Numlock News: August 3, 2026 • Spider-Man, Gamma Rays, Speedy Trains
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal
Spider-Man: Brand New Day smashed even the highest of expectations, making $355 million from 4,487 theaters in North America, the second-largest debut in box office history and just $2 million behind the record held by Avengers: Endgame. Thanks to the continued performance of The Odyssey — which incidentally also stars Tom Holland and Zendaya and also features Jon Bernthal in a crucial supporting role as a deeply violent colleague — this past weekend was the single best weekend at the North American box office in history, with $430 million across all movies in the marketplace, well above the $402 million made over the Endgame weekend.
Air Con
China State Railway Group is boasting about delivering air conditioners from their manufacturers in China to buyers in Europe within just 15 days by rail thanks to a route that was originally designed as a flagship project of the Belt and Road initiative back in 2013. Rail links between China and Europe have existed, but the China Railway Express is particularly shining in this moment, when sea routes between Europe and Asia have been snarled by tensions in the Middle East, and sea routes take 40 days to transport goods. Air conditioners have been shipped from China to Europe at a significantly higher rate than normal given the extreme heat on the continent, and manufacturers like Midea Group and Gree Electrical Appliances have switched to rail to ensure that HVAC systems get to market while it’s still hot.
Sargassum
It’s one of the worst seasons ever recorded for sargassum in the Caribbean, with millions of metric tons of the brown seaweed washing ashore and fouling miles upon miles of beaches. This is a new issue; before 2010, there was virtually no issue with sargassum abundance. In 2011, the numbers hit one million metric tons across the Caribbean, then 40 million last year. Mexico’s tourism authorities are trying to protect key beaches and regions by enlisting more boats to collect sargassum and installing bigger barriers off the coast; this year, authorities collected 96,151 metric tons, up from 92,783 metric tons last year. It’s getting so bad — and so consistent — that several companies are developing projects specifically to exploit the onslaught sargassum for biofuel production potential.
Link
The Link satellite is still in a bad way, spinning out of control in orbit. Its mission is to rendezvous with NASA’s Swift gamma ray observatory and push Swift into a higher orbit before the instrument burns up in the atmosphere, both extending the life of a valuable mission and demonstrating the potential for such orbital-boosting tech. The good news is that the ground team is working to fix the satellite and has confirmed that its electric thrusters and important hardware are still in good condition. They’ve also been able to use the thrusters to control altitude and spin, and as of Friday, the team managed to cut the spin rate in half from nine degrees per second to nine degrees per second. Once the spin rate is reduced further, communication will get much easier, at which point the goal will be to recover the now inoperable reaction wheels and restore control.
Lettuce
The cyclospora outbreak that is believed to have originated in Taylor Farms lettuce sourced from Mexico is prompting a consumer pullback from all manner of leafy greens, and prompting lettuce growers who are well outside of the affected region to plow their lettuce back into their fields. On the consumer side, the reaction has been swift: Foot traffic at Chopt is downs 12 percent in July and Taco Bell is down 21 percent. In supermarkets, unit sales of fresh lettuce was down 8.7 percent year over year in the four-week period ending July 18, a decline roughly commensurate with 7.6 million pounds of lettuce. Interestingly, of 37 vegetable categories tracked by NielsenIQ, 28 saw significant sales declines, an indication that the government response to the specific cyclospora outbreak has been so befuddled that people are simply evading chlorophyll out of an abundance of caution. In reaction to the demand pullback, many farmers in California (not where the outbreak happened) who grow romaine lettuce (not even the affected kind of lettuce!) are chopping up their fields and plowing them back into the soil.
Amira McKee, The Wall Street Journal
All Hail The Mysterious Gap
The Great Oxidation Event is a massive and dramatic change that happened on the Earth’s surface. For two billion years, Earth had basically no oxygen in its air or oceans. Then, 2.45 billion years ago, life evolved and began to fill the world with oxygen, an event termed The Great Oxidation Event. There’s an issue, though, which is that mineral analysis appears to indicate that oxygen-producing microbes actually evolved hundreds of millions of years before the GOE. So, there’s a strange gap between the point when we should’ve had an oxygen-lousy planet and the point at which we in fact did. The level of oxygen also seems to have risen and fallen over 200 million years, which is even odder. A new explanation focuses on continental shelves, arguing that their expansion around the time of the GOE was the trigger that may have set off the event, tectonic shifts driving the change and ensuring that oxygen production wasn’t just swallowed up by the oceans.
Art
Baby Boomers collected vast troves of art, and as the generation succumbs to the inevitable, that means that something like $1 trillion worth of art is going to change intergenerational hands. The Boomers were responsible for an explosion in the art business; the roughly 150 art galleries in New York in 1946 doubled by 1961 and then doubled again by the early 2000s. As for the market itself, in 1988 there were 8,300 artists tracked in the Artnet Price Database, meaning they had a work sold at auction; as of 2012, there were 90,275. Hard-won collections making their way to the next generation is already having significant effects on both the art market as well as museums, because if there’s one thing that is rarely passed on from one generation to the next it’s taste. Many inheritors would rather the works their parents collected find a gallery where they’re actually wanted. One estimate has that there are about 1,000 collectors in the world with an art collection worth $1 billion or more, and perhaps conservatively, 3,000 who own at least $100 million worth of art; back of the napkin math, that means something like two $100 million art collections getting inherited every week.
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The art stuff is an interesting question to me, personally. My parents had some, but it’s all languishing in my mom’s house nearly a thousand miles away. After she went into memory care, the few things she wanted only held sentimental value to her.
I have no idea what I’ll find after she passes.