Numlock News: August 24, 2025 • Aardvarks, Undersea Cables, Gin

Aug 25, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Ghost Order

Details have emerged around a banking error that resulted in Mumbai traders accidentally selling 59.8 million shares of Clean Science for 65.4 billion rupees (US$749 million) during the first four minutes of trading. That is 56 percent of the outstanding stock in the family-controlled company, and was almost twice as many as they actually intended to sell. Upon realizing the error (which sent the company’s stock on a wild ride and would have imperiled ownership’s control of the firm), the brokerage bought back 32.2 million shares. That’s a big error, but still not close to some truly magnificent fat finger incidents, like the time last year a trader at Citigroup accidentally sent a customer six billion dollars because they accidentally pasted the account number into the “amount” field.

Ashutosh Joshi and Savio Shetty, Bloomberg

OnlyFans

The company OnlyFans, which we choose to describe as a direct-to-consumer subscription service that allows creators to earn revenue from their fanbases, made $7.22 billion in gross revenue last year, up 9 percent year over year. The company posted a pre-tax profit of $684 million, $497 million of which went in dividends to the guy who owns most of the company: Leonid Radvinsky. This is a website with just 46 total employees as of last year. While the company has endeavored to diversify the variety of creators on their platform, it’s fair to say that the service is mostly known for, shall we say…performers of negotiable affection. Either way, that revenue figure is approximately the amount made by the company that owns Taco Bell and KFC, which, dang.

Todd Spangler, Variety

Aardvarks

Ecologists set up cameras to observe the burrows of aardvarks in Senegal, and found that it isn’t actually entirely accurate to call them aardvark burrows. More realistically, they can be described as “burrows used by anything on the savannah for any reason at all.” The footage of 105 entrances to 92 burrows captured predators and prey alike availing themselves of the shelter. Warthogs, guinea fowl, leopards, partridges, pythons, porcupines, honey badgers, baboons, bats and monkeys all at one point went into the burrow. This is a problem for us, though, because bats and monkeys all hanging out in the same enclosed space is a perfect recipe for disease spreading from one species to another. That’s a bigger problem because those patas monkeys are common at human tourism sites too.

Jude Isabella, bioGraphic

Cables

Undersea cables carry over 95 percent of international data communications and facilitate $10 trillion in financial transactions per day. Globally, 90 percent of them are produced by only three companies: Japan’s NEC, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks and the U.S.’s SubCom. The rest of the balance is mostly made by China’s HMN Technologies. The FCC approved a new proposal that would disqualify companies based in China, Russia and Iran from involvement in US-owned cables, forcing those three largest companies to take a more rigorous look at their supply chains in exchange for essentially the whole pie.

Ryohei Yasoshima, Nikkei Asia

Estimate

Netflix put its hit movie KPop Demon Hunters into movie theaters this past weekend in a sing-along event, a rarity for a streamer that has been generally hostile to movie theaters. It appears to have made the most money at the box office this weekend — a first for a Netflix movie — though the company is not releasing box office data, so estimates that the movie made $18 million to $20 million will have to suffice. That is, nevertheless, significantly higher than the $15.6 million that Weapons made this weekend.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Gin

The global gin market is expected to grow from $23.43 billion this year to $29.48 billion in 2030, growing at 4.7 percent annually. The fastest-growing region for gin, according to Mordor Intelligence, is the Asia-Pacific region, which has seen local distilleries flex beyond the whiskey that dominates the business. While alcohol consumption is generally declining around the world, India remains an exception, where alcohol consumption actually rose six percentage points year over year. The country is home to a number of gin brands that have obtained international recognition, like Hapusa.

Steven Borowiec, Nikkei Asia

Impact

Earlier this year, there was a bit of a scare surrounding an asteroid that had a non-zero chance of impacting the Earth in 2032. Eventually, more data and an intense period of study found that it does not have any chance of hitting Earth. However, the 60-meter asteroid named 2024 YR4 does still have a four percent chance of hitting the moon, which could be interesting in its own way. A new preprint accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters found that if the astroid does hit the moon, the chance of it striking the moon’s near side is 86 percent, which would mean we get a good view of whatever goes down. If it did hit the moon, it would cause a significant crater — a kilometer in diameter. The fallout would also eject 100 million metric tons of material, 99.8 percent of which wouldn’t escape the moon’s gravity. But that still cracks out to 10,000-100,000 metric tons of material that would all be small enough to burn up safely in the atmosphere, which would look cool.

Phil Plait, Scientific American

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