Numlock News: February 6, 2025 • Herculaneum, Stargazing, Slime

Feb 06, 2025

Farming

Increasing egg prices have some Americans contemplating farming, with many sizing up their grocery bills and then subsequently sizing up their backyards. As we all know, the price of eggs is either “a combination of myriad factors at the intersection of economies of scale, complicated nationwide logistical feats and biological inputs host to an invariably complex set of difficulties” or “specifically decided by fiat by the president of the United States of America” if you don’t like the guys in charge. Anyway, they’re like $4.15 a dozen as of December when buying commercially. This has people weighing whether or not to spring $200 to $2,000 for a coop, $8 to $50 for a feeder and $15-$20 per bag for feed. At press time, Americans fed up with the price of bread just discovered that wheat basically grows out of the ground if you let it.

Leanne Italie, The Associated Press

Kickstart

Kickstarter serves as the crucial fundraising service for pretty much all new independent tabletop board games. This means that its annual report describing the state of tabletop fundraisers on its platform serves as a pretty solid proxy for the R&D budget for the board game business. In 2024, tabletop games raised $220 million in pledges, just off last year’s $226 million. But, encouragingly, this set the new baseline for the post-pandemic board game bump. Furthermore, the fundraisers are increasingly successful, with 83 percent of game campaigns succeeding, hitting the top success rate in the company’s history.

Charlie Hall, Polygon

Slime

Mack Toys — one of the independent companies in the toy business outside of the Hasbro-Mattel duopoly — has filed a 157-page lawsuit about slime, alleging that Paramount is being too restrictive in its enforcement of the trademark for slime. Why does Paramount own the trademark to “slime,” you ask? You’ve evidently not been raised on a steady diet of the Kids Choice Awards and Nickelodeon’s entire conceit of dropping enormous vats of green slime on the various dignitaries it wants to honor. Either way, Mack Toys sells Wildputty, which it very clearly wants to call slime. Given that Paramount is seeking to merge with Skydance, anyone with beef is airing it out in the courts and is angling to get the concept of slime out of Paramount’s hands.

Christopher Palmeri, Bloomberg

Bulls

A new study published in Nature analyzed four years of observations from a large plaza in Pamplona, Spain which is packed during the annual San Fermín festival. The researchers positioned cameras at two observation spots in a 50 meter by 20 meter plaza and managed to model the human inhabitants like they were particles in a fluid. They found that the crowds max out at around 9 people per square meter, at which point the crowd behaves like a fluid oscillating with an interval of 18 seconds. It was emergent fluid dynamics that didn’t even involve any pushing, just the motion of the crowd.

Nature Publishing Group

Look At The Stars, Look How They Shine For You

A new study found that 89 percent of American adults have gone on a date, 62 percent said that they had been on between 1 and 15 first dates and 14 percent of respondents said they had been on at least 15 first dates in their life. Overall, 39 percent of adults said they rarely or never go on dates, and among people who are not in a relationship, 69 percent said they rarely or never date. Among married people, 64 percent said they go on a date once per month or less, while among those same married people, 73 percent said they’d desire to go on dates once a month or more. Scanning the data on what dates people have been on and which they haven’t but would like to, it seems like an under-utilized date is stargazing. This date idea scored a survey-high 40 percent of respondents saying they have not done it but would like to. Just 34 percent of respondents have done it, of whom almost all said they would do it again.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Moon

A new report in Nature Communications found that an asteroid impact in the moon’s southern region 3.8 billion years ago led to some particularly rowdy geology, specifically, several fissures the same size as the Grand Canyon being instantly carved into the surface within minutes. This is of interest to NASA, which is planning to send astronauts to the vicinity. They don’t want to collect samples of just any old random asteroid powder from the Moon; they want to collect samples of the Moon from the Moon, and especially the good stuff from this impact. The good news is: the planned landing spot on the South Pole is evidently lousy with the good kind of rocks.

Collin Blinder, Science

Herculaneum Efforts

A burned scroll from the Roman town Herculaneum was successfully unwrapped using X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence, allowing the incredibly fragile papyrus to be read without cracking it open. Hundreds of such scrolls were found in the city, and this first success — reading ancient text using a synchrotron electron accelerator at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire —means that 3D reconstructions might be made of dense scrolls that could contain up to 10 meters of papyrus.

Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis, BBC News

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