dollar growth is happening online, with 72 percent of growth in the grocery business last year coming from the online space. This year, sales are projected to come in at $363 billion, an improvement on the projection from last year. Online grocery sales are expected to increase at a rate of 11.6 percent annually, while in-store sales are expected to stay flat and grow only about 0.62 percent annually.
Microwave
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning an experiment as soon as this fiscal year to transmit electricity collected on an orbitting solar panel to Earth by way of microwaves. A 2023 CalTech experiment successfully transmitted microwaves from a satellite to the ground, but this experiment will try to get some actual electricity out of the process. This test — the Ohisama Project — will send a satellite with a two-meter-wide solar panel into orbit at 450 kilometers. The satellite will convert that electricity into microwaves that will be targeted at a location in Japan. The goal is to figure out exactly how wide of an area the microwave receivers will need on the ground; receivers will be spread within a 40 kilometer radius centered around Saitama prefecture, with tests taking place over months. The satellite’s power generation capacity is very small at 720 watts, but a successful test could advance JAXA’s goal of a power-generating satellite with a 2.5 square kilometer solar panel in geostationary orbit producing one gigawatt of electricity by 2050.
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The hippos! This is turning into a top notch Numlock saga, bested only by MoviePass. I will entertain myself for DAYS imagining the logistics of the move to Gujarat
I am shocked--SHOCKED, I SAY--that no one's favourite planet is Uranus! In my house, we love Uranus, and Uranus is the subject of much discussion. In fact, not a day goes by where we don't discuss Uranus.
Thank you; I'll show myself out now.