Numlock News: June 17, 2025 • Trafalgar, Devil Fish, Christian Rock
By Walt Hickey
Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar is generally considered to be one of, if not the most, consequential naval battles in British history. The flag that flew on Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, was draped over his coffin at his state funeral following his death in the battle. After the ceremony, that flag was torn to shreds so that the sailors might have souvenirs. The scraps of this flag regularly go for thousands of pounds at auction. Now, the intact Union flag that flew on Royal Sovereign, which was captained by Nelson’s second-in-command, Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, is going up for auction with a starting price of 450,000 pounds. It is believed to be the most important flag from the battle still in private hands. I guess this would be the opportune moment to ask if the Nicolas Cage movie National Treasure was by chance adapted from a six-episode British sitcom, or if you guys just want to take this one from us because I’m sensing some real opportunity here.
Maev Kennedy, The Art Newspaper
Devil Fish
The “pez diablo” is a mythical marine animal (also known as Jenny Hanivers, garadiávolos or rayas chupacabra) that is being sold to gullible tourists in Mexico. A dried pez diablo might sell for $50 to $500 on eBay. The problem is, in order to fuel the hoaxed cryptozoology, real fish are hauled out of the water and killed to make the fakes, especially the guitarfish. It is a flat-bodied fish related to sharks with a cartilaginous skeleton that, when dried, is sold off as the fake fish. A fresh guitarfish is worth about $2, so you can see the business opportunity. The reason this fish is hunted relentlessly? Their nostrils sort of look like eyes when dried? Anyway, as a result, guitarfish are one of the most threatened vertebrates on the planet.
James Marcus Drymon, Bryan Huerta-Beltrán, Nicole Phillips, Peter Kyne, The Conversation
ICE
Right now, $45 billion is earmarked for a colossal expansion to immigration detention space in the United States, and there are 41 companies that are vying to get a bite of the business. Half of the companies have no direct contracting experience with the Department of Homeland Security over the past 25 years. So, there are lots of players, wholly new to the business, that may very well be entrusted with the lives of thousands of people by virtue of being the lowest bidder. Currently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is funded to hold an average of 41,500 people in detention at a time. However, over 50,000 people are in detention today, and the administration has indicated a need for another 100,000 beds.
Rachel Adams-Heard, Sophie Alexander, and Fola Akinnibi, Bloomberg
ESA
The European Space Agency has accomplished the first artificial solar eclipse in space with the Proba-3 mission, which launched in December and is now up and running. Proba-3 is two satellites, 150 meters apart. One satellite (the Occulter) has a 1.4-meter-wide carbon fiber disc that, when aligned, blocks out the light of the sun in just the right way for the second satellite (the Coronagraph) to take an image, briefly seeing the sun’s corona in detail. The pictures are extremely cool. When the mission is fully up and running, it’ll be able to take pictures of artificial eclipses every 19.6 hours.
YouTube
The meta on YouTube is fully in favor of longer videos, at this point. New data from Tubular Labs indicated that 13.7 percent of watch time on YouTube is given to shorts under a minute in length, 16 percent is spent watching videos between one and 10 minutes in length, 13.1 percent of watch time is spent watching videos 10 to 20 minutes and 57.2 percent of watch time is spent on videos that over 20 minutes in length. Yes, whether it’s immersive documentaries about the Garfield dark ride at Kennywood or Contrapoints, long videos are decisively in vogue. While the algorithmically-modulated demand for videos less than a minute in length was only 13.7 percent of watch time, videos that are less than a minute long still make up 57 percent of videos uploaded.
Christian Rock
Contemporary Christian music (CCM) is having its moment in the mainstream, with Spotify streams up 60 percent globally over the past five years. Now, for the first time in 11 years, there are two contemporary Christian music genre songs charting on the Billboard 100. There’s always been some crossover — holiday tracks, some rap-Christian songs, presumably Baby Billy Freeman — but since 2013, there have been fewer than a dozen tracks from the genre on the Billboard 100. One reason is that listenership is skewing younger than usual, with 45 percent of listenership of the genre Millennials or younger, up from 39 percent in 2021.
Insurance
Air India flight AI171 crashed on June 12, and is shaping up to have global reverberations across the aviation industry and the insurance market that makes it possible. The crash is expected to lead to at least $200 million in claims, including the aircraft, which is worth $75 million to $80 million. The thing is, India’s domestic aviation insurance market’s entire direct written premium was, as of 2023, only $127.8 million. This single air disaster alone could exceed the entire annual insurance premium of the domestic aviation market in the entire country.
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The story about bees just depressed me (again). This story really should get greater "play"--do people not realize just how many of our crops are pollinated by bees?