Numlock News: August 27, 2025 • Caspian Sea, Skeletrack, Mamma Mia!

Aug 27, 2025

Here We Go Again

Mamma Mia! made $1.78 million at the Broadway box office last week in the revival’s first full seven-day outing after its opening. The show is back after 10 years and an initial run that extended from 2001 to 2015. It is now playing once again at 100 percent capacity. That $1.78 million is, for what it’s worth, the show’s highest ever gross, beating out every single week of the initial run. The musical tells a classical Greek myth of a woman seeking to find the identity of her father by inviting the three potential paterfamilias to her wedding mediated by nothing but the sounds of several Swedes.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Dang It, Bobby

The revival of King of the Hill came in at No. 2 on Nielsen’s streaming originals chart, making the show a solid hit for Hulu. The show generated 1.28 billion minutes of viewing in the United States and came in behind only the second season premiere of Wednesday. Of those 1.28 billion minutes, 928 million of them were just from the new episodes. With Season 14’s success, news has emerged that production on another 10-episode season has also finished and will debut next year, a necessary choice given the long lead time of animated projects.

Josef Adalian, Vulture

Peace In Our Time

The momentous legal clash between two titans of industry over the cutthroat business of squishy stuffed animals has drawn to a quiet close. Squishmallows manufacturer Kelly Toys Holding seeks to dismiss its lawsuit lodged against Build-A-Bear over the company’s competing line of cute characters sold as Skoosherz. The courtroom battle began last year when team Squishmallows sued Build-A-Bear in California, alleging infringement of trade dress rights. This prompted a countersuit from Build-A-Bear in Missouri, arguing that trade dress was not valid, enforceable or protectable. A momentous decision in the case came earlier this year, when a judge denied Build-A-Bear’s request to inspect 3,000 Squishmallows. Neither company indicated why the case was being dropped, but the lack of intervention from the powerful and judicially revered American Squish-al Li-bear-ties Union may have been a crucial factor.

Hannah Wyman, St. Louis Post Dispatch

Hawk-Eye

Every NFL stadium has been outfitted with a full 32-camera Sony Hawk-Eye system, and this year will see the beginning of Hawk-Eye’s Skeletrack body monitoring technology testing. The tech can capture 29 points on each athlete’s frame — supplementing existing tracking data collected by devices inside pads and on the ball — which hopefully can make officiating the game fairer. The overall system will get its first use this season for ball-spotting, with the virtual measurement system saving 40 seconds per use compared to the chain gang, and the results are reliable to a quarter inch.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Netflix

KPop Demon Hunters hauled in another 25.4 million views worldwide last week, which brings its cumulative total to 236 million views in the 10 weeks since it was released. Netflix’s all-time top 10 lists are derived from a film’s performance in its first 13 weeks (91 days) on the platform. With those numbers and with still three weeks to go, KPop Demon Hunters has surpassed Red Notice — the action comedy released in November 2021 that previously held the most-watched title on the platform with 230.9 million views. While many films on the most-watched are losing steam in their tenth week, KPop Demon Hunters actually built momentum, and after opening to 9.2 million in its opening week, it has not fallen below 22.7 million weekly views in the past nine weeks.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Caspian Sea

The nation of Azerbaijan is raising fears about the health of the largest salt lake in the world, the Caspian Sea. The level of the sea has fallen by 0.93 meters in the past five years and by 2.5 meters over the last 30 years, declining 20 to 30 centimeters annually. The country is attempting to negotiate with Russia, which has significant control over the sea level since Russia is able to dam the Volga River, which provides 80 percent of the water entering the lake. There are 15 million people who live in the Caspian region as a whole, and 4 million who live on the coast of Azerbaijan. Sturgeon, already threatened with extinction, lose up to 45 percent of their summer and autumn habitats and are cut off from spawning grounds owing to the Russian damming.

Nailia Bagirova, Reuters

Survivorship-Bias.svg

Researchers have been able to create remarkable maps of 14th-century London, York and Oxford, identifying hotspots no more than 200 to 300 meters long where lethal violence and murder were most concentrated. The researchers were able to use coroners’ inquests — instances where a jury was assembled to investigate a suspicious death — for 355 homicides from 1296 to 1398, detailing where the body was found, when the attack happened and what caused it. The map is a remarkable document with fascinating findings. However, as a person trained in statistics with knowledge of the all-too-common survivorship bias, I have to wonder whether these geocoded locations are truly the most dangerous parts of municipal medieval Britain. Or, more accurately, are they just the most survivable dangerous places for coroners — essentially comprehensive maps of the parts of London where, sure, murders happened, but safe enough that a coroner could successfully investigate a murder without he himself being killed during the act of investigation. No, I’m suspicious of the parts of the map with no dots, thank you very much.

Stephanie Brown and Manuel Eisner, The Conversation

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