Numlock News: February 7, 2025 • Quasars, Nikola, Torrents
By Walt Hickey
Nikola
Nikola, the other innovative vehicle company that tried to steal valor from inventor Nikola Tesla, is reportedly nearing a bankruptcy filing. The company once worth $30 billion now eyes a sale or restructuring. Nikola went public before selling its first hydrogen-powered truck, and turns out, it’s not especially good at doing that. As of its latest earnings report, the company managed to pull off a net loss of $200 million after producing a little over 80 trucks for the quarter ending in September. Listen, I’ve never built a car before, and certainly never a fuel cell-powered truck, but in my humble view: that would be the wrong amount of money to spend on making a truck.
Soma Biswas and Alexander Gladstone, The Wall Street Journal
Core
A ten-year project to extract an ice core going all the way to the bottom of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) successfully managed to drill to a depth of 2,670 meters. The NEGIS is a channel of fast-moving ice that fuels three neighboring glaciers in the northeast of the country. It accounts for about 12 percent of the ice sheet’s mass loss in the past couple of years, flowing at a rate of about 50 meters per year. The ice core was revealing; not in the “fascinating new insight” kind of revealing but more “the contractor has taken a look at your house’s problem and buddy you’re not gonna like the number of zeros on this quote” kind of revealing. Essentially, the entire sheet moves as a block top-to-bottom towards the ocean. More importantly, the bottom of the ice stream is not, in fact, frozen to the bedrock as previously believed, rather it’s sliding on water and mud, raising fears that the stream might be accelerating as the climate warms.
Torrents
New emails unsealed in a copyright case lodged by authors against Meta revealed that the company trained its AI models on oodles of pirated books. New evidence shows that Meta torrented 81.7 terabytes of data across many shadow libraries of books, lacking the decency to pay off the people whose intellectual property would be chucked into the AI training dataset. That’s on top of 80.6 terabytes of data they torrented from LibGen. Several of the emails contain sentiments from engineers such as "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.” Well, that’s up to the courts but, yeah, that ordinarily is not the kind of thing one does from corporate gear.
Dinner
A new survey found that during a typical dinner, 41 percent of respondents talk to people they’re with, while 63 percent watch television, 28 percent look at their phone, 16 percent listen to music or podcasts, 8 percent read and 6 percent play video games. With just 41 percent engaging in conversation with their dinner mates, one might gasp at the decline in decorum or manners. But no, I contend that a different thing is at stake. As a society, we are running out of “middlers,” the Larry David-coined term for those dinner guests who might be ideally seated in the middle of a table. They are those who have the conversational facility to move the talk along and ensure the table avoids the twin perils, the Scylla of tedium and Charybdis of monologuing. That, or Ken Jennings is just really good at hosting Jeopardy! now and it’s always gonna be a little bit more interesting than whatever I did that day.
Chiefs
This weekend, the Kansas City Chiefs will play the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. Dogging the Chiefs is a popular theory online that they are disproportionately favored by NFL referees, catching favorable calls and avoiding penalties in what some construe to be game-altering assistance from the referees. A new analysis found that, at least during the regular season, that isn’t actually the case. Over the five postseasons since 2020, the Chiefs have become remarkably talented at accruing win probability through penalties. Over the course of 15 playoff games, the cumulative win probability added from plays with penalties was 45 percentage points, higher than any team in the entire league over the period. This might be less of a pro-Chiefs bias and more “the league in general and referees, in particular, tend to be more protective and defensive of star quarterbacks that have become the face of their operation” bias. Since 2005, the teams with the most net penalty yards in a five-year playoff stretch include in first Tom Brady’s 2013-17 Patriots (+276 net penalty yardage), in second Ben Roethlisberger’s 2005-09 Steelers (+205 yards), and in fifth place, yes, Patrick Mahomes’ 2020-2024 Kansas City Chiefs (+144 yards).
Chili’s
Somehow, Chili’s has returned, with foot traffic at the restaurant up 20 percent in the three months ending December 25. It is well above the level of traffic across all casual dining restaurants in the U.S., which was down 3.8 percent in 2024. Chili’s was sliding into irrelevance, seeing guest visits fall 30 percent in the two decades since 2002 as people realized that they did not have to do this to themselves and other food was probably available. The chain started hacking up its menu and cutting off low-sellers and has stumbled upon two menu items that are driving pretty bonkers sales. One is a value meal for as low as $10.99 that gets a person a beverage, a starter and a main. The value meal was responsible for 19 percent of all Chili’s sales in the most recent quarter. The other, the Triple Dipper, which allows a patron to pick three appetizers, was singlehandedly responsible for 15 percent of sales. Innovation!
Jennifer Williams, The Wall Street Journal
Radio Jets
Scientists revealed they’d spotted the largest radio jet ever spotted in the early universe, a phenomenon seen by the international Low Frequency Array Telescope throughout Europe. Radio jets are what happens when a quasar expels large jets of matter out in opposite directions, thanks to the intrepid physics of stuff that exists near black holes. This thing is 200,000 light-years long — twice the width of the Milky Way — and comes from a quasar named J1601+3102, a pretty small quasar (merely 450 million times the mass of the sun) which was formed when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, or 9 percent of its current age.
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy
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Okay, now do the stats for Jared Goff of the Lions. They are consistently dogged with penalties and, I have a feeling, will be found to be in the negative territory for penalty yards. Someone upstairs definitely has it in for my Honolulu blue & silver! ;)
My wife and I went to Chili’s a few months ago when we were looking for something that was open rather-late. It was….okay. Sorta-kinda affordable, though I would have been okay with Waffle House.