Numlock News: February 6, 2024 • Vesuvius, Vegas, Zeppelin

Feb 06, 2024

Favre

Former New York Jets icon Brett Favre has been ordered to pay back $1.1 million in speaking fees he received from a nonprofit in 2020 that improperly paid him out of funds intended for the needy, funds diverted from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program which would eventually go toward a volleyball court. The state auditor of Mississippi filed papers on Monday demanding $729,790 in interest after Favre paid back $500,000 in May 2020 and $600,000 in October 2021.

The Associated Press

Sphere

An incomprehensibly large LED sphere in the middle of Las Vegas has become a bit of a money pit based on data from the Sphere’s first full quarter of operation, with the operator Sphere Entertainment losing $193.9 million on revenue of $167.8 million. All told, $92.9 million in revenue came from 191 performances of the venue’s unique The Sphere Experience, while concerts brought in $55.2 million and suites and advertising on the outside of the Sphere came in at just $17.5 million. The Sphere hopes to turn things around, though given that it is a sphere, any rotation will not make a material difference in its orientation. U2 will leave the Sphere on March 2 when their residency ends, at which point The Sphere will host Phish and Dead & Company to really lean into that stoner crowd.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Contract

In a fascinating look into music history, the original contract that Led Zeppelin signed in November 1968 has been discovered buried in a 2005 Florida court filing regarding royalties. The band got $104,100 up front from Atlantic Records in a three-year deal in exchange for recording 24 sides of a 45 rpm record every year, plus another $51,300 in 1969 and $51,300 in 1970. These would be prolific years for the band, resulting in three sequential eponymous albums that have now become iconic. Led Zeppelin got a 7.33 percent royalty rate in the U.S., Canada and U.K., and a 5.5 percent royalty rate everywhere else. The contract is also very specific in designating Jimmy Page as the undisputed leader of the band, with the ability to replace Robert Plant, John Paul Jones or John Bonham.

James Cook, LedZepNews

Dogs

A study that tracked the fitness and activity of 600 children in Australia over a three-year period also turned into an accidental longitudinal study on the impact that having a dog can have on a kid. While half the kids didn’t have a dog over the course of the study, 204 had a dog the whole time, 58 kids got a dog, and 31 kids unfortunately lost a dog over the three years. Dogs were found to reliably increase activity in children: Adding a dog to a household increased a girl’s light intensity physical activity by 52 minutes per day, and losing a dog decreased that by 62 minutes per day.

Maria Godoy, NPR

I Wanna PUSH You Around, Well I Will, Well I Will

Misleading or trumped-up push notifications from social media apps desperate to juice engagement are rising across the board, with the detested notification flag rising for such boring and quotidian events as “a friend posted a photo” or “a group posted a link” more and more often, according to the app analytics firm Measure Protocol. Many of them are doing it — Snapchat, X and Facebook are all throwing notifications for more useless crap — but the biggest offender is Instagram, which saw users get an additional 12 notifications in January compared to the previous July. This is a sign of fear from the social network; when engagement is down and people are posting less and less, the app will begin throwing up random notifications in a last-ditch attempt at relevance.

Dalvin Brown, The Wall Street Journal

Meetings

A new survey identified behaviors that have become socially unacceptable in virtual work meetings. Paramount among the faux pas are having television playing in the background (which 77 percent consider not acceptable in any meeting), vaping (76 percent), smoking (75 percent) or drinking alcohol (74 percent). Other behaviors that aggravate many include wearing sunglasses in a meeting (64 percent), which I can only assume is a strategy employed to obscure what substance one was smoking or vaping in that same meeting, or turning your camera off (38 percent), which appears to be a more amenable way to solve the “people don’t like it when you vape on cam” problem. Working on something unrelated to the meeting is also considered not acceptable 67 percent of the time, which, let’s be real here, usually says more about the necessity of the meeting than the necessity of the unrelated work.

Oana Dumitru, YouGov

Papyri

When Vesuvius blew up in 79 A.D., it flash-fried many scrolls in a villa in the countryside, from which about 800 papyri have been recovered. They are not readable, as they’re basically charred, brittle and fragile, but the Herculaneum Society wants to raise awareness and get technologists angling on ways to peer inside the scrolls, which really do look like lumps of cylindrical charcoal. A benefactor threw up a $700,000 bounty as a grand prize to the team that would be able to read four passages of 140 characters of text, with a few smaller tranches of prizes to go to other milestones along the way. The Vesuvius Challenge got 18 entries for the grand prize, with several bearing fruit but one team emerging the winner, capable of getting dozens of columns and lots of paragraphs. With the challenge a success, future contests are being planned.

Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet, Bloomberg

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars · Industry of AI · Four-day Work Week ·