Numlock News: June 2, 2026 • Supernova, Comedian, Steam

Jun 02, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Roofs

A new analysis from Verisk found that the average cost of a roof replacement in the United States in 2025 was $17,631, up 33 percent year over year, and the average price of a roof repair was $4,699, up 25 percent year over year. While last year was a cheaper one for the insurance industry thanks to a lighter-than-normal hurricane season, there are reasons to be anxious about the state of the roofs over our heads. Based on aerial imagery analysis, 38 percent of roofs of U.S. residential homes show moderate to poor conditions. This varies a lot region-to-region; in New England, 18 percent of roofs are at least 31 years old, compared to just four percent in the South where hail and hurricanes lead to, in industry parlance, “higher turnover driven by severe weather events and rapid housing growth.”

Carrier Management

How Much Could It Cost, Michael?

In a daring art heist the likes of which we have seen only a few times before, someone stole one banana that was duct taped to the wall, a piece that constituted the perishable element of Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious artwork, Comedian (2019). It was being exhibited at the Centre-Pompidou Metz when the diabolical theft was perpetrated. A museum security guard reported that the work had been stolen, at which point authorities sprung into action by replacing the banana with one of the other bananas that they keep on standby in the inevitable event that the banana currently taking part in Comedian (2019) gets a bit dicey. This has happened before, specifically last year when a visitor actually ate the banana. The perpetrators remain unknown, but one must imagine them — fewer than a dozen thieves, but possibly more than 10 — standing by a nearby fountain as Clair de Lune plays, consuming a banana.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper

Orld-way Up-cay

“EA Sports FC 26” is the latest version of the annual tentpole international soccer video game that was at one point the officially licensed game of FIFA, before officials decided to go their own way and make their own video game. The EA game is still incredibly popular, and with the World Cup on the horizon, the game is preparing with a conspicuously similar but legally distinct 48-team international tournament mode. The good news for EA is that it already has the license for 41 out of the 48 teams involved in the actual World Cup and can use their kits and player names. While Congo DR and Bosnia and Herzegovina are still in the game, they’ll have just generic kits, but Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Curaçao, Jordan and Qatar are just not in it and will get the Generic New England Coach treatment.

Dan Bernstein, Sportico

Stars

Does having a star make films succeed? The answer is generally yes, based on an analysis of the performance of 3,052 films, with films starring A-Listers likely to make back their budget 2.54 times over while films with lead actors in the upper middle tier of fame (50th to 75th percentile) make back their budget 1.91 times over. Most interestingly, though, is that these numbers are super genre-dependent: horror movies get very little with additional star wattage, with an A-lister adding just a difference of +0.25 in that ROI, but romance movies live and die by the stars over the title, with an A-lister adding +1.74 to that median ROI compared to a lower-tier fame actor. In factm, A-list romance movies have a 3.82x ROI compared to 2.08 for lower-fame leads.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Buffet

Vegas has been shedding its iconic all-you-can-eat buffets or years, with the closure of the MGM Gran Buffet on May 31 signaling an end to an institution; there are only about a half-dozen all-you-can-eat buffets left on the Strip, down from 10 times that number, and it’s coming at the same moment that buffets experience a surge in interest elsewhere. According to Yelp’s 2026 Trends forecast, there was a 252 percent increase in searches for “all you can eat buffet,” and a number of buffet brands have been enjoying success, such as Korean buffet KPOT rising from three locations in 2020 to 150 by the end of the year.

Gabriel Baumgaertner and Kate Krader, Bloomberg

Valve

The user base of Valve’s video game storefront Steam has reached 42 million concurrents at a time, up 60 percent over the past five years, and according to PrivCo Holding, generated about $5.2 billion in revenue in 2025 for a net income of $1.5 billion. All the more impressive: Valve had just 79 people working on Steam at last count.

Austin Carr and Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Supernova

A supernova named SN 2023vbw was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2023, and a new paper describes how weird this particular explosion was. While first classified as a Type II supernova, it weirdly ended up getting much brighter at around 190 days following the initial detection, which was different than the general brightness plateau observed in most Type IIs. And it eventually radiated an estimated 3 × 10⁵⁰ ergs over the course of the explosion, which is 10 times as much as a normal Type II. This would seem to mean that SN 2023vbw is a pair-instability supernovae, meaning it was a rare blue supergiant star that probably had 140 to 260 solar masses and low metallicity.

Shreejaya Karantha, Phys.org

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