Numlock News: August 18, 2025 • Labubu, Atomic Oxygen, Ore
By Walt Hickey
I’m back! I had a great vacation and return to you burnt, rested and ready. I hope you enjoyed the rotating crew of guest writers over the past two weeks; I’ll shout them out again this coming week!
Counterfeiting
Humanity craves one thing and one thing only: adorable freaky beasts we carry around in our pockets and pay exorbitant sums to possess. This comes around every couple of years, whether you’re talking Furbys, Tamogatchis, Beanie Babies and now Labubus. The Labubu trend and fierce demand for the toys have naturally incentivized sprawling counterfeiting operations, which in turn have summoned large verification and certification bureaucracies adjoined to reselling platforms. One of such platforms is the Japanese site SNKRDUNK, which started entering the brisk Labubu trade in mid-2024. The list price (13,530 yen) of a six-pack “Exciting Macaron” and “Big into Energy” Labubu series is nothing compared to the 32,947 yen average they were going for in July on the secondary market. They reached highs of 41,511 yen a month prior. Either way, transaction volume is 66 times what it was at the start of the year, which is why SNKRDUNK and its peers are turning to X-rays, UV lights and authentication efforts to ensure that they’re hawking the real deal.
Weapons
The top movie at the box office this weekend was the surprise hit Weapons. It added another $25 million domestically to its box office haul with a mere 43 percent drop, good for a worldwide total of $148.8 million so far. Other new entries attempting to muscle into August have largely missed the mark, with the sequel Nobody 2 coming into second place and the Sydney Sweeney-helmed Americana coming in with just $500,000. Now, speaking as a person who was not in America for the past two weeks and who has fiercely avoided following absolutely any news whatsoever while on vacation, I for one am shocked that the nationally beloved, uncontroversial and famously uncomplicated Sydney Sweeney had difficulty opening a movie. What the heck is happening here?
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Suits
Several legal cannabis stores in New York are suing the state Office of Cannabis Management, which is hard to avoid, for really mismanaging cannabis during the rollout of legal weed in New York. Several weeks ago, the news broke that the state goofed big time: measuring the distance to schools of a cannabis dispensary based on distance to the front door, not distance to the property line, as is actually enshrined in state law. In the state’s view, this means that at least 152 legal dispensaries that they cleared to open are, in fact, noncompliant. A lawsuit filed by a dozen cannabis shops challenges that reinterpretation of the law.
Wiki
A Wikipedia editor sought to find out why some guy named David Woodward had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages. This is more languages than the Wikipedia entries of literally any country (Turkey has the most with 332 languages, followed by the US with 327), more languages than Jesus (274 languages) or Adolf Hitler (242 languages), you get what I mean. If you’re wondering if you have heard of this guy, I bet you have probably not. The Wikipedia editor rightly thought it was kind of weird that every tongue on Earth had a page about the American composer of middling renown. The discovery, reports the editor Grnrchst, is “what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history.” A network of as many as 200 accounts from 2017 to 2019 created at least 92 different language articles about Woodward, followed by a more sophisticated play from 2021 to 2025 to create 183 more articles.
Ore Into Iron
Iron is mined from the ground and then traded as ore — rocks that contain a preponderance of iron but have not yet been extracted exclusively into iron. The iron ore market has, for decades, anchored global pricing to the 62 percent Fe grade benchmark, that is, rocks that have an ore grade of 62 percent iron. The thing is, mined grades have been dropping steadily and impurities have been rising. As a result, the 62 percent benchmark doesn’t actually reflect the ore that’s currently traded. Usually, that ore is more accurately put (and priced, for that matter) at 61 percent. Rather than make a concerted effort to get those grades back up, the entire industry will move to a 61 percent Fe baseline starting in 2026.
Atomic Oxygen
The Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen has one of the largest collections of drawings in the world, with about 18,000 works. Of those, 800 were drawn in chalk, charcoal or pencil with the artist using the pigment lead white to highlight the work. This pigment was very common for centuries, given its stark white color; then learned the whole deal with lead, and it was largely phased out. The issue is, airborne sulphur-containing compounds that have emerged since the Industrial Revolution have caused darkening of those highlights. It’s an issue that is affecting about half of those drawings that used the pigment — the exact opposite of the intended artistic effect, for one thing — and has forced the museum to pull them from exhibition. A conservation team was set to the problem, and discovered that atomic oxygen can be used to reverse lead white darkening, a major breakthrough that the team revealed at a conference in May. Atomic oxygen is found in the upper atmosphere, where ultraviolet radiation bombardment allows single atoms of oxygen (rather than the more typical double-bonded O2 or Ozone O3) to exist in large quantities.
Kimberly Hatfield, The Art Newspaper
Corn
The United States Department of Agriculture has sharply increased its estimate for American corn production, which is now projected to come in at a record 16.7 billion bushels for the 2025/26 season. That is an increase of one million bushels compared to the July estimate and, if it comes to pass, would be 1.4 billion bushels over the current record. As of the end of July, the USDA projected that ending stocks would come in at 1.66 billion bushels; that estimate has been revised up to 2.117 billion bushels, good for a solid corn glut. These predictions will have widespread implications across a host of industries. Corn, a valuable piece of technology that was once generally consumed as a vegetable, has since been adapted into a universal precursor for our society’s entire livestock, chemical, fuel and alcohol industries.
Cassidy Walter, Agriculture.com
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Good to have you back, Walt!
That Wikipedia story—totally nuts! Middling renown? The dude's a Nazi!
Welcome back, Walt--don't know where you were, but we spent 10 days in Iceland and Denmark!