Numlock News: January 24, 2025 • Everest, Iceberg, Brave New World

Jan 24, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Peak Ticket

Starting in September, climbers attempting to make a go at Mount Everest must pay $15,000 to obtain a permit, an increase of 36 percent over the previous fee of $11,000. This is hardly as simple as inflation finally hitting elevation; rather, it’s a conscious attempt by the government of Nepal to rein in rampant demand to climb the tallest mountain in the world, which has led to serious traffic jams and life-threatening conditions on the approach to the summit. If you want to aim for the peak off-peak, the fee to climb Everest outside of the April to May period will cost $7,500 in the September to November period and $3,750 in the December to February period. In the five clean-ups of the mountain the Nepalese army has conducted since 2019, they’ve removed 119 tonnes to trash and 14 human corpses from the slopes, which is still far from the believed 200 bodies on the mountain.

Gavin Butler, BBC News

Oscars

Oscar nominations came out yesterday — you should check out the Numlock Awards spin-off newsletter! — and the film with the most nominations was Emilia Pérez, which racked up a record-setting 13 nominations, the most ever for a film not in the English language. Among the distributors, Netflix came away with 16 nominations fueled by Emilia Pérez, followed by A24 with 14 nominations. When you back up and look past all the industrial consolidation, though, the corporate winner of the day was Comcast, which scored 25 nominations across DreamWorks Animation (The Wild Robot), Focus Features (which put out Conclave) and Universal Pictures (which put out Wicked).

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Screened Out

According to data from Lightspeed systems analyzing the behavior of 2.8 million students in 344 school districts, the average American sixth grader spends 144 minutes on school-provided computing devices over the course of a given school day, and then another 27 minutes on those devices outside of school, presumably doing homework. Many educators are taking a step back and recognizing that that’s probably a bit much, that outside of the tech-empowered teaching there’s probably room for some of the more traditional teaching techniques, and that putting kids behind a computer screen for 35 percent of instructional time might not be the best way to reach them.

Sara Randazzo, Matt Barnum and Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal

Iceberg

The iceberg known as A23a once measured 3,900 square kilometers, but after a decades-long adventure in the Southern Ocean, it’s down to 3,500 square kilometers and seems to be en route to crash into a British territory called South Georgia. It calved off the Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986 and began its quest inauspiciously, primarily by being stuck on the seafloor off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula for 30 years. Then, in 2022, things got cooking, and it began to migrate outward along the peninsula, by early 2024 making it out into some real open water, where it rotated on a water column for eight months. Riveting stuff. Anyway, it’s been an exciting couple of weeks, as now this massive chunk of ice is really moving, and now is just 280 kilometers (173 miles) from South Georgia and closing fast, at least for an iceberg.

Georgina Rannard and Erwan Rivault, BBC News

Undergrads

In a welcome surprise for colleges and universities, the total enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs actually increased 4.5 percent to 817,000 students as of last fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The incoming freshman class was up 5.5 percent year over year, hitting 130,000 students, and driven by more older students matriculating. Education experts have feared a possible “demographic cliff” in coming years that will see large enrollment declines based mostly on larger adjustments in the age pyramid of Americans, but this is at the very least a positive sign that recovery from decreased enrollment is indeed possible.

Elissa Nadworny, NPR

Speed

New research published by New York City’s Department of Transportation found that speeding is down by 94 percent in areas where speed cameras were installed compared to levels of speeding at the start of the program in 2014. This is a pretty remarkable figure, though one that does align with the broader body of research on what automated speed cameras can do to reckless behavior from motorists. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s data on traffic camera installations in Maryland, Arizona and D.C., the proportion of drivers who exceeded speed limits by more than 10 miles per hour declined by 70 percent, 88 percent and 82 percent, respectively.

Barbara Russo-Lennon, AMNY

Brave New World

The Marvel movie Captain America: Brave New World comes out Presidents Day weekend, and early tracking is putting the movie at north of $90 million domestically, which would be a pretty solid start and would make it one of the better performances during that particular holiday weekend. Marvel’s also managed to do a better job of reining in costs on this one, coming in at around $180 million, and this is a more back-to-basics attempt to recapture the energy of movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier over the more elaborate, space-adventuring, universe-colliding, “let’s capture the important glowing rock before the other guy captures the important glowing rock” tales that the studio’s been weaving over the past couple years.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Polly Mosendz, who wrote "The 30-Year Mortgage Wasn't Designed for Climate Chaos" for Bloomberg. This was an awesome investigation top to bottom, I really loved it as it touches on some really specific and down-to-earth situations that stem from a rather general and somewhat abstract global climate issue. We spoke about the government's role in housing, how reinsurance affects homeowners’ policies across the country, and the future of insurance in the age of climate change. Check it out:

Numlock Sunday: Polly Mosendz on climate change and insurance

Susie Stark

Jan 19

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