Numlock News: June 20, 2024 • Pneumatic Tubes, Whiz Comics, Cashews
By Walt Hickey
Helicopters
The NYPD’s usage of helicopters is way up, and it’s attracted the attention of both annoyed citizens as well as budget hawks. In 2023, the NYPD used helicopters for 2,857 hours, taking a five-year high of 3,938 flights, up 60 percent compared to the prior four years. That’s a total of 119 days’ worth of constant helicopter usage. Out-of-city flights were also conspicuously up 60 percent, including jaunts to Philly and Albany. All told, the department spent $12.4 million on helicopter operations last year, up 36 percent year over year and double the level seen in 2021. The NYPD operates at least seven helicopters, and it costs thousands of dollars per hour every one of them is in the air. Last year also saw 59,000 complaints about helicopter noise to 311, which was double from the year prior.
Raeedah Wahid, Fola Akinnibi and Laura Nahmias, Bloomberg
Comics
A number of pristine comic books are hitting the auction block, including a copy of Detective Comics #27 that has hit $490,000 in pre-auction bidding, as well as a Captain America Comics #1, Tales of Suspense #39 and Amazing Fantasy #15, which feature the respective first appearances of Captain America, Iron Man and Spider-Man. Of particular interest to collectors may be Whiz Comics #2, which is the first issue to feature Captain Marvel, and a real rarity in the field: There are only 61 copies in the CGC Census, 32 of which are not restored, and this particular number is graded at a CGC 7.0, making it one of the four best-condition copies in existence. Bidding is up to $288,000.
Pneumatic Tubes
The heyday of pneumatic tubing in office environments was the first half of the 20th century, and as digitization made the speedy transport of paper documents largely unnecessary at the scale previously needed, the tech became obsolete. That said, the tech is having a revitalization, especially in hospitals, where sophisticated pneumatic tubing systems allow samples to be sent all over the increasingly large facilities at a swift and efficient pace. A hospital tube system these days sees lab specimens make up 60 percent of its cargo, pharmaceuticals around 30 percent, and blood products 5 percent. They move stuff at 18 to 24 feet per second, fast enough to pace a sprinter but slow enough so as not to destroy blood samples. The University City Medical District in Philadelphia opened in 2021 and has 12 miles of pipe that handle 6,000 transactions a day.
Vanessa Armstrong, MIT Technology Review
Cashews
Cashews are in increasingly high demand, with cashew milk already a $62 million market poised to triple in the next eight years. Cashews are crucial ingredients in nondairy cheese, a field that is predicted to double from $4 billion today to $8 billion in a decade. Plant-based cheese is already growing in popularity — the percentage of cheese products that used cashews was up 52 percent from 2022 to 2023 — and is expected to do so for some time. On the supply side, the amount of land used for cashews in Africa has increased thirteenfold from 1980 to 2020, and the continent is responsible for 58 percent of the global harvest.
Menswear, Guy
A new survey found that the median number of suits owned by American adults is zero. All told, 51 percent of adults said they don’t own a suit, including 33 percent of men and 68 percent of women. Among men, 23 percent reported owning one suit, 16 percent owned two, 10 percent owned three and 15 percent of men own four or more suits. As office dress codes have relaxed, suits have become less necessary: just 22 percent of respondents said they wore business-professional clothing to work, while 47 percent said they wore casual street clothes, 47 percent said they wore business casual, and 26 percent said they wore leisure or athletic wear. Weirdly, “I don’t want the Twitter menswear guy to make fun of me if I screw up” was not the top reason for forgoing a suit I expected it would be.
Reservoir
After a brutal year of drought, only now is the Panama Canal getting back to routine operation. The canal has a design capacity of 36 transits a day, but due to drought in Gatun Lake, had to drop that to as low as 20 transits per day at worst. The Panama Canal Authority is considering long-term measures to keep the canal operational even during drought times, and one solution under consideration is the construction of a new reservoir that would reduce the pressure on the lake system and maintain the equivalent of 11 transits’ worth of water. This would be an additional reservoir on the Rio Indio, would cost $900 million, and would be ready inside of five years.
Charlotte Goldstone, The Loadstar
Passed Down
A new study sought to find out when humans first began to pass down knowledge and information about technology between generations, and used the relative sophistication of tool production as the way to do that. Some tools are simple — a 2.6-million-year-old sharpened rock found in Ethiopia took three steps to make — while others require a somewhat intricate process, like a blade in Finland that’s 10,000 years old and took 19 different steps to make. Only by passing aggregated knowledge down can those more sophisticated tools be produced. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, argues that 600,000 years ago marks the time that hominins managed to cobble together a cumulative culture. The oldest tools found took two to four steps to make, and were fashioned between 3.3 million and 1.8 million years ago. Tools that took four to seven steps appeared from 1.8 million to 600,000 years ago. After that, the pace of innovation increased, with many tools taking 10 or more steps to produce. Then, in the blink of an eye, bam, humanity produces the pinnacle of a thousand millennia of technological advancement: the Juicero.
Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American
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Pneumatic Tube Systems have been a presence in hospitals for almost seventy years. I grew up in the business, as my father worked for three major manufacturers. Systems which were first installed in the 1950's have undergone several upgrades to electronic controls (which were based on 11 bit logic circuits which originated with automatic telephone dialing systems), stations, and zone exchanges over the years. They primarily handled paperwork in the beginning, and as technology improved with "soft-receive" terminals, allowed blood samples, whole blood, and IV liquids to be transported.