Numlock News: January 15, 2026 • Woolly Rhino, Whiskey, Warhammer

Jan 15, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Warhammer

Games Workshop is a British company that makes “Warhammer,” the tabletop wargaming system that entails spending a small fortune on official figurines. It’s an absurdly profitable business. Converted to dollars, Games Workshop global sales hit $445.7 million for the half-year reporting period, up 11 percent. It made $141.6 million in after-tax profit over the period, which is a genuinely wild margin for any business, let alone a toy business. Sales to North American retailers were up 24 percent over the period.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Death Discount

In California, there is a fascinating idiosyncrasy in the litigation world. If the plaintiff filing a personal injury action dies in the middle of the lawsuit (at which point a personal injury suit becomes a wrongful death suit), they actually stand to lose money as a result. The reason for this is the Code of Civil Procedure section 377.34, which deems pain and suffering damages non-recoverable following a plaintiff’s death. In 2021, a bill was passed to allow estates to recover those pain and suffering damages because there were massive Covid-era backlogs in the legal system, but that window was limited to cases filed from the first day of 2022 to the first day of 2026. As a result, once again in California, we have a somewhat peculiar legal situation where it is more financially expedient to just straight up accidentally kill someone than to accidentally wound them.

Katie A. Stricklin and Chelsea N. Cortes, Insurance Journal

Time Travel

A new study out of the UBC Sauder School of Business looked at how people appraised the value of time when it was expressed differently. For example, which car sounds like it’s seen more miles, a 2016 Toyota Camry or a ten-year-old Toyota Camry? And which is a better vintage, an eight-year-old scotch or a scotch from 2018? The study analyzed real-world auction data and found that when described with the year rather than the time, bottles of whiskey sold at nine percent higher prices at auction. It’s a phenomenon that was inverted for used goods; sellers on Craigslist got a 17 percent better price when they stated the purchase year rather than the age of the item.

University of British Columbia

Vinyl

Sales of vinyl records in the United States grew 8.6 percent year over year to hit 47.9 million units sold in 2025, as the retro format continues to claw back market share and rises for the 19th consecutive year. Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter each had two records in the top 10 vinyl records of the year, with Swift’s Life of a Showgirl coming in far and away at No. 1. It moved 1,601,000 units in the U.S., and Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend came in second place with 292,000 units.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Phones Down

A survey of U.S. teenagers conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 41 percent supported banning middle and high school students from using their cellphones during class. Only 51 percent opposed. However, the surveyed teens were overall opposed to banning phones for the entire school day, with 73 percent opposing such policies and just 17 percent in favor.

Eugene Park and Monica Anderson, Pew Research Center

T. rex

A new study published in PeerJ challenges the previously held scientific understanding of the life cycle of Tyrannosaurus rex. Previous estimates held that a T. rex had a lifespan of around 30 years and reached its full size between ages 20 and 25. The new study, which analyzed bones from 17 specimens, found that T. rex actually stopped growing between age 35 and 40, reaching upwards of 8.8 tons.

Cody Cottier, Scientific American

Woolly Rhino

New research out of the Center for Paleogenetics analyzed the tissue genome of a 14,400-year-old woolly rhinoceros found in an unconventional location: the stomach of an Ice Age wolf. Nobody has ever done that before — sequencing the genome of a creature found in the stomach of another creature from the Ice Age. The study does make us look pretty good. A woolly rhinoceros from 14,400 years ago — 15,000 years after humans arrived in northeastern Siberia — with a genome that didn’t have evidence of long-term gradual population decline, is evidence that we didn’t hunt them to extinction; it was climate change that killed them. I mean, can you imagine how unpleasant it would be to be a mammal during a rapid moment of cataclysmic climate change?

Stockholm University

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