Numlock News: January 13, 2026 • Pompeii, Gold Heist, Footage

Jan 13, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Heist

In 2023, a flight arriving in Toronto from Zurich unloaded its cargo of 400 kilograms of gold and $2.5 million in foreign currency into a facility at the airport. Shortly after, 6,600 gold bars were loaded up into a truck and driven away, with a total of C$24 million in gold and cash stolen. Police in Canada have arrested a suspect who authorities allege was deeply involved in planning the heist, associated with one of the groups involved that extracted the gold out of Canada. The man exchanged calls or messages with two other suspects linked to the heist 772 times, but then again, who hasn’t third-wheeled a groupchat before? A total of 10 individuals have been charged or are wanted in the case.

Adam Carter, CBC News

Stranger Things

A behind-the-scenes doc has revealed that the fifth season of Stranger Things was shot over the course of 237 days, and when all was said and done led to 6,725 shot setups over the course of the shoot. The finale was so complex that the production started shooting before the script was actually locked down. The main filming unit was reported to have captured 630 hours of footage in order to get the eight-episode finale in the can. I guess what’s so remarkable is that by all accounts, they really managed to use all of it.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter

Sales

The hit book of 2025 was a genre piece with a ravenous fandom that’s deeply invested in the intersecting storylines of a sprawling multi-generational sword and sandal epic. It’s called The Bible, and it moved 19 million copies last year — a smash-hit sales figure that reinvigorates the I.P. at hand and up 12 percent over 2024, doubling unit sales of 2019. Though the material has historically been somewhat polarizing, all evidence so far demonstrates that the franchise has serious legs overseas, with the U.K. numbers coming in boffo at sales 134 percent higher than 2008.

Cathy Lynn Grossman, Publishers Weekly

Travel

International travel to the U.S. has fallen for the eighth consecutive month, with December arrivals dropping 1.3 percent to 3.2 million. It’s a real mystery, that one. Just an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Anyway, inbound tourism to the U.S. reached just 92 percent of 2019’s volume, with overseas visitation falling 2.5 percent from 2024.

Rashaad Jorden, Skift

College Football

The NFL is not very good at sharing, as college football has quickly learned when it rolled out its playoff format. The NFL, a ratings juggernaut that truly cannot be threatened by literally any other program, invariably gets dibs on the best game time by virtue of its sheer tune-in dominance. Since 2021, 59 percent of NFL playoff games have been on a Sunday and 32 percent have been on a Saturday, effectively blocking out any rival outfits. Since 2024, zero percent of College Football Playoff games have made it on to a Sunday, and just nine percent have shimmied into a Saturday. Much of the time, college ball manages snag the primetime television dead zone of Friday night, where 36 percent of college playoff games have ended up. About 18 percent have had to pretend Wednesday is a time for football, 14 percent each on Tuesday and Thursday and nine percent decided on Mondays.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Pompeii

A new study looked at the evolution of the water source for two public baths in Pompeii: the Stabian Baths and the Republican Baths. The researchers analyzed mineral deposits and found out that, yes, the Romans really did know how to run a bathhouse. After the Romans colonized the city from the Samnites in 80 BC, a number of infrastructure improvements genuinely upgraded the experience of a schvitz in the shadow of Vesuvius. They found that prior to the Romans, there was abundant organic matter in the hot pool of the Republican Baths. That matter did not come from the 40-meter deep wells that fed them, but was likely the result of the water not being replenished often enough. Only 900 to 5,000 liters of water could be drawn per hour from the wells, good for just a once or twice daily water change. That changed when the Romans took over and installed the aqueduct, which supplied Pompeii with 167,000 liters of water an hour. This replenished the baths more often and meant the deposits from the Roman-era drains contained way less organic carbon. Sure, the long-term lead poisoning probably wasn’t great, but this is Pompeii, so “long-term” resolves itself in 79 AD.

Colin Barras, New Scientist

Game-Set

In tennis, the winner of a given match is the one who wins the most sets, with each set made up of a number of games. Usually, if you win the majority of the sets, you typically also win most of the games. However, there are rare situations where you win the most battles but still lose the war, such as the 2019 Wimbledon final, where Roger Federer won more games (36-32) but ultimately lost in five sets to Novak Djokovic. A new analysis published in the Journal of Sports Analytics looked at over 50,000 Grand Slam singles matches from 1968 to 2024 and estimated that game-set discrepancies occurred in three percent of women’s best-of-three matches and five percent of men’s best-of-five matches. The authors proposed a new set of rules that would add a tiebreak in the event of a split, calling it a Grand Tiebreak. I can’t decide whether this would make tennis more or less interesting, so I’m open to hearing them out.

New York University

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