Numlock News: July 29, 2025 • Trilobites, Vatican, Crazy Train

Jul 29, 2025

Vatican

The Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which we layfolk know as the office that manages all the Vatican’s investments, reported profits of 62 million euros (US$63 million) last year, up 16 million euros year over year. The Holy See has been in a bit of a fiscal crisis over the past few years — it has been running a deficit of 50-60 million euros a year and dealing with a 1 billion euro pension shortfall. Needless to say, that camel is going to have an easy breezy time fitting through the eye of that needle for the first time in millennia. The Vatican’s money is mostly tied up in real estate, owning 4,234 properties in Italy, 1,200 more in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne. Only a fifth of those properties are rented at market value, with another 70 percent used to house church offices and 11 percent rented to Vatican employees at reduced rents.

The Associated Press

Los Angeles

Los Angeles has lost a lot of film productions to on-location shoots and other places with extensive studio lots, and this has caused serious problems for their local economy. The number of annual shooting days in Los Angeles — the aggregated total of days where a television, film or commercial was produced within Los Angeles — topped out at 27,283 days in 2021, which fell sharply over the past several years to land at 13,326 shooting days last year. The places where L.A. can hope to recover are seen in the kinds of productions returning to L.A. There has been a slight uptick in shoot days in Q2 2025 compared to a year ago, specifically TV production — particularly good because television shows lead to more consistent work than movies do. That said, studio movies have completely abandoned the city: in the second quarter of 2025, every feature film shot in L.A. was an independent production.

Tyler Aquilina, VIP+

Songs

This has been a weird summer for music, as nothing from 2025 has really broken through the charts, and we lack a song of the summer. This weirdness is in no small part due to algorithmic streaming vastly narrowing how a song might break through. The single most effective way for an artist to chart their music in an algorithmically-mediated world is simple: dying. “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne just hit No. 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the wake of the Black Sabbath frontman and rock icon’s death, and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” saw its streams increase 298 percent. At this point, the music industry is practically counting on death. Ever since Prince’s unexpected demise in 2016 sent his catalog’s consumption up 125-fold, the music industry has observed that an artist who dies often enjoys considerably higher musical consumption than they did in the years prior to their death.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard and Kevin Rutherford, Billboard

Public Lands

U.S. public lands managed by the federal government cover about 640 million acres of the country, or about 28 percent of the country’s landmass. Of that, 36 percent of all federal public lands are in Alaska alone — the state also has 87 percent of all wildlife refuges and waterfowl protection areas in the country — with the American West accounting for another 56 percent. The rest of the country carries the eight percent balance. People get a lot out of public land; even when setting aside the National Park system and turning our attention only to the lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, 82 million people visited BLM lands for recreational purposes in 2023.

Ally J. Levine, Soumya Karwa and Travis Hartman, Reuters

Driverless

As of this year, 13 percent of U.S. consumers would trust riding in an autonomous vehicle, according to survey data from AAA. The thing is, the future of autonomous vehicles probably isn’t going to be decided by the tech companies or even the citizens; it’s gonna be decided by the actuaries and fine lawyers of the insurance industry. Realistically, things look pretty decent for autonomous cars. From a risk perspective, “Are they safe?” is the wrong question. Rather, “Are they as safe or safer than a comparable human driver?” is the right one, and either the cars are beating people’s expectations. Or perhaps more accurately, human drivers are worse than many people think. Human error is indeed the cause of 90 percent of accidents, and the more light-touch automated systems — stuff like Advanced Driver Assistance Systems help with lane assistance and automatic emergency braking — are already moving the needle and causing double-digit percentage reductions in insurance claims.

Chris Bakes, Claims Journal

Solar

India is investing heavily in solar energy, and based on the projects breaking ground so far, the country has 414 gigawatts of clean power already in operation or under construction. Solar panel manufacturing in India has ramped up to a point of exceeding domestic demand — 91 GW of panels. Sure, the country is still building coal-fired plants, but fossil-fired generation was actually down in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024, even as electrical consumption rose 0.8 percent.

David Fickling, Bloomberg

Trilobite

Trilobites are extinct arthropods that evolved 521 million years ago and, from a fossil standpoint, are pretty much all over the place. People have thought that these guys were neat for millennia; the Roman Emperor Augustus had a big collection of fossils that he showed off to friends. An exciting archaeological — not paleontological — find of a trilobite in Spain put the fossils near a Roman settlement dated from the 1st to 3rd centuries CE. It is the first confirmed trilobite from Roman times, perhaps used in a pendant or bracelet. According to the study, the trilobite had a long journey to arrive at that settlement, and was probably from a shale outcrop 430 kilometers away. The study puts forward the idea that it may have been an amulet with protective or magical properties.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

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