By Walt Hickey
Our longtime friends at Garbage Day are doing three live shows in July at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I’m working on them. It’ll be a great time; more details at the bottom of the newsletter, and you should come! First show is tonight!.
Robusta
The price of robusta coffee beans, which are used in instant coffee and serve as a benchmark for the price of the beverage worldwide, has dropped to $3,459 per metric ton in the London commodities market — a low not seen since May 2024. The price of robusta peaked in February at $5,849 per metric ton amid concerns over the Vietnamese supply and rising prices for the higher quality arabica beans. However, the weather has evened out in Vietnam, turning favorable for the coffee crop. This year, the country is projected to produce 30 million 60-kilogram bags of robusta, up 7 percent year over year. Arabica is also getting cheaper, with contracts selling for 279.6 per pound as of late last week, the lowest level in seven months.
Lilo & Stitch
The live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch has become the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of the year, surpassing the $954 million made by A Minecraft Movie in seven weeks of release. It has racked up an impressive global total of $972.7 million. The current top-grossing movie of the year, though, is not out of Hollywood. The $1.9 billion made at the box office for China’ animated film Ne Zha 2 had set a tough-to-beat total. The only movie that might have a shot of beating Ne Zha 2 this year is Avatar: Fire and Ash, which drops December 19. The two films that preceded Fire and Ash made $2.92 billion and $2.32 billion, respectively, so it may be a real nail-biter.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Afar
In eastern Africa, three rift zones meet at the Afar Triangle, a tectonically active area of the continent. However, a new study published in Nature Geoscience finds that this zone is being ripped apart by rhythmic pulses of molten rock from underneath the surface. Based on an analysis of 130 rock samples from volcanoes in the region and the chemical composition of those rock samples, the researchers surmise that a single plume in Earth’s mantle has been moving upward in pulses that are ripping up the continent above.
Nora Bradford, Scientific American
Tom Sawyer
Yesterday saw the permanent closure of Tom Sawyer Island in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, an iconic attraction that has existed since the park opened and is slated for demolition. Rivers of America opened in 1971 with the rest of the park, while Liberty Square Riverboat and Tom Sawyer Island opened two years later in May 1973. The last raft of guests departed for the island at around 7 p.m. on Sunday and returned at 7:42 p.m., followed by a raft of park employees. In a move that is being praised by historians as “yep, pretty much how it actually happened in actual American history,” the Rivers of America will be demolished in favor of two attractions related to Cars.
Animals
A new analysis of the anthropomorphic animal protagonists of the top 30 children’s picture books of each decade — a dataset of 821 animal characters — sought to understand why some particular kinds of animals had persistent gender skews of the “dogs are boys, cats are girls” style. Birds, ducks and cats skewed more female than male. However, frogs, wolves, foxes and elephants skewed significantly more male. Overall, 66.2 percent of the animals were identified with the pronouns he or him, 31.1 percent with she or her and barely any were identified with they or it. The common animal with the biggest skew was the frogs, which appeared 17 times across all the books and were 94.1 percent male. I really must insist that this discrepancy is possibly related to some deplorable stereotypes about princes. I thought we had societally moved on from these stereotypes with the advent of republicanism and the belief that the most disgusting thing about a frog prince was the amphibian’s implicit belief in the divine right to rule
Melanie Walsh, Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee and Jan Diehm, The Pudding
Impact
Every year, around seven asteroids or comets impact Saturn, a big planet with a big gravitational field that is bound to munch on your occasional object. Still, actual imagery of these moments of impact is non-existent, as we’ve never been able to point a camera at Saturn at the right moment. This kind of event can be marvelous — just look at the imagery we snagged of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet plunging into Jupiter back in ’94 — and a new announcement by a contributor to the DeTeCt project may have just found a winner. The project uses software to analyze images of Jupiter and Saturn to look for such impacts. Now, astronomers are seeking anyone with footage of Saturn taken on July 5 between 9 and 9:15 a.m. UTC, which would be needed to confirm that this isn’t just an equipment bug.
Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist
Netflix
Jaw-dropping data has come out of Netflix last week as the platform boasts of its anime viewership. According to the streamer, half of its audience (or around 150 million households) watches anime content on the service, which is not the jaw-dropping part; everyone watches anime at this point. Netflix further touted the milestone that 33 anime titles appeared on its Top 10 list, which was double the figure of 2021, but that’s also not the shocker. No, the obscenity was the reveal that 80 percent to 90 percent of Netflix members watch anime dubbed, a brutal blow to the morally right side of the decades-long subs v. dubs war and a revelation that will set the movement back years.
Ryan Broderick and the crew at internet culture newsletter Garbage Day are putting on three live shows this summer, and Numlock is a part of them. If you’re in NYC and looking for something fun, learn more about it here and get tickets to the first (tonight!), second and third shows. It’s going to be very, very fun.
If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·
Hey, now. Some of us can’t read subtitles….
My older daughter is a budding astrophysicist, so any space-related stories always grab my attention (and then get forwarded to her).