Numlock News: January 27, 2025 • Macaques, Alaska, Frank Lloyd Wright

Jan 27, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

In Case Of Monkey Capture

Fate has ordained that the monkeys who escaped from the South Carolina medical research facility to explore in peace will return to the medical research facility to be tested in peace. These brave monkeys — the four remaining escaped rhesus macaques from a group of 43 that escaped in November — now know that there is no hope for their continued liberation. But they also know that there is hope for monkeykind in their sacrifice. These four monkeys, presumably lured in with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, “monkey biscuits,” or other scrumptious treats, spent their lives in monkeykind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. Their recapture will be mourned by the rest of the Alpha Genesis monkeys, it will be mourned by their nation; it will be mourned by the simians of the world; it will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send 43 of her daughters into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the readers of Numlock to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the sisterhood of macaques. In ancient days, macaques looked at the woods immediately adjacent to the medical research facility and imagined heroes in the jungle. In modern times, they do much the same, but their heroes are epic macaques, of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way to at least Myrtle Beach. Macques’ search will not be denied. But these were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every macaque who looks out to the woods in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever theirs.

The Associated Press, With apologies to William Safire

Alaskans

An Alaskan consortium consisting of the Anchorage Museum, the city of Nenana, the Alaska Railroad and some private donors successfully bid to buy the golden spike that was used to complete the Alaska Railroad. The original top-line estimate from Christie’s for the eventual sale price came in at $50,000, but the final bidding finished at $201,600 for this piece of history. It’s a neat arrangement, as Nenana — where the railroad connecting Fairbanks to Seward was completed — was the tiny town with the very spot where the spike was ceremonially tapped in, and the plan is for the cities of Nenana and Anchorage to alternate displaying the spike.

Mark Thiessen, The Associated Press

Jerky

We’ve come far beyond the simple Slim Jim, as sales of dried meat snacks were up 10.4 percent last year to $3.29 billion in the United States, riding a surge in popularity of salty, spicy snacks and increased interest in snackable protein. They have become the single fastest-growing category in snacking, as mechanically separated meat finally gets its moment of glory.

Jennifer Williams, The Wall Street Journal

Frank Lloyd Wright

The starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright made a single skyscraper in his life, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which has been the center of an ongoing architectural fiasco after the building was sold. The new buyers — who paid a token $10 but agreed to pay down $600,000 in debt and invest $10 million in rehabilitating it — saw their crypto company collapse and subsequently started ripping out and selling the Wright-designed guts and furniture of the building, in violation of an easement held by the conservancy. This went to the courts, spawned multiple lawsuits, and saw the new owners cut the utilities to the building, potentially threatening its stability in freezing cold. A judge has had enough and ordered the building be sold to the McFarlin Building Company for $1.4 million.

Elena Goukassian, The Art Newspaper

Gambling

Americans have fallen hook, line and sinker for throwing their money at long-shot wagers on apps, multistep parlays that really aren’t working out very well for them. Three states get specific about their in-state gambling — Illinois, New Jersey and Colorado — and as of last year through October, parlays were 27 percent of all sports bets. That said, they’re incredibly lucrative for the big casinos, and by the transitive property, that means that people in the aggregate are getting absolutely hosed on these bets. Despite representing only a quarter of money wagered, parlays were responsible for 56 percent of revenue after payouts for the companies in the states, meaning that the house is really, really winning these.

Katherine Sayre and Isabella Simonetti, The Wall Street Journal

Just Hanging Out

A cool study compared old video footage of cities taken in 1980 to new footage taken in 2010 of the very same places to figure out how pedestrians are using the street differently over the years. The footage was taken in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia, and found that American pedestrians are walking faster and hanging out with other people way less than they used to. The days of informally meeting up with a friend on the corner are declining, the researchers said, and pedestrians walked an average of 15 percent faster in 2010 compared to 1980. I think that we can reverse this; why, just last night I saw a whole lot of videos of the citizens of Philadelphia informally gathering in the street, having those exact kinds of spontaneous hangouts and only occasionally commandeering garbage trucks or scaling street lamps while yelling about The Birds.

David Zipper, Bloomberg

Bees

A new study found that by mowing lawns in changing curves rather than back and forth in straight lines, pollinators saw a significant boost down the line. Bees have made habitats in grasslands that were informally grazed by animals in the wild, but the rise of industrial equipment to mow meadows changed the manner in which that habitat gets sculpted. The multiyear study found that fields that were mowed in that curvy, meandering way had 50 percent more solitary bees and 40 percent higher diversity in bees after the second year, and by the third year the bees and butterflies were 25 percent to 35 percent more abundant.

Erik Stokstad, Science

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