Numlock News: August 17, 2026 • Hobbies, Tornadoes, Meteorite Iron

Aug 17, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Spider-Man

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has passed $2 billion in global ticket sales in just three weekends of release, with $785 million domestic, $1.23 billion overseas and $2.022 billion overall. Spider-Man has reached $2 billion in the second-fastest amount of time ever, behind Avengers: Endgame, which did it in 11 days. This past weekend also saw two extremely different dinosaur movies both perform well at the box office, with The End of Oak Street starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor and PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie starring Ryder and Chase each making over $20 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Basically A Haku From Spirited Away Situation

When New York City was being built, dozens of streams and brooks were destroyed or piped into the sewer system to make way for development. The city is still dealing with the ramifications of those decisions whenever it rains, such as streams that ought to exist becoming sewers that are completely beyond capacity, which will lead to flooding. New York is embarking on an ambitious plan to bring back one such waterway in the Tibbetts Brook daylighting project, which, at a cost of $150 million, is expected to reduce sewage discharges into the Harlem River by 215 million gallons per year. That’s excellent bang-for-buck; a project to install two large underground water tanks to hold 153 million gallons per year of stormwater otherwise destined for the Gowanus Canal would cost $1.6 billion.

Fola Akinnibi, Bloomberg

Hours

In a move that may have otherwise escaped notice, the NBA schedule reveal last week is also a dark sign for Hollywood, with NBC and ABC each getting an additional 11 games to air on broadcast television. The linear networks are fundamentally time-constrained, with only 168 hours a week of broadcast time and only a fraction of that in primetime. That means that the increase from 79 games a year ago on NBC and ABC to 90 combined games this year will also increase the aggregate amount of primetime shifted away from original network programming like sitcoms, dramas and reality shows by 33 hours per season, up to 270 hours of broadcast television time.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Hobbies

According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans are now devoting 4.96 percent of their goods spending to hobbies, an upward shift in time and money spent on hobbies that is seen across ages and generations. The fraction of money spent on hobbies rose steadily from a little over two percent in 1960 to around 4.5 percent in 2002, before gradually declining over the following decade and a half to a recent low of 3.7 percent spending in December 2018; the pandemic caused an overnight jump in hobbies’ share of American spending. While the emergence from the pandemic caused a slight drop, as of June we’ve since grown past the pandemic all-time high.

Julia Fanzeres, Bloomberg

Turn East At Tornado Alley

This year’s tornado season showed the continued trend of Tornado Alley shifting eastward and into more populated areas, with Illinois leading all states in tornado activity — 220 confirmed tornadoes — and Indiana and Wisconsin also setting record high numbers. Tornado Alley appears to be shifting from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas thanks to a warming climate that is moving warmer and more-humid air further north and further east. Illinois’ annual tornado report average was up 45.6 percent in the 2020 to 2025 period than it was in the 2000 to 2025 period; by comparison, in Kansas, the average was down 49 percent in the five-year span compared to the 25-year span.

Don Jergler, Insurance Journal

Somehow, Cetacean Returned

From 1913 to 1978, an estimated 350,000 Antarctic blue whales and 725,000 fin whales were killed in industrial whaling, which nearly wiped out both species. Today, Antarctic blue whales are at three percent of their pre-whaling numbers and are recovering at a rate of about five to eight percent per year, and fin whales have bounced back to 30 percent of historical levels and are growing four to five percent annually. While sightings of each species remain rare in the South Atlantic, they’ve increased significantly, and sustained recovery would likely mean more spottings.

Taylor & Francis

Rings of Power

A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science looked at 91 Bronze Age and Early Iron Age objects from 33 Minoan and Mycenaean archaeological sites and 19 museums, analyzing the metals found among the iron objects to determine if it may have been meteoric in origin. Meteorite iron tends to have levels of nickel, and of the 91 objects, 13 had more than enough nickel in them to have come from a meteorite, and 10 of those were very likely to be from meteoritic iron. The presence of meteorite iron among precious metals like gold and silver indicates that it may have been held in very high esteem by the nobles who owned them; the researchers surmise the meteorites were imported to Greece from Egypt, where the climate is more suitable for the iron.

Krystal Kasal, Phys.org

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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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