Numlock News: April 8, 2024 • Coyotes, Cochlear, Shōgun

Apr 08, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Coyote

The NHL's Arizona Coyotes have been in a comical limbo, having departed their arena in Glendale in 2022 and temporarily set up shop at the 4,600-seat Mullett Arena of Arizona State University in Tempe, a paltry venue for any pro team. Originally, they'd planned to get a bunch of money from the city of Tempe to build a new arena, but voters shot the referendums down. Now, it's coming up on their last shot: On June 27, a 95-acre plot of Arizona state trust land in North Phoenix is up for auction. The Coyotes want it, and the appraisal price is $68.5 million. If they win the auction, they'll build an arena, a neighborhood, a training center and theater for $3 billion. If they lose, well, I have it on good authority that Salt Lake City just loves hockey as long as the chirping doesn't get too blue.

Barry M. Bloom, Sportico

Drama Alert

The Emmy awards for drama categories tend to be fiercely competitive, but it appears this year that a number of series that ordinarily would compete in the limited series category — reportedly including Masters of the Air, Shōgun and The Sympathizer — may in fact attempt to compete in drama instead. The reason is that previous juggernaut Succession is off the air, and The Last of Us doesn't have anything up this year. The numbers work better for cast members, too: Drama and comedy categories are guaranteed at least eight nominees. In limited series, only five are, and a sixth is added when there are 80 entrants. So far, it sure looks like there are only around 50 contenders in limited series.

Clayton Davis, Variety

Cochlear

Worldwide there are about a million people who have a cochlear implant, a prosthesis that helps people with hearing loss hear sounds better by stimulating the auditory nerve. It's somewhat controversial in the Deaf community, but it's now somewhat standard among children born congenitally deaf. That said, just based on numbers, there ought to be more people with them: About 2 million people in the U.S. alone would benefit from an implant, but just 5 percent have it. The process is pretty onerous, and the referral system is "leaky" and often loses people as part of the process. One study found that to get an implant, a patient might require up to 15 appointments.

Timmy Broderick, STAT News

Voyager

For the past five months, the Voyager 1 probe has been sending back unreadable data, and now NASA has figured out why. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a memory bank has corrupted in the Flight Data System, one of the spacecraft's three computers. About 3 percent of the FDS memory has been corrupted, and since that's the part of the spacecraft that packages scientific data to go back to Earth, that's a problem. Troubleshooting might take some time, as it takes 22.5 hours for a signal sent from Earth to get to a spacecraft 15 billion miles away.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Fiber

America's insatiable desire for nutritional supplements has made a surprise hit out of fiber, long held to be the most boring of all nutrients. Metamucil, the Procter & Gamble staple for 90 years, has seen sales double in the past five years. Other innovators see the obvious, that all you need is a marketing budget and an understanding of the broken millennial mind to make any routine macronutrient blend into a gold mine. From 2019 to 2023, the number of fiber-centric supplements launched is up 14 percent, according to the Global New Products Database.

Sara Ashley O'Brien, The Wall Street Journal

The Boy and the Heron

The latest film out of Studio Ghibli, The Boy and the Heron, has become a smash hit in China, where it was released last Wednesday ahead of the Qingming public holiday, emerging as a reliable family movie date. The Oscar-winning movie from Hayao Miyazaki set a record on Thursday for the biggest single-day performance for a non-Chinese animated film, and is projected to earn $105 million in China by the end of its run. That's more than the $61 million it made in Japan, and well more than the $46.6 million in North America, where it was still the top-grossing Studio Ghibli movie ever. China's increasingly fond of Japanese film; last year, Suzume and The First Slam Dunk each made more money in China than all but one Hollywood film.

Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

Shoppertainment

The end of Ramadan on Eid al-Fitr is a big shopping holiday in Southeast Asia, and that’s highlighting the idiosyncratic e-commerce sites that are thriving there. All told, the market for e-commerce in Southeast Asia is worth $175 billion, dominated by four sites which have half of the market, most of which don’t have much traction outside the region: Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia, and of course TikTok. Most of those are fueled by entertainment-driven e-commerce, where livestreamers hawk the wares to viewers.

Adi Renaldi and Chong Pooi Koon, Rest of World

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