By Walt Hickey
Stradivarius
Sotheby’s is auctioning a violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1714; the auction house thinks this could very well become the most expensive musical instrument ever sold. The instrument is estimated to go for $12 million to $18 million, the top end of which could beat out the $15.9 million paid for another Stradivarius in 2011. The auction house claims that the instrument comes from the luthier’s “Golden Period,” which I assume ran from a couple of years before the instrument they currently have to sell through some time after the instrument they currently have to sell.
International
At a press conference in New Orleans, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated he hopes that eventually, the league can do 16 international games per year, up from the 5 games it hosted internationally this past year. In the coming season, the league wants to do 8 games abroad. However, the final goal for Goodell is to get the international games into a specific rights package that can be sold. Presumably targeting some desperate streamer willing to pay a motherlode for the opportunity to broadcast the Jacksonville Jaguars getting smoked by some division-losing NFC team in the old country sixteen times a year. After all, who can forget such iconic matchups from this year as the godawful New York Giants playing the anemic Carolina Panthers in Munich, the tepid New England Patriots playing the Jags in Wembley or the Jags playing the Chicago Bears in London’s Tottenham Arena? The Bears in Tottenham? Finally, Spurs fans were treated to the chance to watch a storied football franchise from a major market squander generational talents and fail to seal the deal for the past thirty years. I mean, they’d know nothing about what that’s like, would they?
Bones
A clever study looked at radiocarbon dating of over 60,000 bones, textiles and other archeological finds from Indigenous populations across North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. The study managed to track population fluctuations over the centuries. According to the analysis, the population of North America peaked in the year 1150 after growing steadily for 2,000 years, only to then fall by 30 percent through 1500. It then began to rebound, at least until the European conquest caused major population upheavals. The researchers did not try to estimate actual population numbers. Instead, they just sought to estimate the relative population shifts over time by using the overall abundance of radiocarbon data from the continent as a proxy, which is a neat way to go about it.
Speak
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that for the most part, there is not a major gender difference in the number of words per day spoken, with one exception of those aged 25 to 65. Among those in early and middle adulthood, women spoke an average of 3,000 more words per day than men, based on an analysis of 630,000 electrically activated recorder readings from 22 studies, covering 2,197 individuals across four countries aged between 10 and 94. No significant difference in word count existed before 25 or after 65. However, for those between 25 and 65, women averaged 21,845 words per day compared to men who spoke 18,570 on average. The most talkative person in the study — a male — spoke 120,000 words per day, while the least talkative — also a guy — spoke just 100.
Alexis Blue, University of Arizona
Pianos
Japanese companies such as Yamaha and Kawai produce grand pianos that are purchased across the world. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant that Japan joined in on sanctions imposed on Russia, including grand pianos. Well, trade data demonstrates how Russians have managed to skirt those sanctions and get ahold of the instruments despite them being on Tokyo’s list of banned goods in 2022. Turns out that exports of grand pianos from Japan to China rose 300 percent, rising from 1,290 to 5,318 from 2022 to 2023. Exports of grand pianos from China to Russia also jumped, rising from 155 pianos in 2022 to 830 pianos in 2023. Chinese intermediaries have been spotted boasting about their piano arbitrage on RedNote.
Alastair Gale, Eddy Duan and Yihui Xie, Bloomberg
Cereal
A new study managed to look at all breakfast cereal purchased at 77,000 U.S. households over a period of 9 years and tracked that against the Nielsen ratings data of all the ads seen in a given house over the same time period. They found that advertising to adults was pointless, essentially, but advertising to kids was strongly correlated to how much sugary cereal a household with children bought. Just nine advertised cereals, all of which had between 9 and 12 grams of sugar per serving, dominating purchasing and accounting for 41 percent of total household cereal.
Wagyu
An interesting shift has happened to Japan’s agricultural, forestry and fisheries exports in just a single year. There has been a shift away from surf to turf, and a move away from China and towards everyone else overhauling Japan’s food moves. Overall, exports were up a modest if solid 3.7 percent to 1.51 trillion yen ($9.8 billion). But under the hood, things got a bit nuts. Agricultural exports were up 8.4 percent, but fishery exports were down 7.5 percent as China shunned Japan’s seafood in a diplomatic spat. So exports to China were down 29.1 percent, while shipments to the U.S. were up 17.8 percent, to Taiwan up 11.2 percent and to Europe up 18.5 percent.
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