Numlock News: December 3, 2024 • Smarties, Lucky, Spy Satellites

Dec 03, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Small update for those interested: Listen, I really wanted to write about the escaped monkeys again, and I have read or heard nothing for a couple of weeks, so I actually just called up the police station in Yemassee. It turns out that, yes, they’re indeed still trying to capture the four remaining monkeys. They’re being fed and have decisively not been falling for any of the traps set for them. I will update more as soon as I learn more. Godspeed.

Science

India has cut a one-of-a-kind deal, announcing that it has made a massive arrangement with multiple academic publishers to give the country’s 18 million students, faculty and researchers free access to 13,000 journals through a single portal as part of the One Nation One Subscription program. Starting in January, the nation will pay $715 million over three years to 30 global publishers to get the whole country access to scientific journals that are out of reach for many smaller institutions. The deal includes Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and AAAS, which publishes Science. It covers 6,300 government-funded institutions, of which only 2,300 have subscriptions to journals.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Science

Telescope

The United States has invested some $1 billion into the Vera Rubin, a telescope in the Chilean high desert that will begin its work next year. It’s an exciting project — it can scan a much larger section of the sky than NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and after 30 seconds can deliver an image that goes 13 billion years back in time. There is one problem. Whenever the Vera Rubin spots a new object, it will alert astronomers around the world. However, the way it works is that it will also undoubtedly spot American spy satellites, and having their location instantly blasted around the world would be bad, particularly given that the American government picked up the tab for the telescope. Negotiations between the telescope and, uh, someone who was extremely discreet in the American government have arrived at a compromise: a government agency will pay $5 million for a dedicated network to move sensitive data, and every time the telescope takes an image, it will be sent to a facility in California, which will censor any spots that portray a satellite and send the censored image around the world inside a minute. Then three days and eight hours later, the entire unedited original image will be released to astronomers.

Ross Andersen, The Atlantic

Absence

European workers take a lot of sick days, and absences are at the highest level seen in 15 years. Across wealthy countries, the average number of sick days taken by workers comes in at 14 days per year, or just shy of three workweeks out sick. In Norway, the average worker took 27.5 sick days per year, essentially spending over five workweeks per year claiming illness. That’s the highest number in the group, followed by Finland (26.6 sick days). I get what you’re thinking — obviously those cold climates are causing more sickness, come on, what’s the issue here, and then you see Portugal (23.7 sick days), France (22.5 sick days) and Spain (22.4 sick days) and you begin to wonder if the so-called “sick man of Europe” is just “all of Europe.”

Ott Ummelas, Bloomberg

Smarties

The Smarties Candy Company was founded in 1949, and while their rivals in the confectionary space have sought to diversify their offerings and innovate with new ways to consume their candy, Smarties will have none of it, deliberately producing one thing and one thing only: Smarties. They have two plants that run 24 hours a day, five days a week, cranking out 1 billion candy rolls per year, and that barely keeps up with demand. Variations in the cost of cocoa have pinched rivals who foolishly attempted to diversify into chocolate, and those desperate enough to jam nuts or legumes into their confections have been foiled by allergens that are completely absent from Smarties. Sales are up and the company is poised to post an annual record yet again.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Lucky Statues

The Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris is poised to reopen shortly, and copper sculptures that were placed on the original spire will be placed back on the cathedral next year. These incredibly lucky sculptures were at the base of the spire and removed for restoration just days before the fire that consumed the roof of the iconic church. They were added during a restoration of the cathedral in 1857 and consist of four statues, one of each of the four Evangelists of the New Testament who are then in turn ringed by three apostles each. The apostle Thomas — the patron saint of architects — was actually just modeled after the architect of the 1857 renovation, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, which is a great strategy to score primo placement for the statues. During the restoration they found bullet holes in Saint Mark, most likely from the Second World War.

Alexander Morrison, The Art Newspaper

De Beers

The largest producer of diamonds in the world by value, De Beers, has taken the significant step of slashing its prices of mined gems by 10 percent to 15 percent for most of its wares, departing from their previous strategy of trying to stabilize the price of diamonds. That’s both the biggest price cut of the year as well as one of the largest in memory, and this kind of massive reduction in price is generally considered to be an option of last resort for the company. They’ve been struggling to win over younger millennials, who evidently don’t have much of an issue with lab-grown diamonds. De Beers wants profits of $1.5 billion by 2028. Generally, they make between $500 million to $1.5 billion in profits in a given year. Last year was a bit of a disaster, with profits of just $72 million.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Last Mile

An estimated 106 million parcels per day will be delivered at the peak of the holiday season. Of that, ShipMatrix predicts that 3 million parcels per day will come from either Shein or Temu, the Chinese e-commerce sites, which would be up 35 percent to 40 percent from last year. Shein has been increasingly relying on a new service, SpeedX, which specializes in international deliveries of small packages and relies on a network of independent contractors for last-mile deliveries. There are pros (SpeedX is mostly focused on keeping things cheap) and cons (like the unreliability of the tracking numbers or delivery success). It expects to handle 350,000 to 400,000 parcels per day at the peak of the season, which is not bad for a company that started in 2022.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

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