Numlock News: June 2, 2025 • Deer, Doppler, Above Average
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Karate Kid
Lilo & Stitch continued to smash expectations, raising its global cumulative audience to $610 million after pulling in another $63 million in the U.S. and $113.1 million overseas. It is yet another sign that making movies for children and putting those movies in a movie theater is a good idea. Karate Kids: Legends was the only major new release, and its results are a bit shy of expectations: opening to $21 million, below the tracking. The Karate Kid has been rebooted every couple of years to diminishing returns; there was the 2010 The Karate Kid movie, then, of course, the Cobra Kai Netflix show and now this one. All of these movies are making us look into our hearts and really consider how much material there possibly can be to hang on the concept of “what if a kid did karate.”
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Louvre
The Louvre is returning 258 objects that accidentally wound up in its collection, which is an understandably rare way to get ahold of a fortune of art. In 2019, a cross-inventory of work looking into the Louvre’s collections and bequeathed art from patron Adèle de Rothschild found that when she died in 1922, a bunch of her art was on loan at the Louvre. Other items just gradually made their way into the collection during renovations of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, which is where the bulk of the items in her collection are.
Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper
Data
Verizon claims that the sold-out crowd of 350,000 at the Indianapolis 500 logged an in-house record for most data consumed at a sporting event, coming in at 172 terabytes in a single day. That is the equivalent of moving 57 million digital photos. Coachella was the largest spectator event last year, which saw 129 terabytes moved, and the Iowa State Fair had the largest transmitted data with 393.1 terabytes moved. That said, this distinction does feel a bit, shall we say, backhanded, as the edge-of-your-seat nature of IndyCar racing does seem slightly inconsistent with the idea that everyone is just on their phone the whole race.
Doppler
The national network of Doppler high-resolution radar systems consists of 160 radars installed in 1988 and then subsequently upgraded in 2012. They’ve been one of the most successful lifesaving technology build-outs ever, given their ability to identify dangerous weather conditions before they become a public hazard. The microwave pulses that each station emits bounce off raindrops and other forms of precipitation, giving high-resolution insight into multiple levels of a storm system. Interestingly, for every hour of operation, as little as seven seconds is actually spent sending out pulses; the rest of the time, it’s just listening for returns.
Andrea Thompson, Scientific American
Lake Wobegon
When appraising their own talents and skills, vast majorities of Americans rate themselves as “far above or somewhat above average” on topics like trustworthiness (77 percent considering themselves above average), reading ability (63 percent above average), critical thinking (57 percent above average) and, of course, self-awareness (59 percent above average and with just 4 percent below average). There are some topics which get people claiming they’re less confident in their talents, including dancing ability (16 percent above average, and a whopping 54 percent say they’re below average), mechanical ability (26 percent above average, 34 percent below average) and running (16 percent above average, 57 percent below average).
Companion Planting
The old gardener's wisdom of companion planting claims that planting a fragrant herb around your tomatoes will make the tomatoes healthier, and it does turn out that’s grounded in the science. One reason, according to several papers that put companion planting to the test, is that aromatic herbs produce compounds with pest-repelling properties, specifically cutting down pests like nematodes and whitefly that afflict tomatoes. It’s not a slam dunk every time. While some studies found a boost in yields of 59 percent when tomatoes were grown with herbs, another found that sometimes an herb like peppermint actually competes with the tomato for resources, and yields in that case dropped 6.7 percent.
Deer
At the turn of the 20th century, there were only 300,000 white tail deer in North America, down from an estimated 30 million on the eve of colonization. Decades of hunting, habitat destruction and particularly hunting young deer dropped the population to a dangerously low level. The species’ continued survival is only thanks to the protection of the deer in the early 1900s and the ensuing end of commercial deer hunting; today there are 30 million to 35 million white tail deer in North America, basically at pre-colonization level.
Elic Weitzel, The Conversation
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The thing about people rating their self awareness so high made me laugh. I suspect some of us might be confusing self awareness with navel gazing.