Numlock News: February 27, 2024 • Antarctica, Saola, Bogs

Feb 27, 2024

By Walt Hickey

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Antarctica

The continent of Antarctica has been the subject of fascination for centuries, as its remoteness and challenging climate has made exploration difficult and direct communication with those explorers routinely impossible. In 1911, Douglas Mawson’s expedition was the first to bring an antenna along, but while he may have transmitted wireless signals, it’s not clear if anyone actually got them. When Americans added a sequence of bases to the Ross Ice Shelf in 1929, radiotelegraphy allowed some contact with humans to the north, which was followed by an AM radio broadcast, but even still communications were hard; for much of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, two amateur ham radio operators in New Jersey helped route messages from the polar bases to families in the U.S. The Iridium constellation of comms satellites allowed a thousand seasonal workers access to a collective 17 megabits per second at McMurdo, but all that’s changing with Starlink. Now, field researchers are paying $250 a month for 50 gigabytes, or $1,000 a month for a terabyte. Who says the Age of Exploration is over, when there’s still the prize of “first person to win a Fortnite battle royale from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station” remains on the board?

Allegra Rosenberg, MIT Technology Review

Brazil

Brazil remains a hot market for the creator economy, with 165 million social media users and 20 million people making money from the creator economy. Brazil is a bit unique, though, as it’s the fifth-biggest social media market in the world, but it’s the only big player where people speak Portuguese. This means that Portuguese-language creators have a massive and lucrative market to themselves, which is especially interesting for the Portuguese-speaking countries that are not Brazil, particularly African countries like Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Those countries are significant consumers of Brazilian media, such as soap operas, but there’s also cultural transfer in the other direction, as seen by a cohort of Portuguese-speaking African creators who are visiting or moving to Brazil to make videos, sign brand deals, and appeal to the largest market that speaks their language.

Matheus Andrade and Daniela Dib, Rest of World

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Saola

The saola lives in the rugged jungle on the border of Vietnam and Laos, and at first glance looks to be similar to an antelope. It’s actually way more interesting than that: Only discovered by Western scientists in 1992, it’s a rare beast that has become incredibly endangered, so much so that the last time one was conclusively spotted was by a camera trap in 2013. The Saola Foundation wants to spot one again, and ideally capture a few to maintain a population in captivity due to the distressingly low wild population, but even that’s no sure thing. The saola isn’t even that closely related to an antelope, besides the surface-level looks; it’s 200 pounds, has two long curving horns, and is actually more closely related to wild cattle, sitting in a genus alone. They’re really, really tricky to find, and live in a habitat as large as New Jersey but so rugged that only 2 percent of the land has been intensively explored.

Jeremy Leon Hance, Ensia

No

A viral video has provoked a debate over whether or not it’s appropriate to hold meetings at 8 a.m., which some see as a useful time to coordinate a global team, whereas others argue that it’s psychological warfare waged by morning people against the rest of us, infringing on personal time and child care. According to Calendly, the bulk of meetings take place in the afternoon corridor, with 43 percent scheduled from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and only 3 percent of meetings take place between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Now, devotees of the 8 a.m. call may argue that’s even more evidence that they’re out-competing rivals, but it’s worth noting that Calendly was unable to provide the percentage of mutinies that took place between 8:05 and 9.

Ann-Marie Alcántara, The Wall Street Journal

Merger

The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block the proposed merger between supermarket empires Kroger and Albertsons. The combined entity would control 13 percent of the U.S. grocery market, and, the FTC argues, diminish competition that keeps prices fair. The cost of food has been up lately, causing lots of consternation; the cost of food consumed at home was up 11.4 percent in 2022 and 5 percent in 2023, so Americans are a bit testy about the topic of higher prices and reduced competition.

Dee-Ann Durbin, The Associated Press

Tired

Airplane tires are not like other tires in that they have a remarkably short lifespan. It’s somewhat understandable given the nature of the work, as the tires predominantly exist to stop a 164,000-pound object landing at 130 miles per hour, and with 200 pounds per square inch of pressure, that’s going to put some wear and tear on them. Tires fitted to landing gear on Air Canada’s fleet last between 300 and 450 landings on average. Indeed, the airlines don’t even bother to buy the tires; they’re actually leased from the manufacturers on a per-landing basis, and after it’s reached the end of its run is returned and re-treaded again up to seven additional times before eventually it’s got to be tossed.

Ryan Erik King, Jalopnik

Bogged Down

There have been upwards of 2,000 bog bodies — human remains that have been preserved by the unique environments found in peat bogs — in Europe as a whole, of which 130 have been found in Ireland. The discovery of a bog body can sometimes necessitate a call to the police, given the remarkable state of their preservation. The police will come in to take a look to see if it’s a more recent case, and in any event will often contact archaeologists so as to figure out whose jurisdiction applies to this particular case. This in fact just happened in January in Northern Ireland, when a body of a young man was found in Bellaghy and the cops were called. Even after an initial examination they weren’t sure if this was a cold case or a very, very, very, very cold case, at which point the body was exhumed with all due care so as to preserve possible evidence even though radiocarbon dating would soon reveal that this young man died in the Iron Age.

Rosie Everett, Benjamin Gearey and Karl Harrison, The Conversation

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