Numlock News: July 23, 2026 • Ordovician, Sequoias, Go-shugi

Jul 23, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Wedding

In lieu of the kind of wedding registries that marrying couples use for gifts in other parts of the world, Japan’s custom is go-shugi, cash gifts from guests that, conveniently, have pre-determined values depending on the relationship and social status of the guests and couple. Convention holds that for a friend’s wedding you give 30,000 yen (US$183), 50,000 yen if you’re going as a couple. Here’s the issue: That value has been fixed for decades; the process is always cash, and 30,000 yen is a lovely number for the gift because three 10,000 yen bills cannot be evenly divided in two, which fits with the occasion. It can’t really conveniently increase: An increase to 40,000 yen would involve the number four, which sounds like “death,” and 50,000 yen would be a steep 60 percent hike. Given Japan’s inflation, that means that couples are getting less in gifts and paying more for hosting the event, which is causing some pain.

Gearoid Reidy, Bloomberg

Coral

In the 1960s, fishing surveys conducted off the coast of West Africa found what appeared to be a possible coral formation over 50 meters below the surface. That’s very deep for a reef, and given the technology of the time, the researchers just moved on. A new study saw researchers return to the area with high-resolution sonar and underwater drones. They managed to find, to their shock, a living coral ecosystem all the way down in the twilight zone of the Gulf of Guinea’s continental shelf, with the reef consisting of scattered patches of coral on rocky outcrops. It’s not entirely clear if this is the same reef as spotted in the 1960s, or if it’s shifted over the years, but it is the first confirmed mesophotic coral ecosystem on that shelf.

Sanidhya Sharma, Scientific American

Boxed Office

A key public resource for box office data, The Numbers, has been offline since March, and new details show that an onslaught of AI-enabled scraping potentially motivated by people involved in prediction markets forced its servers — and the data files for 78,396 movies, 178,375 release records and 236,176 people — offline. For an independent website, new AI tools have made the scraping economically untenable. Google has scraped the web for years, but at least they send traffic back; for every five pages Google scrapes, Cloudflare reported that it sends one visitor. For every visitor that OpenAI sends to a website, they scrape 1,091 pages. For Anthropic, websites get one visitor for every 38,066 web crawls, a deeply unsustainable ratio for an indie website.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Sequoias

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park has an extensive prescribed burn program, and a new analysis of the forest’s health from space found that it’s been remarkably successful at keeping the trees in good health. The analysis looked at wildfire outcomes for 26,400 giant sequoias from 19 groves across the complex, and found that the prescribed burns over the previous decade reduced the odds of death by 77 percent. Trees that got prescribed burn treatments were four times as likely to survive as untreated trees, and prescribed burns prevented 1,900 sequoia deaths. If every tree had been treated, some 3,900 sequoias would have likely survived.

Kat Kerlin, University of California Davis

Florida Man

A series of reforms in the state have brought Florida’s property insurance crisis down from a national embarrassment to merely a national peculiarity. In 2018, the height of the crisis, 79.91 percent of homeowners’ suits against insurance companies nationwide were opened in Florida. In 2017, 16.46 percent of all homeowners insurance claims in the country originated in Florida, vastly higher than their percentage of the population. Insurers were bailing on the state not just because of its position as a speed bump for tropical cyclones but because of what appeared to be systematic and rampant fraud. Now, several years after reforms, claims originating from the Sunshine State remain disproportionate but no longer obscene: In 2025 Florida was responsible for five percent of claims and “just” 41 percent of all lawsuits.

William Rabb, Insurance Journal

Magic

A new paper published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reports the finding of millennia of microscopic plant remains from a large limestone cave in Australia. The findings are exciting because they’re evidence that grass was burned repeatedly in the cave for the past 25,000 years. What’s particularly interesting is that the burnt phytoliths are evidence that while the cave never appeared to be a place of everyday living — no evidence of food prep or consumption was found — the thin layers of ash still indicate instead that grasses and herbs were systematically burned there. It lines up with evidence from senior members of the GunaiKurnai community that ash and charcoal powder were integral for initiation ceremonies and the performance of magical rituals, a sign that the cave was the site of 25,000 magical practices.

Russell Mullett, Bruno David, and Elle Grono, The Conversation

Resells Seashells By The Sea Shore

A new study puts an estimated date on when mollusk shells first began being reused by other organisms for their habitat. This was a legitimate innovation; during the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago, the inside of shells remained uninhabited after the death of the creature within them. An analysis of fossils from around the world found that it was only during the Middle Ordovician, 460 million years ago, that evidence of new animals colonizing the shells began to emerge.

Merilin Reede, Estonian Research Council

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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