Numlock News: February 11, 2026 • Ludus, Love, Wizards
By Walt Hickey
Love
A new study from the Kinsey Institute asked 10,036 single adults in the United States how many times they have been passionately in love in their lifetime. The study confirmed earlier research that love can touch us one time, and last for a lifetime and never let go ‘til we’re gone. The average number of passionate loves in respondents’ lives was 2.05 experiences. This number goes up with field research that reports formative romantic experiences on doomed trans-Atlantic voyages, or four revelatory days of passion with a visiting National Geographic photojournalist taking images of the bridges in the county in which you now reside. Overall, 28 percent said they had experienced passionate love just once, 30 percent twice, 17 percent three times and 11 percent four or more times. On the other hand, 14 percent of respondents said they had never experienced passionate love; perhaps they’re mere days away from being swept off their feet by their fiancé's hot-blooded younger brother with an injured hand and a passion they’ve never felt before.
Camilla Peterson, Kinsey Institute
MetroCard
This year, New York City’s Transportation Authority discontinued the MetroCard in favor of a more durable, tap-to-pay OMNY card. This came as bad news for the artists who had spent the past several years using the iconic MetroCard as an artistic medium, and who have become desperate to snag the remaining dead cards in circulation to continue their pursuits. In the decades of use, the MTA ordered 3.2 billion MetroCards, and there’s still inventory in a high-security facility in Queens, likely tens of thousands more. I will simply point out that the New York Times does not go out of its way to describe a facility as “high-security” unless the organization behind the facility is, in fact, rather worried that a rag-tag crew of artists, merch companies, resellers and foamers are up to something.
Stefanos Chen, The New York Times
Ludus
A flat stone (212 millimeters by 145 millimeters) made out of limestone with an engraved geometric pattern found in the Netherlands was theorized to be a piece of a Roman game. A clever new study goes so far as to suggest precisely what kind of game it might have been. The key clue was visible wear on the surface, the kind you’d get if stone game pieces were pushed along the lines, with one diagonal line in particular seeing a little more wear than the rest. An AI play system simulated thousands of possible games with 130 rule variations and different starting pieces drawn from known ancient board games such as haretavl and gioco dell’orso. It found that the observed wear was consistent with nine similar blocking games where the goal is to stop one’s opponent from moving their pieces. The game has been tentatively called Ludus Coriovalli. Since this is a European board game, I can’t wait to presumably spend $80 on a Kickstarter to bring this vision to life sometime in 2029, only for it to languish on my shelf for months thereafter.
Hydrogen
Earth’s core is made up of iron, but there’s also a lot of hydrogen jammed in there, too. A new study took samples of iron and samples of hydrous silicate glass — the first representing Earth’s core, the second the magma ocean of an early Earth — and heated them to 4,827 degrees Celsius, then they squished the samples between diamond anvils to a pressure of 111 gigapascals to simulate the amount of hydrogen that’s probably present in the core. By weight, researchers estimated that hydrogen represented 0.07 percent to 0.36 percent of the core, which (if you extrapolate to the core of Earth) means that there’s nine to 45 times the amount of hydrogen in our oceans jammed into the core of the planet.
Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American
Flight
Two budget airlines in Mexico are planning to merge: Grupo Viva Aerobus and Volaris (full name: Controladora Vuela Compañía de Aviación SAB). The proposal has the support of the government, given the hope for more investment in services. However, some are concerned since the merger would result in a behemoth that controls about 70 percent of Mexico’s passenger airline market. Regular airfares in Mexico have risen 37 percent in the past four years. The pair of budget airlines and Aeromexico already combine for a 99 percent market share when it comes to passenger air service.
Juan Pablo Spinetto, Bloomberg
Wizards
Hasbro made $4.7 billion in 2025, but the profits for the toymaker largely came from Wizards of the Coast, which makes Magic: The Gathering cards as well as the Dungeons & Dragons product line. All told, Wizards of the Coast saw revenues up 45 percent, with Magic up 59 percent year over year. The $1.01 billion in operating profit from the Wizards division constituted the bulk of the entire company’s operating profit of $1.14 billion, with Wizards pulling an eye-watering 46 percent operating margin.
Colostrum
The first milk from a breastfeeding mammal is known as colostrum, which contains nutrients and antibodies that are essential for the newborn’s immune system. A new trend has emerged: consuming the colostrum of cows, which advocates claim has a number of health and beauty benefits related to the aforementioned advantages. It’s still a generally small section of the broader supplement industry, but the growth has been remarkable. In the 52 weeks ending January 3, 2026, consumers in the United States spent $19 million on colostrum supplements and another $3 million on supplements that count it as one of several ingredients. Thats more than 3,000 percent of the $612,000 spent two years before. The vibe is that this is very much the start of something, as other supplements — melatonin, for instance, a $1 billion business in 2025 — see growth slow.
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Drinking cow colostrum is the next step in that comedy bit about how much we hate cows: we eat them (beef), eat their children (veal), drink the milk intended for their children, then put our own missing children on milk cartons. Drinking their first milk seems like another bridge too far until the next bridge too far lol.