Numlock News: June 29, 2026 • Interstellar, Hacky Sacks, Containers

Jun 29, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Hacky Sacks

The bean-filled footbags best known as the genericized brand Hacky Sack are once again popular, a 1990s throwback that had faded for much of the 21st century but has evidently caught on among the youth, fueled in no small part by shortform video apps. While many are selling for between $5 and $15, this is a hobby we’re talking about, so naturally premium products are emerging, and one design advertised as “the Missile” is now selling for $23. That’s a remarkable price point for what is effectively a bag of beans, yet it’s still down from $34 in May.

Miles J. Herszenhorn, Bloomberg

Jackass

Toy Story 5 made another $70 million domestically in its second weekend release, a relatively standard decline, which brings its global total up to $585 million after 12 days, keeping it on pace to beat the $1.07 billion made by Toy Story 4 to be the highest-grossing film in the franchise. It held off new competition in the form of Supergirl, which came in a bit below expectations at $38 million domestic, and Jackass: Best and Last, which brought in $8.2 million domestically and $1.9 million overseas.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Yachts

There were 1.2 million registered boats in Florida in 2024, up 20 percent compared to 2023. It’s causing problems in densely-packed waterways, and the sticker shock of maintenance is leading to scores of abandoned vessels across the peninsula. This is a particular issue in Miami-Dade, where there are 73,000 boats, with high demand for marina space meaning that the less-affluent boat owners have been priced out. And given that repairs, docking, fuel, and insurance can add up to 10 percent of a boat’s value, some people are simply ditching their floating money pits. Florida spent $13 million to remove abandoned watercrafts in 2024.

Michael Smith, Bloomberg

Missions

A new study from the Planetary Society sought to figure out which NASA missions got the best return-on-investment. After looking at 90 NASA science missions from 1994 to 2023, it found that while the most expensive billion-dollar missions did indeed produce the most highly cited papers, there is a sweet spot for missions that cost $250 million to $750 million that led to a fast time-to-science (just six years) and a solid balance of reliability, scientific productivity and speed.

Mona Patterson, Science

Payroll

This forthcoming negotiation between the MLB Players Association and Major League Baseball is being touted as a situation where the players are focusing on their share of total revenues while the fans are most concerned with reducing the vast disparities between different payrolls. Or is it? No, there’s a third thing at play here, specifically the owners trying to pull off a shell game that obscures the real issue at hand, which is that they want to tie player pay to baseball revenue in a moment when revenue is less certain, and when the real action is in the spiking value of these teams. Since 2011, reported revenues are up 116 percent, payrolls are up 75 percent, but franchise valuations are up 464 percent.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Containers

The newest report from the World Shipping Council about containers lost at sea is out, with the industry estimating that 1,478 containers were lost overboard last year out of 280 million containers transported overall. That is up from 576 containers last year, driven by just a few major incidents (the MSC ELSA 3 sinking off the coast of India with 640 lost containers paramount among them) but still overall well under the historical average.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Interstellar

Interstellar objects have passed through our solar system for its entire existence, but only in the past few years have we managed to spot them, track them and study them. Three such objects have been found, 1I/'Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS, and new information about 3I/ATLAS puts a fresh perspective on just how old some of these objects are. 3I/ATLAS travelled at 68 kilometers per second as it approached the sun, and a new paper published in Nature using James Webb and Atacama Compact Array found that the comet contained conspicuously low levels of carbon-13, levels that would imply it formed about 12 billion years ago — the earliest stages of galactic history, and before the formation of our own solar system.

Jonti Horner, The Conversation

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