Numlock News: August 7, 2024 • Little Dragons, Nostromo, Sonoma

Aug 07, 2024

Socks

Yes, we all know of the generational sock wars: Gen Z prefers a taller sock (41 percent like tall socks, 47 percent shorter socks) while millennials prefer the inverse (23 percent tall to 59 percent short), as do Gen X (28 percent tall, 61 percent short) and boomers (27 percent tall, 57 percent short), while only those born before 1945 (45 percent tall, 36 percent short) side with Gen Z. This obscures the true nature of the conflict, though. Shattering though it may be to our sensibilities, the data is unambiguous — the time-honored taboo is broken, and socks are increasingly perceived as okay to wear with sandals.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Nostromo

If you want to cool a room with green energy, the late afternoon is your problem spot. In the mornings and midday, you’re usually getting ample solar energy, and in the evenings and nights the demand for cooling is just low enough that you can make do. But in late afternoon, solar energy generation is declining with the setting sun, but you’ve still got to contend with the heat of the day. New cooling tech aims to charge itself up during those good times to spend the power during the bad, and one new piece of cooling tech from Nostromo Energy called IceBrick cools down a 2-liter solution of water and glycol into ice, which can be used later as coolant during the late afternoon. The first system was installed at the Beverly Hilton in 2023, has a capacity of 1.4 megawatt-hours, and contains enough solution to make 150,000 pounds of ice in the mornings to discharge in the late afternoon.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Wrestling

Mijaín López, a 41-year-old Cuban wrestler, achieved a never-before-done accomplishment at the Olympic Games, winning five gold medals in the same individual event after returning for a final sixth summer Olympics. He first competed in Athens in 2004 and lost in the quarterfinals, but would go on to win the gold medal in the men’s heavyweight Greco-Roman event in Beijing in 2008, London in 2012, Rio in 2016, Tokyo in 2020 and now Paris in 2024. In Tokyo he became the eighth athlete ever to win four Olympic golds in the same individual event, joining a Japanese wrestler, a Danish sailor, and an American discus thrower, sprinter, and two swimmers. After securing the fifth win and a place in the history books, he left his shoes on the mat to signal his retirement.

Lukas Weese, The Athletic

Six Little Dragons

Six companies in China — Moonshot, MiniMax, Zhipu, Baichuan, 01.AI and StepFun — termed the Six Little Dragons constitute the leading companies in AI in the country, and they have the backing of some serious heavies, with the first five all staked by Alibaba, first four staked by Tencent, and the main difference being another partner dealt in. Moonshot just scored a $300 million round, pushing its valuation to $3.3 billion. Since OpenAI cut off access to China in July, it’s been a bit of a sprint to fill the gap, made even more complicated by the import controls on advanced AI chips.

Zheping Huang, Bloomberg

Refunds

The Oklahoma Energy Resources Board collects a 0.1 percent assessment of oil and gas production in the state, a fund that has grown to $163 million that’s designed to restore blighted land and plug orphan wells that have been abandoned by their creators. So far, it’s funded the restoration of 20,000 sites. But, some companies — 76, to be precise — have bailed on the voluntary levy, and the state has forked over millions of dollars in refunds to them, enough money to have otherwise plugged 1,500 orphan well sites. The state has over 18,000 labeled orphan wells, and drillers have set aside only 0.6 percent of the projected cleanup costs.

Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

Road Trip

The largest shipping company in the world for automobiles is Höegh Autoliners, and they are remarkably busy given record exports from China. The going rate for a vessel that can carry 6,500 cars is right now $105,000 per day, which is close to a peak hit earlier this year of $115,000, the highest since at least 2000. China’s BYD and SAIC are staring down massive tariffs from Europe and seem poised to get similar hits from the U.S., which should cut demand for the vessels.

Bloomberg News

Sonoma

Sonoma County is linked in the minds of many Americans with California wine country, one of the premiere regions for wine in both the country and the world. It’s hoping to maintain that reputation, and a new ballot initiative — Measure J — is seeking to rein in another, less scenic agricultural industry in the area: the factory farms that hold an estimated 3 million head of livestock in concentrated animal feeding operations. While the country makes half a billion dollars from wine grapes, livestock is also a $140 million industry. Its growth has threatened the water quality and the health of the area, and if the measure passes, Sonoma will be the first county in the country to ban CAFOs. Advocates tallied up 21 large CAFOs in the county with between 900 and 600,000 animals.

Nina Elkadi, High Country News

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