Numlock News: August 12, 2026 • Trebuchet, Funko, Speed Record

Aug 12, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Funko

The bobblehead industry, long a bellwether for the health of the licensed media ecosystem or at least the ability of the media industry to monetize fandom on tchotchkes, is mounting a bit of a comeback. Funko reported that U.S. sales were up 3.4 percent year over year to $121.8 million in the second quarter of the year. The company has sought to cut down the time-to-market between a show becoming a surprise hit and Funko’s ability to mint a Pop figurine of the show’s characters, reducing it from months to weeks.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

Crushing It

Candy Crush has defied the gravity of the mobile game space that saw many of its peer games launched in the early 2010s essentially evaporate without any remaining cultural footprint. For 15 years, Candy Crush Saga has continued to mint money, with some 81.5 million monthly active users, 190.5 million installs last year and $876.5 million in revenue in 2025. Only four percent of players spend money in the game, according to intelligence firm Quantumrun, and as of June, there were 22,450 levels to play available on mobile.

Alanna Okun, Bloomberg

CSI

A presentation at a paleopathology conference revealed an exciting find related to the remains of an individual known as Skeleton 150 who died about 700 years ago, with the researchers contending that this man was probably killed by a hit from a projectile launched from a trebuchet. The skeleton was discovered during excavations under Stirling Castle’s chapel in 1997, a fortress that changed hands five times from 1296 to 1304. Skeleton 150 was, to put it bluntly, in uniquely bad shape, with 160 separate fractures, a skull smashed in 61 places, a large shoulder break and 60 zigzagging breaks to the ribs — the kind of injuries that today are seen from car crashes and train strikes. The answer came from the discovery that the 1304 siege of the castle saw the use of the recently-invented trebuchet, with the largest trebuchet ever built at the time, War Wolf, used during the battle and potentially on Mr. Skeleton 150.

Andrew Curry, Science

Panama

As global maritime trade is rerouted away from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, logjams are emerging at other vital crossings. The Panama Canal is seeing significant traffic, and Neopanamax-sized vessels have to wait in line for 10 days to pass through the canal — the highest wait time since May for Pacific-to-Atlantic transit. Vessels in a hurry are paying out the nose to hop the line, with the owner of the container ship Seaspan Benefactor dropping $4 million to jump to the front of the line.

Lucia Kassai and Ruth Liao, gCaptain

Land Speed

The current holder of the land-speed record, former fighter pilot Andy Green, just set a number of new speed records behind the wheel of the Hydromax, a highly-engineered, specially hydrogen-powered car. In his second attempt, Green pushed the vehicle to 412.135 miles per hour, good for the International Automobile Federation (FIA) records for fastest hydrogen fuel cell car (previously 303 miles per hour), the fastest electric vehicle (previously 342 miles per hour) and the fastest hydrogen internal combustion engine (185.5 miles per hour). The land-speed record is generally considered “the fun one” that any sufficiently financed team willing to put wheels on a jet engine on a salt flat can take a solid go at; the air-speed record is typically the domain of secret experimental skunkworks military jets, the rail-speed record is now and forever will be named John Stapp and the water-speed record is infamously the one that basically kills anyone who attempts to break it.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

Salt

The Great Salt Lake is under significant pressure. Historically covering between 1,700 and 2,000 square miles, it is both a major source of water in the West as well as the most important node of one of the most important avian migratory routes on the planet: the Pacific Flyway that sees 10 million migrating birds from 230 species, all of whom need a drink when they’re over Utah. Overall, inflows from the three rivers that feed it — the Jordan, Weber and Bear — are down 40 percent since the 1980s. Water volumes are down 64 percent, the lake’s level dropped 11 feet since the 19th century and as of 2022, it covered just 888 square miles. Utah has the second-highest per-capita water use in the country, with 60 percent of household water use going to watering landscaping, double the national average.

Wade Graham, High Country News

Weather

A new study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences proposed a new maximum for how long ahead a forecaster could theoretically predict the weather. As it stands, we can get a solid forecast about 14 days out, which itself is already a radical achievement where humankind has conspired to glimpse ahead in destiny’s ineffable ledger through an interconnected system of monitoring attached to an equally impressive computational milestone in supercomputing. Present work aside, the new research contends that the theoretical maximum for a forecast is 129 ± 7 days, though even under ideal conditions, a five-day forecast probably tops out at around 62 days. After that, prediction becomes literally impossible, as at that point, even if you do have a perfect understanding of the initial state of the atmosphere, the quantum uncertainty of the phase of the Sun’s photons entering the atmosphere will actually begin to overwhelm the modeling.

Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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