Numlock News: August 26, 2025 • Josh, Daggerheart, Sidewalk Robots
By Walt Hickey
Sidewalk Delivery
Robomart, based out of Los Angeles (where sidewalk delivery boxes have slowly become a dominant form of urban wildlife), is out with what it believes is the next iteration of grocery delivery. It’s an autonomous vehicle with 10 refrigerated lockers the size of a shuttle bus. It does not have a driver and can carry 500 pounds of payload to multiple deliveries. The fully electric vehicle has a range of 112 miles, a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and a curb weight of 2,205 pounds. This is a considerable improvement in deliverable mass compared to drones or sidewalk boxes, but at this point, I fear we’re just reinventing food trucks.
TTRPG
Critical Role is perhaps the best-known brand in tabletop gaming. The Dungeons & Dragons podcast and video series that spawned an original animated series also has a tabletop format of its own: the newly launched Daggerheart RPG system. It then came as a surprise when the best-known franchise in tabletop chose not to even use its own RPG system for its fourth campaign. Instead, it will use D&D 2024. The relationship between Dungeons & Dragons and the vast tapestry of (often lucrative) actual-play content has been an interesting story of how a brand can grow thanks to work that is fair use but nevertheless derivative of its IP. Perhaps the main reason Critical Role is sticking to the standard is in case the players make Dimension 20 impresario and Gygaxian gun-for-hire Brennan Lee Mulligan pinch hit as DM and run a game for 13 different players split across three groups. In that event, for the love of god, Tymora should stick to what he’s already familiar with.
Railroad
A new analysis out of Arizona State University found that while the 623,000 car and truck bridges in the United States must be regularly inspected with results made public, the 70,000 railroad bridges in the U.S. do not share a similar degree of scrutiny. There are, in fact, only six people at the Federal Railroad Administration who oversee the safety for all those bridges, and about 10 percent of U.S. railroads have not had their bridge programs audited. Since 1976, FRA data has found 112 bridge-related railroad accidents, or about two per year.
Matthew Bird, Mackenzie Miller and Justin Patton, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism
Peak Josh
The Joshes of the world have never been this powerful, a new analysis found. The number of baby boys named Josh or Joshua was essentially nil through 1970. However, its popularity sharply increased, accounting for 1.09 percent of all newborns in 1981, peaking at 1.13 percent in 1985 and then falling off after 1989 to just 0.15 percent of newborns named Josht today. It was a great run — from 1979 to 2009, it was in the top 10 baby boy names — and this demographic wave of Joshes is cresting. This decade of hegemony means that today, your vanguard Josh is in their 40s to 50s, an age seen among six percent of U.S. governors.
Allan Smith and Amanda Terkel, NBC News
Calories
A new study found that the world produced enough calories to feed 15 billion people in 2022. That said, while we produce lots and lots of calories, many of the more boring calories are converted into tastier calories in an inefficient process known as “feeding them to cows and chickens.” In 2020, 45 percent of the calories grown were lost during the production of animal-based foods. Also during that year, five percent of the calories grown were converted into biodiesel. While the total global calorie production increased 24 percent from 2010 to 2020, the number of calories available for people to eat increased only 17 percent.
Michael Le Page, New Scientist
Dentistry
The dentistry and orthodontics profession is weighing the tradeoffs of just how much microplastics are consumed by people in the process of maintaining healthy and straight teeth. Toothbrushes are made of plastic bristles, people who grind their teeth are prescribed plastic mouth guards, the process of filling cavities might involve the use of a plastic composite and lots of orthodontics (whether it’s the clear plastic aligners or the retainers) are plastic. According to one study, a plastic-bristled toothbrush might add 30 to 120 micro-particles of plastic to your diet; another estimated 39 particles per day. The question up for debate is how much exactly is the wrong amount of microplastics to consume in exchange for a nice smile.
New Cars
As new vehicles become more and more expensive, the once standard five-year car loan has given way to the six-year car loan. It has been the most common auto loan term since eclipsing the five-year term in 2012. That said, the slow but steady rise of the seven-year auto loan is also eclipsing the five-year, as people attempt to spread out payments longer and longer. In Q1 of 2005, 45.4 percent of auto loans were for five years, a figure that today stands at 18.5 percent. Meanwhile, seven-year loans went from nearly unheard-of in 2005 (just 1.8 percent of loans) to 21.6 percent today. The six-year loan remained relatively steady over the period, and today accounts for 36.1 percent of loans. The average interest paid on an 84-month (seven-year) loan was $15,460, about $4,600 more than the standard five-year.
Jade Thomas and Keith Naughton, Bloomberg
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