Numlock News: April 3, 2025 • Pangolin, Vacheron, QVC

Apr 03, 2025

Why You Got To Go And Make Things So Complicated?

One of the nerdiest one-upmanship fights in the world has culminated in Vacheron Constantin’s Solaria Ultra Grand Complication, seizing the crown for most complicated watch with 41 complications (any feature beyond hours, minutes and seconds). In mechanical watches, which only depend on wound springs, such complications tend to require clever feats of horological engineering. The 41 complications of the Ultra Grand beat the 36 complications of the Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4, which beats the 2017 Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Celestia Astronomical Grand Complication 3600, which had 23 complications in addition to its seven adjectives. The Solaria Ultra Grand Complication has 1521 components, 204 jewels, a 72-hour power reserve, 14 astronomical complications, 5 chiming complications, a Gregorian calendar, a second time zone, a Civil time module, a dull constellation wheel on the back and even more. One guy had 8 years to just do whatever he wanted and made 13 new patents in the process. There was no budget, and there is no price tag, but yes, you can buy it if you dare.

Mark Kauzlarich, Hodinkee

Tallow

The latest specious trend in food is beef tallow, a fat that its proponents argue is healthier than other kinds of frying fat, such as soybean oil. Smaller food chains angling for this audience have prompted increased demand for the tallow, which is essentially the melted-down fatty tissue of slaughtered cattle. That said, agricultural officials are actually hoping that the trend doesn’t get too far ahead, simply because the United States does not produce anywhere near enough beef tallow to sustain the interest if, indeed, larger chains begin to shift away from typical commercial frying oils and toward tallow. The U.S. produces 15 billion pounds of edible refined soybean oil, but it only produces about 1 billion pounds of similarly edible beef tallow.

Patrick Thomas and Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal

Music

The shift away from album sales and digital songs toward streaming music did have an interesting impact on the music listening population, namely, 50 million more people are paying for their music, whether through a streaming subscription or actual sales. Last year, 132 million Americans paid for a music subscription, well higher than the 14 million Americans who conceded that they pirated music in 2024. Overall, per-capita spending on music is up 32 percent over the past decade after adjusting for inflation.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Wiki

The Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for the servers that host not just Wikipedia but also the myriad of adjacent open internet libraries like Wikimedia Commons’ 144 million media files, is reporting extensive strain under the burden of AI scraping its sites. This has some pretty considerable costs when you’re a site the size of Wikipedia, and the foundation found that bots were responsible for 35 percent of total pageviews. More importantly, AI made 65 percent of the most expensive requests to their systems; essentially, the scrapers were responsible for some of the most demanding downloads.

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

QVC

Days after laying off hundreds of employees, the home shopping television network QVC intends to surrender to the inevitable and launch a 24/7 live shopping stream on TikTok, the social video app that has become an ecommerce titan in its own right. The capitulation expands on an effort started last August when QVC began a push into TikTok Shop, an effort that has since resulted in over 74,000 creators shilling QVC products in their own clips. By joining their foe rather than trying to beat TikTok, the company is aiming to reverse its otherwise declining fortunes, where 2024 revenue was down 5 percent and the company posted an $809 million loss.

Sean Burch, The Wrap

Minecraft

Warner Bros. and Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie is projected to open with $70 million to $80 million domestically. Other tracking services put the kid-friendly movie’s opening haul at probably closer to $90 million and another $65 million internationally. Given that Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time and has what producers believe to be multigenerational appeal for kids who play the game, young adults who grew up on it and everyone else who has had to politely feign interest in it, the $150 million budgeted movie has a lot of hopes riding on it. Expectations are high, especially given the success of movies like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made $1.3 billion.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Pangolin

The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) is notoriously hunted by poachers, and a new study shows just how essential the species is for the long-term resilience of forests. A thriving pangolin population is especially evident after fires, and they dig between 50 and 100 burrows per year, which is a major boon to other species. The study (which placed cameras outside of several burrows) found that 35 different species made use of those holes, including leopards and cobras, and that 58 plant species flourished in the areas where pangolins dug through burned patches of earth.

Annie Roth, BioGraphic

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