Numlock News: April 8, 2026 • Nolan, Bixonimania, Andromeda XXXVI
By Walt Hickey
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Scams
The FBI is out with their annual analysis of the scams taking advantage of Americans, with the report indicating that cyberscams looted $21 billion. Across a total of 1,008,597 complaints, 181,585 involved crypto, which accounted for $11 billion of the lost funds. The number of complaints involving a scammer posing as someone from the government rose to 32,500 from 17,300, and resulted in $797 million in losses. While AI was involved in just a comparatively small number of complaints (22,364), they did cost Americans an aggregate $893 million. Seems the long-promised efficiency gains boasted by AI’s boosters is finally a reality, at least when it comes to making cybercriminals more efficient at ripping off the elderly.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, David DiMolfetta, Route Fifty, Sage D. Young, Sherwood News
Why So Serious?
A new analysis of Christopher Nolan’s movies totals the number of questions asked in each film. Nolan has a reputation for putting a lot of questions in the movies — Inception and Interstellar and Oppenheimer all need to yes-and exposition into their sciencey plots — and he tends to be rewarded for it. Oppenheimer, for instance, involved a Nolan-high 592 question, good for 3.4 questions per minute. In Inception, we’re talking 445 questions, at 3.17 questions per minutes, and The Dark Knight with 396 questions comes in at 2.26 questions per minute. The most declarative of his films? Dunkirk with just 1.04 questions per minute.
Guardian of the Galaxy
New data from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey reveals a new satellite of the Andromeda galaxy, an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy which has been designated Andromeda XXXVI. It’s 2.53 million light years away from us and 388,000 light years away from the Andromeda galaxy. Overall Andromeda probably has an estimated 100 dwarf satellites, but roughly half are known.
Bixonimania
“Bixonimania” does not exist, it is a word made up by a medical researcher and then published to the web by way of two posts on the website Medium. Two clearly bogus preprints published on an academic social network called SciProfiles describe it as an eye condition that causes eyelids to appear a mild pinkish hue as a result of blue light. Well, those small nibbles were picked up by LLMs which, if asked, will absolutely tell you it’s an actual thing. Within weeks major artificial intelligence systems repeated the invented condition, and then the fake papers (which had not even been published in a journal) were cited in peer-reviewed literature, possible thanks to researchers relying on AI-generated references. By April 2024, Perplexity AI was claiming that one in 90,000 individuals were effected, and this was an experiment by a medical researcher; imagine what an unscrupulous marketer of blue light glasses might do with it.
Cranberries
The flooded bogs that produce cranberries are very sandy, which has come in handy in other parts of New England. While cranberry prices have fallen, the price of sand is up 20 percent from 2012 to 2023. Sand is in high demand thanks to beach erosion and other uses. As many farmers move away from cranberry production amid declines in demand, about 750 acres of bogs around Massachusetts have stopped production. As a result, much of the 61 million cubic yards of sand and gravel extracted from southeastern Massachusetts since 1990 has come from defunct cranberry farms and been shipped out to the beaches on the cape to shore them up.
Brooke Kushwaha, The New Bedford Light
Testing
Colorado has passed the first law in the country that bans making arrests based solely on colorimetric drug tests. These tests are cheap — costing $2 to $10, well under the definitive $24,000 to $80,000 portable drug testing devices that serve as the actual benchmark for drug detection — but there are rising concerns about their reliability. While early studies put the error rate at about four percent, new data from University of Pennsylvania researchers put the error rate somewhere between 15 percent and 38 percent, and a study from the New York City Department of Investigation show test error rates from 79 percent to 91 percent in correctional environments. Other, more basic demonstrations of fallibility — bird crap scraped off a car testing positive for coke — are not a great indication that people should be incarcerated over this test.
Digester
California has allocated $389 million in grants to build manure digesters in the state, which houses 1.7 million dairy cows on factory farms. Across all of U.S. agriculture, 14 percent of emissions come from manure alone. By enclosing the lagoons, we can mitigate the methane by 91 percent, and a new study of 98 dairies in California found that when digesters work, they really work — reducing point-source methane emissions from 91 kilograms per hour to 68 kilograms per hour. The downside is that when the digesters leak, it’s bad; the heating element of the equipment can lead to methane plumes of 1,000 kilograms per hour.
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And now I’m wanting a cranberry-orange scone this morning….