Numlock News: January 23, 2025 • Mangroves, Nordiques, Tephra

Jan 23, 2025

By Walt Hickey

DC-area readers! On Tuesday, January 28 at 7 pm, I’ll be interviewing my friend Olivia Walch at One More Page Books in Arlington, Virginia about the release of her new book, Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed up and What To Do About It. It’ll be fun, you should come out for it.

Good Books

Based on the data for the first 10 months of 2024, sales of the Bible continued to spike all of last year, with sales in the religious book category up 18.5 percent year over year, blowing away the rest of the industry. Beyond sales of the Bible specifically, sales of books interpreting it and books guiding the study of it were fueling the growth. Listen, business is really booming and publishers are buying; earlier last year after checking with our insurer that our policy did indeed cover acts of God in general and lightning bolts in particular, of course we kicked the tires on if there were some kind of Numlock-branded tie-in potential with the good book. After consultation, it turns out there is already a Book of Numbers within the existing text, and my representation insisted that the market almost certainly couldn’t support another, which was obviously an unfortunate revelation.

Cathy Lynn Grossman, Publishers Weekly

Deserts

A new study sought to identify “dental deserts,” or regions of the country where people must travel hours in order to find dental care, a reality for 1.7 million Americans including 10.4 percent of Alaskans, 7.8 percent of Montanans, and 7.7 percent of North Dakotans. According to the study, rural areas had one dentist available for every 3,850 people, while urban areas had one dentist for every 1,470 residents.

Heather Denny, Harvard University

Botnet

Cloudfare reported last week on a large distributed denial-of-service attack that managed to blast out 5.6 terabits per second of junk traffic, a new record for the largest DDoS volume ever reported. That traffic was fired from 13,000 Internet of Things devices that had been infected by the malware Mirai, which is a bit of an innovator in the cloak-and-dagger world of DDoS. The botnets do appear to be back, built on hacked equipment like routers and industrial devices, often running outdated versions of Linux.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

Quebec City

About 30 years ago, the NHL’s Nordiques left Quebec City for Denver, where they became the Colorado Avalanche. The city’s been without a pro team since, but during the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s “Takeover Tour,” when neutral sites across North America were barnstormed by the league’s teams, a sold out crowd of 18,000 turned up to the Videotron Centre in Quebec City, stoking local interest in regaining a pro squad. Girls hockey registration in Quebec increased from 6,000 in the 2021-22 season to 8,000 in the 2023-24 season, with plenty more girls playing in local leagues with boys. While the city population of 560,000 would make it smaller than some potential expansion rivals like Detroit — when it hosted an NHL team, only Green Bay was a smaller municipal home to a North American pro team — the possibility to bring pro sports back to a jilted town is an attractive play to new fans.

Hailey Salvian, The Athletic

Luxury Towers

The massive skyscrapers catering to ultrawealthy clientele in Manhattan have run into a small problem as it relates to a key perk offered: Nobody’s bothering to go to the in-building private restaurants and many are sad and empty. The restaurants are certainly attractive — chefs are poached from Michelin-starred joints around the city and the world — and in other buildings, access to a private bar and restaurant can be a major perk for the clientele, but these stratospheric restaurants are facing genuine headwinds. When the globe-trotting billionaires who otherwise treat their luxury apartments as Manhattan P.O. Boxes blow into town, they mostly want to eat out. The restaurants are kept afloat through maintenance fees or minimum spends, such as at 432 Park Avenue, which required residents to spend $15,000 per year at its restaurant.

Dionne Searcey, The New York Times

Tephra

A new article published in The Holocene argues that a major volcanic eruption that rained down pyroclasts onto the region around Lake Titicaca between 400 and 720 CE may have been responsible for a large migration to go very far away from there, an exodus that coincided with the rise of one of the first great ancient cities. Researchers found layers of ash that were interesting at sites 55 kilometers west of La Paz, and eventually determined that due to the presence of tephra, which is produced by volcanic eruptions, that was probably the cause. What makes the timing interesting is that the tephra was dated at around the precise time the city of Tiwanaku in modern-day Bolivia really took off — a period from 420 to 590 CE, coincidentally — as productive and prosperous settlements affected by the volcano were abandoned and the city swelled in size.

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Live

Viviparity is a phenomenon found in plants where they reproduce through live births, essentially forgoing the use of seeds to spread new descendants and instead growing a child plant right away, while still attached to its parent plant. It’s rare among trees, but particularly common among mangroves, in 80 species on warm coastlines. Mangroves are already weird — not a lot of plants live off water that salty — but their viviparity is particularly so, and is useful for getting some instant hold onto exposed ground when the tide is low, as the failure to do so means drifting in ocean currents for months until eventually finding purchase on some distant coast. The genetic analysis of viviparous mangroves found one missing gene in a family of genes identified as DOG1, which otherwise prevents seeds from sprouting prematurely.

Elizabeth Preston, bioGraphic

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