Numlock News: December 4, 2024 • Tectonics, Himalayas, Magic: The Gathering

Dec 04, 2024

Spoons

A new study identified and categorized 241 small spoon-shaped objects found at 116 different archaeological sites — marshes and graves, mostly — in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland that date to the days of the Roman empire. The study suggests that the most likely use for the spoons — which were invariably found among items used in warfare, and had a small disk 10 millimeters to 20 millimeters across — was to dose out drugs before battles, especially stimulants. Germanic people of the time had access to all sorts of proto-pharmaceuticals, including poppy, hops, hemp, henbane, belladonna and various fungi. It’s fascinating; today if you wanted to watch a bunch of Germans take uppers and get defensive against other Europeans, you have to get turned away at Berghain.

De Gruyter

Cyber Monday

Consumers spent $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday this year, up 6.1 percent compared to last year, according to the estimates out of Adobe Analytics. That’s a preliminary tally, and the final numbers might come in closer to $13.5 billion when all is said and done. Americans spent $15.7 million per minute during the two-hour peak of the day, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. It makes sense why everyone wants to hop on the bandwagon by inventing Small Business Saturday or Giving Tuesday, and then of course the new one they’re pushing called Matching Wednesday, followed by what I can only imagine is called Rapidly Diminishing Returns On This Bit Thursday and finally Get The Hell Out Of My Inbox, You Fiend Friday.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Tectonics

Earth is the only known planet with plate tectonics, and also the only known planet with life. Coincidence? Some think not! The activity of the Earth’s tectonic plates may have kickstarted life on the planet, some scientists contend, but whether or not that’s a viable hypothesis first comes down to whether or not life already existed when the plates started moving. This is harder to determine than one might think, given that the fundamental concept of plate tectonics means that rocks are constantly being created but also destroyed, effectively eliminating the kind of scientific paper trail that can pin this one down. The oldest known oceanic crust is 340 million years old, in the Mediterranean; while continental crust is older, less than 7 percent of rocks are older than 2.5 billion years, and there’s pretty much nothing before 4.03 billion years ago. The incontrovertible evidence of plate tectonics puts plate movement as far back as 700 million years, but some think it may have emerged 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. One fun hypothesis is that the reason everyone else has a rigid shell of crust while we have an active one is that Earth was hit by a planet-sized object 100 million years after formation, an event that resulted in the moon but may have also kickstarted subduction.

Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience, Scientific American

Gallium

China’s Ministry of Commerce announced that it will forbid export to the U.S. of gallium, germanium, antimony, and any other metal that vaguely sounds like it could also be the name of a Pokémon. The country is assessing controls on sales of graphite, as well, in retaliation for chip export bans enacted by the United States. The U.S. has not developed domestic supply chains for lots of crucial metals; of 50 critical minerals the federal government identified, the U.S. relies 100 percent on imports for 12 of them (graphite and gallium among them) and over 50 percent on imports for another 29 of them. Last month, the United States Geological Survey announced that a total export ban on gallium and germanium will ding the U.S. economy to the tune of $3.4 billion, at least until some guy finds the largest deposit of it in their backyard or something, which is usually how the U.S. wiggles out of this one.

Liam Denning, Bloomberg

Oscars

AMPAS, the Academy that puts on the Oscars, filed financial statements saying that they made $146.6 million from putting on the award show in their 2024 fiscal year ending June 30, up slightly from the previous two years. The deal with Disney runs through 2028, and after that it’s deeply unlikely that they’ll score such a cushy arrangement given declining viewership of the show. That makes the other money that they make all the more important. On one hand, the investment return on their increasingly large endowment was up to $66.7 million, up from $36.9 million in the previous year. On the other hand, the Academy Museum that they’ve bet so heavily on has hit a bit of a wall, making just $15.3 million over the course of the year, down from $18 million the prior year. Currently, the Oscars are in a race against time, trying to add as much to the endowment as possible before the current deal with ABC comes up and their annual revenue stream gets a whole lot harder.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

MTG

Magic: The Gathering is having yet another banner year, and sure looks poised to beat the $1.09 billion in revenue made in 2023. Through the first three quarters of the year, the collectible card game has made $870 million for Hasbro, continuing the trend of it being the toymaker’s first and only billion-dollar brand. It’s also established a niche as the strategy game of choice for a post-chess, post-poker generation. The game got a huge kick during the pandemic — card sales grew 42 percent from 2020 to 2021 — and they’ve managed to sustain that growth since. Even though the attention-grabbing stunts from Wizards of the Coast get the headlines, like the one-of-a-kind “One Ring” card that was eventually bought for $2 million, it’s the bread-and-butter packs that are keeping Hasbro in the black, with the original sets “Modern Horizons III” and “Bloomburrow” propelling the company to 3 percent growth.

Ty Schalter, Sherwood News

Land O Lakes

Researchers tracked 902 lakes across the Himalayas and found that 458 of them, or 51 percent, grew in area coverage between 2011 and September 2024. Some of those lakes swelled by 40 percent in size, and overall the land covered by the water bodies increased by 10.8 percent to 600,000 hectares. This corroborates findings from satellite analyses that argue the region is increasingly at risk of floods, as changing climates mean that water tends to be stored in its considerably more risky liquid form than in its otherwise predictable solid form.

Athar Parvaiz, Science

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