Numlock News: December 11, 2025 • Broadway, Cherries, Nautilus
By Walt Hickey
Cherry Picking
Chile is a major producer and exporter of cherries, and China is a massive importer. Nine out of 10 of Chile’s cherries go to China, a real trade tongue twister. That statistic is also causing problems as Chilean farmers are trying to ramp up production to satisfy an increasingly demanding customer. For instance, the first batches of cherries are airlifted over to China in order to get a very good price. However, this year’s crop had early issues, causing lots of the delivery to be refused. Last year, 641,100 metric tons of cherries were exported to China, but this year that’s expected to drop to 550,000 metric tons because of those issues and adverse weather late in the season. It takes 23 days to ship them over water, and prices are going down —- $20.20 per kilogram compared to $23.70 per kilogram last year.
James Attwood, Antonia Mufarech and Srinidhi Ragavendran, Bloomberg
Laundry
Fabric-folding robots are still science fiction, but new advances in training robotic arms are really attempting to overcome this infamously difficult-to-automate household chore of machine laundry folding. Researchers evaluate the success of an attempted fold using a metric of Intersection over Union, or IoU. A perfect fold has an IoU of one, meaning it was folded perfectly in half. A 2024 study that tried to fold a rectangular piece of cloth in half managed only a 0.41. One new tech, AdaFold, was able to get an IoU of 0.83 in that same experiment. Still, we’re just going to have to wait for an automated solution to the tedium, because obviously the world makes far more sense when we make the robots do all the artistic creation and force humans to fold laundry.
Kaia Glickman, Knowable Magazine
Attack
Ukraine struck the Comoros-flagged oil tanker Dashan when it was en route to Novorossiysk, the third attack on the Russian shadow fleet of oil vessels following attacks on the tankers Kairos and Virat in late November. It’s a calculated escalation from the Ukrainians, who had previously refrained from targeting commercial oil vessels but have since made the decision to attack them with marine drones to gum up the economic engine of the Russian war machine. The insurance rates to sail a ship into the Black Sea have spiked dramatically, meaning that the actuaries have formally been drafted to the Ukrainian cause.
Broadway
Broadway entertained 14.66 million theatergoers last season, now back to only slightly behind the 14.77 million logged in the pre-Covid 2018-19 season. It was the highest-grossing season on record, earning $1.89 billion up and down the Great White Way. One concern is the decline of a crucial constituency: people from Long Island and New Jersey. In the 2006-07 season, 16.5 percent of the Broadway audience were from New York City proper, 18.3 percent were from the New York City suburbs, 49.7 percent were from the rest of the United States and 15.5 percent were from outside of the country. Since then, the shift has been more NYC and Rest of World, and less Nassau and Westchester. New York City now accounts for 25.1 percent of the audience, the NYC suburbs a measly 12.6 percent, the rest of the U.S. 42.1 percent and the rest of the world 20.3 percent. Guys, we brought Mamma Mia! back and everything, what else could you possibly need to hop on NJ Transit? Just name any woman, we’ll put her in Chicago.
Caitlin Huston , The Hollywood Reporter
Brown-Forman
Jack Daniels has become the bellwether of Canada-U.S. relations, and the latest data shows that the Canadians are still really, really mad at America. The tariff policies of the administration, coupled with a number of demeaning barbs, prompted an ongoing Canadian boycott of a number of U.S. imports, a core one being American alcohol. Sales in Canada for Brown-Forman are down 62 percent as Canadians stick to the domestic stuff or imports from trading partners that have not gone completely out of their way to insult their country. Currently, only two provinces continue to sell alcohol from the United States.
Fire
A blockbuster finding published in the journal Nature pushes back the earliest date for controlled fire produced by humans to 400,000 years ago, a massive 350,000-year shift from the previously accepted 50,000-year history of human-controlled fire. That earlier estimate was based on the confirmed evidence from Neanderthal sites in northern France. The new one is based on a discovery of baked clay, flint hand axes fractured by intense heat and fragments of spark-producing iron pyrite from a Paleolithic site in Barnham in Suffolk, England. Geochemical tests showed evidence of repeated burning in the same location and temperatures over 700 degrees Celsius. This is all rather impressive since fire can be a notoriously tricky thing for archaeologists to date and confirm, given our ancestors’ robust commitment to burning the evidence.
Mustakim Hasnath, Associated Press
Salp
Males of the brown paper nautilus octopus have evolved to be the same size and color as the guts of a salp, which is a large gelatinous zooplankton that forms in long chains. This allows the nautilus to hide in plain sight by clinging to a salp chain and pretending to be a dumb little zooplankton hitching a ride with its asexual brothers rather than a very edible octopus. Salps are fascinating in their own right, beyond the protection they offer other species. They feast on algae, and a study concluded that they may be responsible for sequestering as much as 700 million metric tons of carbon into the depths per year despite a lifespan measured in mere weeks.
If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·
Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·
Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
That story about Brown-Forman didn't surprise me at all. I don't think that people south of the 49th Parallel realize just how angry Canadians are at the U.S., and that anger will not fade anytime soon.
"obviously the world makes far more sense when we make the robots do all the artistic creation and force humans to fold laundry." Well done Mr. Walt Hickey!