Numlock News: April 7, 2026 • Halos, Hawks, Parmesan Cheese
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to Tell A Friend About Numlock Week. Word-of-mouth is the single biggest contributing factor to people finding out about this thing, especially as social media disintegrates. We try not to ask a lot here at Numlock, but this week we’re going to ask that if you like this thing, you tell a friend who might like it about the newsletter and encourage them to sign up! It really makes a huge difference.
Prize Insurance
A furniture store’s March Madness stunt that would have cost underwriters roughly $50 million narrowly missed coming to pass. It’s a moment of bad luck for 20,000 New England furniture customers and good luck for an insurance company. Jordan’s Furniture, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, put out a promotion that if both the UConn men and women’s college basketball team make it to the championship game of their respective tournaments, every single purchase made at their eight stores from January 20 through March 1 would have been eligible for a full refund. In practice, this meant that Jordan’s Furniture just paid for a prize policy of $50 million, but somewhere some underwriters was sweating as both teams did indeed make the Final Four. That said, while the UConn men had made the final game in a surprise, the University of South Carolina women beat UConn in the final four game on Friday. Hilariously, this has happened before: In 2007 when the Red Sox won the World Series, 24,000 customers were offered a full refund worth about $35 million from Jordan’s. I can now reveal that next year if both William & Mary teams make their NCAA tournament final I will gladly refund every Numlock paid subscription for the year.
Andrew G. Simpson, Insurance Journal
Tailors
According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 17,000 people employed as tailors, dressmakers and custom sewers in the United States as of 2024, down 30 percent over the previous decade. It’s an aging profession; the median age for the employed population of tailors came in at 54 years old last year, 12 years older than the overall median age of an employed person. Many who pursue fashion training now do so with an eye towards mass production rather than the solo shop or atelier. Some retailers — such as Nordstrom, which is evidently the largest employer of tailors in the country — are looking to support training programs to bring people into the craft.
Anne D’Innocenzio, The Associated Press
Parks
A new study looked at 60 national parks across 17 countries south of the Equator to find out the effect that fences have on the flora and the fauna that the parks were intended to preserve. The study concluded that when parks are fully fenced in, there was a much larger difference between the areas inside the fence than outside of it. The natural tree cover inside the fence was much higher, but at the same time the cropland and human development tended to be much closer. With unfenced parks, the boundary separating the park from the surrounding area was more of a gradient. Finally, partially fenced-in parks like Kasungu National Park in Malawi had inconsistent edges, with abrupt shifts in the fenced portions and more of a gradual shift in the unfenced.
Hawkish
A new survey finds that yeah, it was probably not a strategically brilliant plan to brand those who prefer active policies as “hawks” and those who prefer more deliberate and slow policies as “doves.” While nitially “hawks” tended to be the name of those who favor militarily-led foreign policy solutions and “doves” more diplomatic-driven ones, the hawk-dove split has also lent itself to monetary policy (hawks preferring low inflation at the expense of other priorities, doves preferring low unemployment over other priorities) as well as deficits (hawks want to reduce, doves see that as a lower priority) and so on. The problem is, hawks are cool birds, or so men appear to think. Two versions of a survey about preferences for military solutions to conflicts were presented to two groups of respondents. In each case, they were asked whether the military should be used frequently or rarely. However, researchers primed one group with the question of whether they are a “hawk” or a “dove.” This had a big effect. In the hawkless group, 13 percent of men said they believed the military should be used frequently, but in the other group, 25 percent said they were a “hawk” and believed the military should be used frequently. That 12 point difference was a one-point difference among women. I simply propose that we rebrand “doves” as “falcons” or some other neat bird (get at me in the comments I’m not a bird guy) in order to avoid disastrous machismo-driven interventionism moving forward.
Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov
Taxes
While a solid proportion of respondents to a new survey indeed said the amount they pay in federal taxes bothered them — 41 percent said it bothers them a lot, and 34 percent said it bothers them some — those figures are dwarfed by significant majorities who think that rich people and corporations don’t pay their fair share. Overall, 61 percent were bothered “a lot” and 21 percent were bothered “some” by the feeling that some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share. For corporations, on the other hand, the feeling was 60 percent “a lot” and 23 percent “some.”
Andy Cerda and J. Baxter Oliphant, Pew Research Center
Feta
As the United States cuts new trade deals with other countries, one negotiating point has been a longstanding dispute with the European Union over what to call certain foods. In the Old World, they can be very particular about what’s Parmesan cheese (it’s cheese from Parma) or Feta cheese (it’s cheese from the Feta-producing part of Greece) or Asiago cheese (it’s cheese from Asiago) and so on. In the New World, the longstanding perspective is that the glorious melting pot of our society has boiled off such prosaic geographic distinctions and that food is not a place; you can make all that in Wisconsin. This makes the Europeans very mad. It’s been a long-simmering dispute that (amid rising geopolitical tensions on other matters) has come to boil over as the U.S. insists in its point of view in new trade deals. This is real money; the Consozio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano contends that “fake Parmesan” sales exceed two billion euros annually.
Jon Emont, The Wall Street Journal
Halos
A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal used data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) to settle a longstanding mystery: where galaxies in the early universe got all the hydrogen they needed to grow as fast as they did. Lyman-alpha nebula are massive halos of hydrogen found around galaxies that are 10 billion to 12 billion years old from a time period called Cosmic Noon. Previously, just 3,000 such halos were known. Because of the difficulties in detecting hydrogen only the most extreme examples were spotted. The new data, derived from precise instruments, has found a whole lot of in-between hydrogen halos. After selecting the 70,000 brightest of the 1.6 million early galaxies identified by HETDEX thus far, were able to increase the number of known halos to over 33,000.
I’m helping out at Garbage Day’s show tonight at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, if you’re looking for something cool to do tonight there should be a few tickets still available!
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
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