Numlock News: August 23, 2024 • Orca, Crayola, Neodymium

Aug 23, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Diamonds

Botswana announced the discovery of a massive 2,492-carat diamond, the second-largest ever brought out of a mine, found by the Lucara Diamond Corp. It appears to be the largest diamond found in over 100 years, after the 3,106-carat Cullinan Diamond found in South Africa in 1905, and beats out the previous second-largest diamond, the Sewelo diamond, which came in at 1,758 carats in 2019. The diamond is still rough, though high-quality, and now the difficult, crucial, delicate and important work begins of keeping it the hell away from the British royal family.

The Associated Press

Crayola

It’s Crayola’s big month with back-to-school, and all summer the crayon maker has been cranking out 13 million crayons a day from their factory in Easton, Pennsylvania, a rate 8 percent higher than the rest of the year. Half of Crayola annual sales happen in the nine weeks leading up to Labor Day, and the Easton plant produces 350,000 24-count boxes every day. The wax that goes into the crayons is stored molten in silos that hold a three-day supply at a time. Pigment arrives in sacks that weigh 3.85 pounds each, and the facility goes through 450,000 pounds of wax every five days.

Lily Meier and Brian Delk, Bloomberg

Wealthy

A new study from Charles Schwab said that on average, Americans would consider themselves to be wealthy at $2.5 million, up from $2.2 million two years ago. Americans reported needing an average net worth of $778,000 to feel “financially comfortable,” which is down from $1 million last year, though the figure scales upward with age. Gen Z respondents said they would be financially comfortable at $406,000, on average. Americans believed on average that they’d need $1.46 million saved up for retirement, up 53 percent compared to the $951,000 cited in 2020. Schwab did not calculate the level at which Americans would feel like their own personal financial goals were reached, but based on a cursory survey of 10 of my boys, I think that it’d probably take one-eleventh of the $150 million the Nevada Gaming Commission stipulates must be stored in the vault beneath the 3000 block of Las Vegas Boulevard — the Bellagio, the Mirage and the MGM Grand — on a fight night, like the one two weeks from tonight. You do the math.

Rocio Fabbro, Quartz

Whales

For a month, rescuers tried to save a single young killer whale trapped in a tidal lagoon off the coast of British Columbia, a media spectacle that demanded action to save one of the younger members of a population of about 380 transient killer whales. Many different attempts were made, including playing recordings of other whales to try to coax the calf out of the lagoon, which it eventually did in late April. While the happy part of the story is over, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Ehattesaht First Nation have been locked in negotiations over who is on the hook for the costs. A GoFundMe to raise C$500,000 raised just C$44,000, and the Ehattesaht are seeking C$250,000 in reimbursements for their contributions to the response. Fisheries and Oceans Canada also spent C$260,000 to try to free the whale, and the issue is that their entire annual budget to rescue marine mammals and sea turtles amounts to C$1 million.

Larry Pynn, Hakai Magazine

Alerts

Since May, 99 percent of Americans have been under at least one National Weather Service extreme weather alert, and many have been through multiple. Right now, 58 million Americans are under an alert for extreme weather, whether a California wildfire, a Texas heat wave or flooding in the Northeast. For every degree Celsius the atmosphere warms, it can hold 7 percent more water vapor, and what goes up must eventually come down. There have already been 19 events in 2024 that have inflicted more than $1 billion in damage, the fourth-busiest year on record.

Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

Squeeze

Teams of academic researchers have grown substantially over the past few decades, increasing from an average of 1.8 authors per paper in 1970 to 3.6 authors per paper in 2004. That’s contributed to a bit of a logjam for early-career academics, according to a new study: For every one-person increase in the average team size for a given academic field, the new Ph.D.s working in that field are 24 percent less likely to hold a tenure-track job and 11 percent more likely to eventually leave science. While teamwork is crucial for lots of scientific discoveries, the structure of academia and the job market penalizes the very processes that make for good science.

Katie L. Burke, Science

Neodymium

Neodymium is a rare earth metal that’s been essential for generations — it makes glass purple, we love it for that — but has secured new prominence as a crucial component in cryogenic coolers necessary for superconductors, as well as high-powered magnets in smartphones and wind turbines. Right now, known, economically feasible reserves of the metal stand at an estimated 12.8 million tons. In order to make wind turbines at the rate believed necessary to keep global warming south of 1.5 C, we’ll need 121,000 tons of that a year, according to a 2023 study, giving us a century of the stuff at currently believed levels. The operative word is believed, though, as there’s lots more out there that isn’t viable to mine, and geologists discover more all the time.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Exciting couple weeks in the Sunday edition!

This week, I spoke to Stephen Harrison, tech journalist and author of the new novel The Editors. Harrison predominantly covers Wikipedia, one of the most interesting systems to emerge from the internet. His journalism dives into all the interesting, behind-the-scenes decisions and controversies on one of the most important sources of information on the internet, and that beat has informed his brand new, thrilling novel. His novel, The Editors, is out this week, you should check it out!

Last week I talked to Chris Dalla Riva, author of the newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher. Chris is responsible for one of my favorite newsletters, you folks will recognize him as one of the writers who covered for me during my honeymoon, he’s doing things at the intersection of data and music that nobody else is doing. Dalla Riva can be found on Substack and most social media platforms.

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