Numlock News: July 3, 2025 • Iris, Six Flags, A11pl3Z
By Walt Hickey
We’re off in observance of Independence Day tomorrow. Have a great weekend!
Documents
Sure, sometimes it might feel as if the institutions and laws that made ours a freer society are being devalued and cheapened, and it can be hard to be optimistic about what’s to come. Anyway, great news on that front: an auction of a bunch of Abraham Lincoln’s stuff found that the institutions and laws that made a free society are actually incredibly valuable when they’re up on the auction block. A copy of the Thirteenth Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln was sold to financier Ken Griffin for $13.7 million. It is one of only 15 versions signed by Lincoln, and the price smashed the previous record for a Thirteenth ($2.4 million) set back in 2016. Griffin also snagged a signed Emancipation Proclamation for $4.4 million, beating the previous best of $3.8 million. Like I said, valuable stuff.
Carlie Porterfield, The Art Newspaper
Popcorn
Movie theater chains and their suppliers have gone all-in on the novelty popcorn bucket, pursuing increasingly elaborate and expensive ways to serve guest popcorn in a souvenir bucket. The Dune 2 sandworm bucket was a challenge heard across the entire industry, and now the R&D process on a popcorn bucket might begin a year in advance. Coming soon, a Galactus head that can fit 361 ounces of popcorn and cost $79.95 at Regal Cinemas will debut alongside The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Theater chains order anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 units of each collectible bucket, but popularity is notoriously hard to gauge. While the Nosferatu sarcophagus popcorn bucket was a sellout and even had an afterlife on eBay, somewhere there’s a storage unit full of worthless Borderlands dynamite detonator popcorn buckets.
Ben Fritz, The Wall Street Journal
Moisture
Two classes of materials, hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks, are advancing the science of extracting water from humidity in the air. It is a way of harvesting water that has historically been too expensive and energy-intensive to pose a viable opportunity, but viability is getting tantalizingly close. The best prototypes of hydrogel vapor condensers can produce 1.2 liters of water per kilogram of hydrogel when tested in Death Valley, California. Another modified hydrogel prototype has managed to harvest 14 liters of water per kilogram daily, though that requires heating the water to 60 °C. That said, this kind of tech means that moisture farming might very well one day become a viable, if humble, profession. It could probably offer modest pleasures like humble trade with local sandcrawlers, weekends bullseyeing womprats in one’s T-16 in Beggars Canyon or talking about Old Ben Kenobi behind his back.
Iris
The song “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls has climbed back into the top Streaming Songs chart at No. 50, a formidable achievement for a song that peaked at No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1998. Usually, the thing that pushes a song from the ’90s over the top is placement in a movie or television show, but “Iris” has come by its 7.8 million weekly streams the hard way. While it was featured in Deadpool & Wolverine, it has also been getting attention on TikTok and has been gaining steadily in popularity. It is one of only a few non-holiday songs from the 1990s or earlier to make a debut on Streaming Songs. The last time this happened was when “Margaritaville” made it to No. 41 after Jimmy Buffett died, and the time before that was when “Master of Puppets” made it into an episode of Stranger Things and charted in 2022.
Trash
A “toxic, hot garbage pile” wasn’t just my reputation in college, it’s also a serious public health concern that causes serious problems in communities around the country. Over 2 million people live within a mile of a landfill, and unexpectedly hot temperatures are causing unexpected chemistry in large buried piles of garbage. These chemical reactions are fueled in part by unraveling protections at the federal regulatory level, making underground fires more common and the companies responsible for the landfills unaccountable. When landfills overheat — as they did in 2022 when one section of a landfill in California got above 93 °C, or 200 °F, 40 percent hotter than the EPA standard — the waste below cooks and emits toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and benzene. The temperatures are thus forcing boiling trash juice leachate out of the ground as if they were geysers.
Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle, Bloomberg
Amused
Foot traffic at many amusement parks is down, particularly at the more pure-play rollercoaster-driven parks outside of Orlando and Anaheim. Foot traffic at United Parks & Resorts’ 12 locations — the SeaWorld, Sesame Place and Busch Gardens parks — is down 9.6 percent on average year over year in the 30 days through June 20. It is a much steeper drop than the 1.3 percent decline from the same period last year. At the Six Flags and Cedar Falls parks where Placer.ai’s data was available, foot traffic was down 17 percent. Some of this might be weather — Six Flags operated 14 fewer days than it did last year because of inclement weather — and it’s a common point of blame for executives. But I don’t know, maybe we should be interpreting this as “Fortnite got really good, and now it means that Millennials don’t have to wait in lines for roller coasters anymore,” and see this glass as half full.
Visitor
We may have a guest, according to new data from the European Space Agency. The agency announced the detection of an object being referred to as A11pl3Z, which seems to be coming from outside our own solar system. The object appears to be moving 60 kilometers per second, which would be way too fast to be bound by the sun’s orbit. It’s estimated to be 10 to 20 kilometers wide and will get brighter and closer to the Sun until October. The object could be the third known outside guest we’ve hosted here in the solar system — the first being ‘Oumuamua from 2017 and the 2I/Borisov in 2019. Modeling estimates hold that there might be as many as 10,000 such interstellar objects in the solar system at any given time.
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I guess the Six Flags just east of DC is closing after this season. I’ve never been there, having moved up as an adult. Did spend many days at Busch Gardens Williamsburg when I was young. In high school, I vowed to never work fast food, or at Busch. My HS girlfriend, OTOH, wore a pink dirndl selling hats….