Numlock News: January 8, 2026 • Angus, Poison Arrows, Sea Lions

Jan 08, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Our Cow Angus

In 2024, art collective MSCHF embarked on a new piece called Our Cow Angus. They bought a young cow, named it Angus. They then presold Angus as 1,200 hamburgers and four leather handbags. The products are named “Angus Tokens” and are redeemable when Angus reaches slaughtering age. Well, it’s getting to that time, and it’s up to the token buyers to vote on what happens next. If by March 13, 2026, half of the buyers cancel their purchases through an online portal, Angus lives the rest of his life in an animal sanctuary. So far, just 31.8 percent have done so, led by one 12.5 percent stake purchased for $1,200, corresponding to one of the potential handbags.

Annabel Keenan, The Art Newspaper

Books

A study analyzed how 9,000 American novels published between 1880 and 2000 were eventually rated on the book-scoring website Goodreads. Specifically, the study looked at the cohort of books rated as mediocre. This subset of books sits at the middle 25 percent of novels from the set — 37.5 percent better, 37.5 percent worse — and constitutes the 2,150 titles that had an average Goodreads rating between 3.71 and 3.91. However, lots of those books (678 to be precise, or about 32 percent of the “Goodreads mediocre” books) were hardly mediocre by multiple other metrics: awards won, being part of the literary canon or appearing on a lot of syllabi. The researchers argue that this is a big problem with boiling down quality to a single average number as books that are polarizing or popular and achieve great things can, after all is said and done algorithmically, appear to be mid.

Anja Kjærgaard, Aarhus University

One Man’s Trash

A job that many are pleased to see replaced with automation is material recovery: the tough, dirty jobs of extracting valuable trash from the rest of the garbage. It’s very hard to hire for, and has already been the subject of lots of automation. The latest tech is using machine-learning along with optical sorters and state-of-the-art conveyors to sort discarded metals, plastics and more. Aluminum tariffs have made scrap metal much more valuable, and pulp mill closures have made recycled cardboard crucial. Computers able to analyze material passing by at seven miles per hour can automate that recovery process. And it’s paying off. Republic Services is the second-largest waste firm in the country, operating 79 recycling facilities, and has been adding such equipment to its lines. Waste Management, the largest firm, saw an 18 percent increase in profit in its recycling segment in the third quarter due to more valuable output thanks to automation.

Ryan Dezember, The Wall Street Journal

Poison

A new study argues that humans were putting poison on the tips of arrows 60,000 years ago, based on the consistent presence of poisonous sap found on five out of 10 sampled quartzite arrowheads. The arrowheads were found in 1985 at a rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. They were found to contain traces of toxic plant alkaloids buphandrine and epibuphanisine, which scientists believe were collected from an exudate of the roots of the Boophone disticha plant. Given that the toxin was found on not one but five arrowheads, the scientists think that it was probably deliberate.

James Woodford, New Scientist

Phones

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association passively tracked smartphone use of 640 adolescents who were about 15 years old. In general, teenagers spend about 8.5 hours a day on screen-based entertainment, and whether that is “good” or “bad” ultimately comes down to what they would be doing instead. For instance, looking at screens instead of sleeping is much worse than screens instead of, say, shopping. The new study in JAMA finds that screens are definitely eating into school time. The average person in the study spent 1.16 hours using their smartphone during school hours, with social media taking up 30 minutes of that time and games and videos taking another 15 minutes.

Justin Jackson, Phys.org

Suez

While traffic through the Suez Canal has recovered since the cessation of the Houthi rebels’ hostilities, canal volumes are still down anywhere from 51 percent to 64 percent below levels seen in 2023. Container shipping is the hardest-hit, with transits in the fourth quarter of last year still down 86 percent compared to the 2023 levels. However, some companies are more comfortable than others to dice the Red Sea. The real inflection point will come in London and will set up some financial pressures to return to the canal rather than going all the way around Africa: war-risk insurance premiums for the Red Sea dropped from 0.5 percent of hull value before the Israel-Hamas ceasefire to just 0.2 percent as of early December, the lowest rate since November 2023.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Salmon

One of the longest-running conservation and wildlife rehabilitation projects in the United States has been bringing back the salmon populations of the Columbia River basin. The salmon are a crucial species that much of the ecosystem depends on. For the past 40 years, an aggregate $9 billion has been plowed into salmon restoration and scaling back human impacts on their lifecycle. The goal has been to get the population up to 5 million adult salmon and steelhead returning every year, but the number has been pretty much stuck at 2 million. The latest foe is sea lions, crafty mammals that eat an enormous amount of salmon, preventing their prey from mounting a real recovery. Humans have tried chasing sea lions away with boats, capturing them and sending them to California using non-lethal ammunition, detonating explosives and so on. They even released a fiberglass orca into the Port of Astoria to scare the crap out of the tricky mammals. At this point, simply killing them has become the main way to keep the Columbia River safe for salmon. About 200 sea lions have been trapped and euthanized since 2020, which had the knock-on effect of scaring off others. The project is pricey, but workable in the math of salmon: the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated that sea lion removal costs $203 per fish saved, which is on par with fish recovery efforts.

Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic

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