Numlock News: July 16, 2025 • Black Lotus, White Lotus, Storm Locus
By Walt Hickey
Black Lotus
This past weekend saw a major Magic: The Gathering auction over at Heritage Auctions, and some weakness in the sales price for classic Magic cards has people seeing softness in the market. An Unlimited CGC 5 Black Lotus card was the highest-ticket item at the auction, selling for $10,625. It was on the lower side of the $10,000 to $12,000 sales price and down significantly from the $15,000 to $20,000 that cards of that quality were going for in 2022 and 2023. A possible theory is waning interest towards the pre-2000 Magic: The Gathering classic cards, and today’s Magic card collectors turning their attention to new cards that are particularly hot on the market.
Emmys
Severance came away with 27 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, the most of any show competing. HBO Max came away with 142 nominations across all of its shows, thanks to strong performances from The Penguin, The White Lotus, The Last of Us and Hacks. The streamer beat its own best of 140 nominations in 2022. That being said, Netflix has led for the past several years, and set the high water mark for a network or platform at 160 in 2020.
Jordan Moreau and Michael Schneider, Variety
Japan
Mori Trust projects that Japan will host 43 to 45 million tourists this year, which would be up 17 percent from 2024. That in and of itself is remarkable, because last year saw an explosion of tourism to Japan, with the final count coming in at 36,869,900 visitors. That number was already up a remarkable 47 percent year over year. In May 2025 alone, visitors reached 3,693,300, which was a 21.5 percent increase year over year and easily a record. In the first quarter of the year, travel expenditure from foreign tourists was up 28.8 percent year over year.
Insurance
As the recent adage goes, you may not believe in climate change, but your insurance company certainly does. A new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Catastrophe Risk and Resiliance found that insured losses from hurricanes could rise 50 percent if the global atmospheric warming hits the 2 degrees Celsius threshold. A lot of those losses come from the areas affected by hurricanes expanding well northward along the Eastern Seaboard, with places that had been considered relatively safe from the monster storms suddenly now well in range of the tropical storms. Florida still sees the largest absolute increase — its already high losses are projected to rise another 44 percent if the 2-degree threshold is broken — but areas that had relatively low risks are poised to see a higher percentage increase. New York’s insured hurricane losses are projected to rise 64 percent, and Massachusetts’ poised to rise 70 percent annually.
Magnetosphere
Towards the end of the Pleistocene epoch, there was an event known as the Laschamps Excursion. This is what happened when Earth’s magnetic poles wandered rapidly and erratically and rapidly over the Earth instead of reversing as they usually do every hundred thousand years. Rather than being the typical dipole, the protective force field around Earth kind of broke down for a bit. A new study sought to figure out what early humans did to ride out the event — the surge in auroras all over the Earth, lots more harmful solar radiation and potential increased risks of sunburn, eye damage and birth defects. The reaction from people may have been to innovate newer protective forms of clothing and spend more time in caves, two things that were indeed coming around in Europe around 41,000 years ago — precisely when the Laschamps Excursion went down.
Raven Garvey, Agnit Mukhopadhyay and Sanja Panovska, The Conversation
Blood Type
French scientists have discovered the newest blood group, which is incidentally the rarest blood group. We only know of a single woman from Guadeloupe who has it. The classic and most popular blood types — A, B, AB, O and whatever Rh-positive or negative — are just the most common two blood groups out of a rich tapestry of what is now 48 unique and recognized blood groups. The newly-discovered 48th group is now called “Gwada-negative” and required an entire exome sequence to determine its cause was a mutation in the gene PIGZ, making all the rest of us now Gwada-positive on top of whatever else business we’re working with.
Martin L. Olsson and Jill Storry, The Conversation
Tube
The London Underground’s average temperatures are rather bad right now, with temperatures on the Tube regularly exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. All told, temperatures among all lines are up 1 to 3 degrees over the past 10 years, according to Transport for London. London’s system — the oldest in the world, originally laid down in 1863 — is struggling to keep up. As it stands, there is air conditioning in only 40 percent of the Underground stations.
Anvee Bhutani, The Wall Street Journal
Correction: HBO’s previous record was 140 nominations.
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Walt, I hate to break it to the guy whose site is called Numlock, but... these are actually equal values:
"HBO Max came away with 142 nominations across all of its shows, thanks to strong performances from The Penguin, The White Lotus, The Last of Us and Hacks. The streamer beat its own best of 142 nominations in 2022."