Numlock News: June 13, 2025 • Andor, Vera Rubin, Crunchyroll
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
I Have Friends Everywhere
Andor came in as the top show on Nielsen’s weekly television streaming chart the very week it released its last tranche of three episodes on May 13. It racked up 931 million viewing minutes that week, 59 percent of which was in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic. The success of the show even launched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which dovetails directly with its conclusion) into the top ten movies chart, pulling in 179 million viewing minutes. Andor even managed to beat weekly juggernaut Bluey (922 million minutes streamed across 154 episodes), which is reliably the show to beat if one wants to snag that top spot. Andor is the fictional story of Cassian Andor, a fictional man who gradually joins a fictional resistance movement against a fictional totalitarian empire that has gradually come to replace a fictional democracy and subvert the fictional institutions designed to protect the fictional people who lived within it. It also follows the loose-knit and fictional coalition that gradually forms into a legitimate, albeit fictional, alliance to restore the republic. Any resemblance to real persons or other real-life entities is purely coincidental.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Cuckoo Bees
Social bees are the best-known of their order, but not all bees form hives and live in large or structured societies. In fact, 90 percent of bee species are solitary in nature. Even in that cohort, there are unique and fascinating types of bees. For instance, there are 850 species worldwide of cuckoo bees, a clever species that lays eggs in the nests of other solitary bees. Upon hatching, the cuckoo bee larva eats its companions until it eventually leaves the nest to keep up the ruse for the next generation. All the species of cuckoo bees engage in different strategies to accomplish their brood parasitism, but their species’ health is only as strong as the species they target. With bees in decline, even those funky cuckoos are suffering.
Vera Rubin
Just a few weeks of testing remain for the hotly anticipated Vera C. Rubin Observatory, situated on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes. It’s got the largest camera in the history of astronomy — a 10-meter-by-10-meter steel cube — with a 1.5-meter lens, a unique three-mirror structure and a collecting area of 6.67 meters. The camera weighs 350 metric tons, and will canvas the entire visible sky from the Southern Hemisphere every three nights, producing an eye-watering 20 terabytes of data every single night that the computer scientists are still figuring out how to sift through. That is 350 times the data produced by the James Webb Space Telescope every day. In its first year alone, the camera will collect more data than has been collected from every telescope in the history of astronomy combined, and it will do this for at least 10 years.
Rebecca Boyle, Scientific American
And Now A Word From
Amazon introduced ads onto Prime Video in January 2024 and only had a reported 2 to 3.5 minutes of advertising per hour at the time. According to a new report, the ad load on Prime Video is now up to 4 to 6 minutes per hour. That’s still one of the lighter ad experiences on the market — Netflix does 4 to 5 minutes per hour as well, Max says about 4 minutes per hour and Peacock is coming in at about 5 to 7 minutes per hour — and is still well under the 13 minutes to 16 minutes of ads you’d see on linear television.
#&$(@!
A group of Australian scientists have published a study related to a key Australian pastime, profanity. A new study published in Lingua analyzed 1.7 billion words of online language in 20 English-speaking regions and searched for 597 different swear word forms. The study found, to their shock and dismay, that Australia is merely in third place in the English-speaking world when it comes to the use of profanity. Only 0.022 percent of Australia’s words are vulgar, behind Britain (0.025 percent vulgarity) and the United States (0.025 percent vulgarity). Other top-notch swearing societies included Singapore (0.021 percent) and New Zealand (0.02 percent). The least profane English-speaking countries were Bangladesh (0.007 percent vulgarity), Ghana (0.008 percent) and Tanzania (0.008 percent).
Martin Schweinberger and Kate Burridge, The Conversation
Anime
New survey data presented by Crunchyroll brass at the Annecy convention projects that by 2030, anime fandom will reach at least 1.5 billion people outside of Japan and China. National Research Group’s survey of 29,000 respondents in seven global markets found that 44 percent of general entertainment consumers between the ages of 13 and 54 considered themselves anime fans, a figure that increased to 60 percent among teens. Based on the survey, anime is only slightly less popular globally than the NBA, and considerably more popular than the NFL. Furthermore, the kids are alright: 34 percent of respondents among Gen Z said they preferred subs over dubs, compared to just 26 percent who prefer dubs and of course, the 40 percent who have no character or principles and like them both.
Batteries
Lithium-ion batteries have become the standard for most applications like scooters and storage, but there’s some appeal to be found in sodium-ion batteries. Sodium-ion batteries have found uses in electric micromobility scooters and for some grid solutions. That being said, these batteries are significantly worse at storing energy compared to lithium-ion batteries, which is certainly a problem. The upside, however, is that the world’s lousy with sodium: we’ve got oceans of the stuff. Lithium supplies, on the other hand, have been hard to come by at times, and prices have been volatile. It swung from $10,000 per metric ton in January 2021 to $76,000 per metric ton in January 2023, and then recently back down to around $9,000 per metric ton.
Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review
This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Ames Alexander who wrote This little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making your city hotter for Floodlight. It’s a fascinating story about a very clear win for energy efficiency and a very particular entrenched interest trying to kill it, I really enjoy the work Floodlight is doing and this story in particular is great. Alexander can be found at Floodlightnews.org
And, I just knocked down the paywall on this awesome Sunday interview from two weeks ago, with Alex Kaufman who wrote Geothermal startup’s drilling breakthrough shaves ‘tens of millions’ off costs for his newsletter FIELD NOTES. We spoke about what this kind of breakthrough actually means for this kind of work, why geothermal is having a moment, and what makes it particularly promising. Alex can be found at FIELD NOTES, Bluesky, and Farcaster.
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