Numlock News: January 9, 2026 • Icebergs, Asteroids, Snowboarders

Jan 09, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Tubes

Regardless of how the streaming wars hash out, the reality is that less money is flowing out of households and towards the people who make stuff that looks like television. In the previous television ecosystem, consumers were spending $171 per household per month, a figure that is today down to $37, combining subscription revenue and advertising revenue. One fascinating stat is how this breaks down into revenue per hour; linear television was making about $0.57 for every hour watched, while today all the streamers are making well under that (Disney+ comes in at $0.28 per hour watched, and Netflix $0.27).

Entertainment Strategy Guy

Iceberg

A23a, a massive iceberg that has been puttering about in the Southern Ocean since calving from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in 1986, appears to be nearing its end. Currently 800 square kilometers — about a fifth of its size upon calving — and too far north to last much longer, it’s exhibited a fascinating last run. A giant pool of meltwater has formed on its surface which makes it appear deep blue from above. The billions of liters of water pooling on the surface, held in by a rim, are a potential sign that a swift end might soon meet A23a; if the water were to drain into cracks and refreeze, it could break the iceberg apart, which could spell a swift end for the massive expanse of ice.

Jonathan Amos, New Scientist

Movies

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, has formally announced how many movies are going to lose Best Picture this year. In order to qualify for consideration in the general entry categories, movies have to be at least 40 minutes long and screened in a commercial movie theater for at least seven consecutive days in one of six cities: New York, LA, the Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth or Atlanta. This year, there are 201 films that have done so and are eligible to win Best Picture. This means that while nine Best Picture nominees will indeed lose, exactly 200 movies are going to lose Best Picture this year. Last year, 207 movies were eligible for Best Picture. Movies that are technically eligible for Best Picture include Anaconda, M3GAN 2.0, Ella McCay, Fackham Hall and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2

Erik Anderson, Awards Watch

The Hobby Lobby

A new study conducted a five-week randomized control trial where 196 participants in the active group were encouraged make plans to engage in a hobby and then checked in with them every week to see how they were keeping up on their plan to engage in their hobby more. Additionally, they included of 266 people in a control group not encouraged to dabble in a hobby at all. This check-in worked — the experimental group did in fact engage in more crafting for leisure — and by the end of the five-week trial they not only felt more creative but also reported greater meaning at their job.

University of East Anglia

Bootstraps Paradox

A survey of 1,405 British adults asked respondents to rank a list of explanations for their social position, explanations which included “hard work” or “background.” All told, 50 percent of respondents ranked hard work as the most important reason, while 18 percent ranked their background as the most important reason. Interestingly, when asked to apply that ranking outward to other people and asking how those factors related to general differences in social positioning, 25 percent said hard work was the best explanation while 41 percent said background was the most important explanation for differences in social position. On one hand, this is a funny example of people rating their own work as more important for their own status while dismissing everyone else as getting handouts. On the other hand, this survey was conducted in Britain, a place that still has an actual king, and which puts that king’s face on their money. It’s somewhat understandable why Britain might have a pervasive belief that background may impact social position.

Joe Greenwood-Hau, The Conversation

Skiers vs. Snowboarders

A new study analyzed 8,719 GPS-located ski and snowboard injury incidents across four seasons at mountain resort in California, and found what practitioners of alpine sports have long held to be true: skiers and snowboarders tend to eat it at completely different parts of the mountain. There were 4,196 skier incidents and 4,523 snowboarder incidents — isn’t that just classic snowboarder — and high-injury locations for the skiers had no overlap with high-injury locations for the snowboarders. That said, the maps are interesting; there really are just some runs that chew people up.

Matt Bisenius and Ming-Chih Hung, Northwest Missouri State University

Dizzy

Researchers analyzing data from the Vera Rubin Observatory have revealed the discovery of 19 ultra fast-rotating asteroids spotted by the new telescope. One of them — a 710 meter wide space rock called MBA 2025 MN₄₅spins at a rate of one rotation every 1.9 minutes — has become the new record as the fastest-spinning rock larger than a half-kilometer in size. The asteroid is theorized to be made of a high-strength material, perhaps solid rock, that keeps it in one piece despite the speedy spin.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American

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