Numlock News: December 19, 2025 • Crucial, Curses, Clutch
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend! Keep an eye out on Sunday for something neat.
RAM
An unexpected side effect of the AI boom is the real demand for RAM from industrial buyers with seemingly infinite VC capital behind them. This has had the unintended effect of making the traditional market for memory — gamers in particular — pay out the nose for chips. A Patriot Viper Venom 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR-6000 that sold for $49 as recently as August is now going for $189, according to price tracking from Ars Technica. At the high end, a Team Delta RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6400 that sold for $190 in August is today retailing for $800. Solid state drives are also feeling the pinch, though those prices have merely doubled. The future looks bad; Micron, which sold RAM to consumers under the Crucial brand, straight up announced it’s yanking the product line from shelves and devoting all its energy to the incredibly lucrative AI business. It’s somewhat funny that the main impact of the AI trend — from expensive GPUs a little while ago to RAM right now — has been to make the core gaming consumer of the computing industry’s wares somewhat miserable.
Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica
Mosquitos
If you wanted to obtain small biological samples from a large habitat containing some elusive species, you would basically need to recruit a small army of grad students and set them to work. Or, a pair of new studies finds, you can instead just catch a bunch of mosquitoes and analyze their meals. This has a number of advantages; they’re competitive against grad students on pricing for sure, and the mosquitoes don’t complain, so there’s that. One study found that 96 hours of conventional sampling techniques in the wet season of a stretch of central Florida detected 67 species of vertebrates, including 12 amphibians, 8 reptiles, 8 mammals and 39 species of birds. By comparison, with 22 hours of field work and 179 hours of lab work, 2,482 blood-engorged mosquitoes were collected, 1,494 of which yielded DNA. This resulted in1,345 vertebrate detections, including 9 amphibians, 12 reptiles, 9 mammals and 36 species of birds. The mosquito technique totaled 66 species, comparable to conventional approaches.
Zounds!
A new study carried out two experiments on 192 participants essentially asking them to do the physically strenuous task a chair pushup. The experimental bit came when the control group was told to repeat a neutral word every two seconds while the experimental group was told to repeat a swear word of their choice. This found that the participants who swore supported their body weight significantly longer, and the researchers chalk that up the the swearing making them more disinhibited. This corroborates earlier studies that found those who swore reported feeling less pain when immersing their hands in buckets of ice water compared to a control group and could do so for 40 seconds longer. As a New Yorker, my read on this is that I am essentially invincible and consume the equivalent of the Super Soldier Serum every time I miss the subway or jaywalk.
Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica
Revisions
A new analysis of the 725 companies included at least once in the S&P 500 from 2010 to 2020 found that oftentimes, the 266 companies that disclosed their carbon emissions data at least twice between 2010 and 2024 would have to revise those emissions statements, typically in an upward direction. The data looked strictly at greenhouse gas produced directly by the business only, or Scope 1 emissions. A good 74 percent of the companies had to revise that data on at least one occasion. The amount of emissions that went underreported and totaled 135 million tons; on the other hand, the over-reported emissions totaled 57 million tons.
Susan Milligan and Glen Justice, Harvard Business School and Lauren Cohen, Ethan Rouen and Kunal Sachdeva, Nature Climate Change
Box Office
The global box office is projected to hit $35 billion in 2026, which would be a fiv percent increase over the 2025 estimates. But that is still short of the high water mark set in 2019 when box office revenues reached an eye-watering $42.3 billion, according to Gower Street Analytics. The expectation is for the North American market to finish the year with an 11 percent increate over 2025 at $9.9 billion, still 14 percent behind the 2017-2019 average. China’s market is projected to finish at conservatively $7.1 billion, down four percent from 2025. The rest of the global theatrical business will finish with an increase of five percent at around $18 billion.
Clutch
NFL kickers are doing outstandingly well this season, with a few standouts making record-setting and herculean field goals. The rest of the crop also became automatic at increasingly fearsome distances. For instance, a quarter century ago the average kicker made 70 percent of kicks from 40 to 49 yards, a figure that today stands at 84 percent of kicks. Today, kickers are outperforming the 25-year baseline by 6.1 percent when it comes to field goal percentage, and have even began to outperform in “clutch” situations (field goals to tie or take the lead in the final 2 minutes of regulation or overtime) when they previously underperformed during those high-pressure situations.
Best Years Of Our Lives
A new survey asked Americans when the best decade of their life was, and somewhat delightfully each age cohort disproportionately says “this one” compared to what would be expected. For instance, 22 percent of people in their 60s say its their best years right now, as do 30 percent of those in their 70s. Overall, the most commonly held best-decade for each age cohort was the one they’re currently in. Otherwise, the respondents did tend to shout out the 20s and 30s: 22 percent of adults said the 20s were or would be their best decade, as did 20 percent for their 30s. Women were more likely than men to say that their best years happen after 30. As for worst decade, the spread was pretty diffuse but teenage years did come out ahead.
This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Brendan Borrell, who is out with a delightful new book that dives into a fascinating era in the history of rock and roll called Power Soak: Invention, Obsession, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Sound. It’s a great read!
Numlock Sunday: Brendan Borrell on Power Soak
The book dives into the troubled and genre-bending history of the band Boston, the web of vexing studio contracts that diverted their creative energies into the courtroom, the third album that seemingly could never come, and the technological breakthrough that turned the tide of chief songwriter Tom Scholz’s fortunes.
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 ··
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
I look back very nostalgically at the 1990s...........
The kickers have helped mess up my FFL’s scoring. I also need to bump up the INT penalties since they’re so rare these days.