Numlock News: February 12, 2026 • Guano, Harrow, JUCO
By Walt Hickey
Harrow
The Harrow International School is a spinoff of the posh British boarding school Harrow, which opened in September outside of New York City in an attempt to woo wealthy Americans away from the U.S. prep schools and to an upstart. I will grant it this: the school’s got a superb teacher-student ratio. Its goal to enroll 80 students by the end of the first year fell short, with just 20 students enrolled, served by a staff of 26. To try to compete, the school is slashing tuition by 42 percent next year, lowering tuition to $50,544 for day students from $61,700 and granting a $15,000 discount for their first two years.
Soap
Soap operas got their name because they were directly sponsored by household goods companies looking to hawk soap and other related products. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Procter & Gamble has been in the soap opera business since the 1930s, originating on radio and then expanding eventually into television. The company will release a 55-episode microdrama called The Golden Pear Affair; individual episodes running between 60 seconds and two minutes and 45 seconds, with a grand total runtime of 80 minutes. While microdramas have been a major force in other countries and territories, particularly in soap opera-adjacent mediums, they’ve been modestly successful in the U.S. as well.
Guano
Researchers analyzed 35 maize cobs found in 14 cemeteries around Peru; the cobs originated from the Chincha Kingdom, a densely populated society that existed from AD 1000 to 1400 in a productive coastal valley. Eventually, the kingdom was subsumed into the Inca Empire, but the data from the maize cobs reveal that the Chinha Kingdom was advanced when it came to agriculture. It appears the Chinha people fertilized their crops with nitrogen-rich guano, given the levels of nitrogen-15 found in the cobs. The society existed 25 kilometers from the Chincha Islands, which were covered in guano, indicating that the seabird fertilizer was harvested and propelled the kingdom’s economic development.
Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist
Super Bowl
The Nielsen numbers reveal that Super Bowl LX averaged 124.93 million viewers, two percent off the Super Bowl LIX high from 2025 but still good for the second-best telecast in American history. The final numbers show that the halftime show starring Bad Bunny, in fact, narrowly missed the record set by Kendrick Lamar last year, but still delivered 128.2 million viewers. Not to mention the four billion views on social media thereafter, according to Ripple Analytics. The all-time record for peak viewership was set in the 7:45 pm to 8 pm block with 137.8 million viewers during the second quarter.
Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
Haha, I’m In Danger
A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that 16 percent of Americans said they had directly paid for or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member in the past 12 months. Overall, just eight percent of respondents said they believed that individual Americans have a responsibility to pay for news, including just four percent of those aged 18 to 29.
College Athletics
The NCAA is being sued by former junior college players attempting to secure full D-I eligibility. As it stands, the NCAA limits eligibility in a single sport to four seasons of competition over a five-year period, and that includes junior college and Division II play. Since some players decline to play in year one, there are a lot of fifth-year players in the NCAA. Additionally, some pandemic-era provisions allowed some players to play into further years of college. The big change, though, was the Name, Image and License (NIL) rules that allow players to make a lot of money in college. The junior college players are arguing that they’re essentially being boycotted by the NCAA and being prevented from participating in lucrative years of college play. The NCAA has argued that, were the junior college players able to play another four years at an NCAA school, college rosters may very well be populated by athletes in their late 20s and early 30s — players who might not be NFL-caliber but nevertheless could make a lot of money on a field where their athletic adversaries could be as young as 17. The NCAA went so far as to suggest that if taken to its logical conclusion, the plaintiffs’ position could allow student athletes to compete in at least 18 seasons of intercollegiate play, including “two seasons of JUCO competition, four seasons in Division III competition, four seasons in Division II competition, four seasons of NAIA competition, only then to matriculate to a D-I member institution at roughly the age of 32 with a fresh four-season clock.”
Glen Canyon
The Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, damming the Colorado River to produce the reservoir of Lake Powell. The destiny of the water in the Colorado River is the subject of massive negotiations. The states of the West are haggling over a new management plan, and the status of the Glen Canyon Dam is central to that negotiation. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are each less than 30 percent full, and the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam was designed for excess water. In 2023, the water level in Lake Powell dropped to within 30 feet of the minimum required for power generation, a minimum level which is 20 feet above the intakes. Those intakes are 240 feet above the bottom of the reservoir, but if the water drops below the minimum, that 1.7 million acre-feet body of water would be trapped and stagnant and prone to an algal bloom. Such a disaster would cut off water to millions while potentially squandering the water still stuck. In the ’90s, a plan to build a bypass tunnel around the dam in case of such an event was floated, but it hasn’t happened.
Wade Graham, High Country News
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