Numlock News: August 21, 2025 • Croissants, Transformers, Shakers

Aug 21, 2025

Spirited

What makes parasitic relationships so interesting is how they are oftentimes mediated by environmental factors just as much as by host-parasite links. Scavengers, parasites, carrion eaters, the eaters of the dead, these are the creatures that hold up the firmament of the food chain. Sure, we see time viruses and infections of the opportunistic sort. They can only emerge when the ecosystem and the host are vulnerable, overexerted or under-resourced — thus less defended and more likely targets. But even so, you have seasonality too: organisms that can only survive under certain climate, certain solar or certain biome conditions. The idea that life might be able to survive year-round, that the conditions for survival can be consistently met or exceeded at all moments in the calendar, is anthropomorphism. It is a denial of the realities of the swings within the predator-prey model, a form of self-centered pareidolia indulged by mankind to ignore the desperate and often ephemeral nature of life in the cutthroat, violent ecosystem that is the natural world. We must salute these scavengers, these agents of decomposition, those that wring life from death. I bring this up only because one of the most beautiful, if devastatingly temporary, phenomena of the natural world will soon grace our planet: Spirit Halloween has announced it will open more than 1,500 storefronts nationwide this year, coming soon to a mini-mall near you.

Natalie Miller, The Toybook

More Than Meets The Eye

Hitachi Energy announced it will spend $109 million to build out its Tennessee facility that manufactures transformer components in light of the tight U.S. supply. The expansion will add 60,000 square feet to the factory by mid-2027. Demand for power transformers (which are used in the power grid) in the U.S. is up 116 percent since 2019, while demand for distribution transformers (which are used right before power gets to the end users) is up 41 percent over the same period. Supply has not kept pace with demand, and this year we’re looking at shortfalls of 30 percent for power transformers and 10 percent for distribution transformers. Prices for a power transformer are up 77 percent over the period, and prices for distribution transformers are up between 78 percent and 95 percent.

Alexander C. Kaufman, Latitude Media

Shakers

It is (expressed as a percentage) one of the fastest-growing religious movements in America: there’s a new Shaker! The last active Shaker community in the United States has had just two remaining members for some time now. The sect was founded in 1747, prioritizing the confession of sin, the community of goods and celibacy — the last of which is generally considered to be a key cause of the religious order’s diminished numbers. Until recently, there were just two remaining full members of the Christian sect: an 87-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man, the latter of whom joined in 1978. A new convert — a 59-year-old woman who previously lived in an episcopal convent for four years — came to live at the village this spring, and has since joined formally, bringing the number of Shakers up to three.

Madi Smith, NPR

Solar

NASA and IBM released an open-source machine learning model trained on a decade of data from the sun collected by the space agency. They hope that it’s suited to help forecast future solar activity, such as solar storms. The data came from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which takes images of the sun in multiple wavelengths, and the total size of the training dataset came in at 250 terabytes. The early testing holds that the model — called Surya — might be able to predict solar flares at least two hours in advance.

Peter Hall, MIT Technology Review

Posters

A new analysis of 58,687 movie posters found a number of genre-related trends across the images. While the overall color intensity of movie posters has slowly declined over the past several decades, colors nevertheless have strong links to different genres. Some genres (animation, musical, comedy) skew more colorful, and others (war, mystery) skew more drab. But it even gets more sophisticated than that. Orange and brown on movie posters are most prominent for western movies, both white and red are big for romance and comedy and blue and green are both strongly linked to animated and family films.

Stephen Follows

Oui

Croissants are big right now, particularly in supermarkets. In the context of supermarkets, “perimeter sales” refer to the bakery, deli, produce, et cetera — everything that’s not in the packaged goods part of the store. Perimeter sales are $22.3 billion industry that has been doing particularly well lately and has been outperforming all the snacks and packaged goods in the middle of the grocery store. Croissants have been crushing it in both venues, up seven percent year over year. Croissants have grown to be the third largest category in perimeter sales, period, behind only traditional bread, then the buns and rolls category.

Amanda Schuster, Food Dive

85% Rule

In the 1930s and 1940s, studies of rural roads in the U.S. coalesced around the idea of the 85% rule, which said that the posted speed limit of the road should be as fast as the 15th-fastest vehicle out of every 100 traveling on the road in free-flowing traffic. The rule essentially allowed the so-called “natural pace” of traffic to set the speed limits for thoroughfares. This has been the hard-and-fast rule for speed limits for decades, with some exceptions. For example, in the 1970s, the oil crisis prompted a lot of 55 miles per hour limits, which were upped to the increasingly standard 65 miles per hour on most highways after the crisis elapsed. However, a new approach for stretches of highway in urban areas is challenging that rule of thumb. A 2019 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that each 5-mile-per-hour increase to a state’s maximum speed limit increased fatalities by 8.5 percent on interstates and 2.8 percent on other roads.

Jeff McMurray, Insurance Journal

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