Numlock News: June 3, 2025 • Andromeda, Florida, Tetrapod
By Walt Hickey
Florida
An analysis based on examination of the 45 insurers responsible for personal property insurance in Florida sees the state pulling out of its spiral after eight brutal years of losses. The personal property insurance industry reported an underwriting gain of $207 million in 2024, a substantial turnaround from the $174 million underwriting loss in 2023. This was hard won — involving a legislative reform that made it somewhat more palatable to do business in a state that caps out at 105 meters above sea level and is routinely shellacked by powerful storms — and an expensive one, as direct premiums reached $11 billion in 2024, well above the $5 billion seen in 2020.
William Rabb, Insurance Journal
Panama
Panama’s Maritime Authority reported it has removed 214 vessels from its ship registry since last year and over 650 vessels since 2019, all part of a plan to enforce stricter rules for the ships sailing under the Panamanian flag. Panama has one of the largest registries in the world — over 8,500 ships — and has historically been criticized for allegedly looking the other way when it comes to renamed, sanctioned vessels. NGO critics say that a fifth of the vessels believed to be moving Iranian oil fly Panama’s flag.
Audiobooks
Sales of audiobooks in 2024 were up 13 percent compared to 2023, with total sales hitting $2.22 billion. At this point, digital audiobooks are pretty much the entire market, accounting for 99 percent of revenue and for physical audiobooks falling off the map. Romance audiobook sales were up 30 percent, science fiction and fantasy were up 21 percent and general fiction was up 16 percent. In a somewhat interesting trend, the percentage of respondents who said they would be interested in an AI-narrated audiobook dropped from 77 percent in 2023 to 70 percent in 2025.
Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly
Solar
A new multi-year study of grasses growing in the shade of a Northern Colorado solar array found that solar panels significantly boosted the production level of those grasses during particularly dry years. The system of panels boosts grass growth by 19 percent compared to a control group during the dry year. There are tradeoffs: during an average year, grasses in those same solar fields only attained 94 percent of the production of grasses outside the solar field. During a particularly wet year, they only hit 88 percent of the total growth in those control-group grasses. Still, it’s an intriguing result if only because grasses don’t tend to die off during wet years, but the drought years can be particularly rough on the grassland. Now, they’re interested in testing the effects of panels over grasslands in even more arid climates to determine what happens.
Matthew Sturchio, The Conversation
Names
A new survey of 2,567 U.S. adults found that 42 percent of people “love” their first name, 31 percent of people “like” it and 19 percent of people are neutral on it. This leaves an interesting remainder: the 4 percent of adults who dislike their first names and the 2 percent who outright hate their names, meaning 6 percent of the time parents blow it. Women were slightly more likely to dislike their names (8 percent dislike or hate), and older respondents were more likely than younger respondents to declare they did not care for their first names. Only 2 percent of respondents said “not sure.” However, to my dismay, it does not appear that it was even an option to respond to the survey with “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” screamed into the general direction of a digital survey.
Consider The Tetrapod
There are generally thought to be five mass extinctions in Earth’s history, including the end of the Ordovician (445 million years ago), the Devonian (372 million years ago), the Permian (252 million years ago), the Triassic (201 million years ago) and the end Cretaceous (66 million years ago). This last one has a somewhat notorious reputation. We know about these events because of the devastation in ocean life, which tends to be much easier to track in the fossil record because marine animals are more likely to fossilize than terrestrial ones. That said, there’s also an unconventional theory that argues that many of these were not, in fact, mass extinctions as we might understand them. For example, there was no extinction of tetrapods at the end of the Permian, the avians still survived the destruction of the rest of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous and insects never seem to have actually suffered a mass extinction. The theory also points out that plants seem largely unaffected by most of the big five, reappearing and thriving some 75,000 years after the end-Permian mass extinction.
Galaxies
It has long been thought that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies are on a collision course, given that we are heading towards one another at a speed of 100 kilometers per second. However, a new set of 100,000 simulations based on data from Hubble and the Gaia space telescopes actually gives us decent odds of missing one another, or at least not colliding until well after the fact. The simulations assign just a 2 percent probability to the galaxies colliding in the next five billion years, with about half of the simulations instead finding that the galaxies will have a near-miss, lose orbital energy and collide instead in 8 billion to 10 billion years. This is clutch; by that point, the Sun will have burnt out, rendering the question of intergalactic politics all a bit moot.
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"This is clutch; by that point, the Sun will have burnt out, rendering the question of intergalactic politics all a bit moot."
Don't tell Musk!