Numlock News: June 4, 2025 • Muons, Mahjong, St-Germain
By Walt Hickey
Clooney
In the week before the Tony Awards and its penultimate week on Broadway, Good Night and Good Luck starring George Clooney has broken a record (that had been set earlier this year) for the highest weekly gross for a Broadway show. The show totalled $4.245 million after playing to 100 percent capacity. The show will end its run June 8, with one live broadcast airing on CNN the night before. Coming up right behind it (as it has been pretty much all season) is the Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal production of Othello, which made $3.5 million. The familiar trio of Wicked, The Lion King and Glengarry Glen Ross came up behind in formation as the Tony Awards approach.
Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter
Mahjong
A printing error has sent the nation’s avid Mahjong-playing community into a tizzy; the annually-distributed National Mah Jongg League card that indicates this year’s winning tile pattern contains a goof. Every year in the first week of April, the organization mails out the new standardized card, which can be had for $14, and which contains the copyrighted and ever-changing winning patterns so as to keep the game fresh. One of the 55 lines of tile patterns denotes only one tile instead of the three tiles, as indicated by the line description. The misprint appears on both the standard and large-print cards, and it’s being addressed with stickers to cover the offending element.
Corrie Driebusch, The Wall Street Journal
Forget It, Jake
A 15-year lawsuit between the overarching Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and its largest member, the San Diego County Water Authority, has finally been settled after years of inflexibility. The MWD delivers water to 19 million people in the region across 26 member agencies, one of which is the San Diego County Water Authority, supplying 3.3 million people with water. The issue was the price that San Diego pays for the 277,700 acre-feet of water it buys from the MWD annually. It will now be set at the fixed rate of $671 per acre-foot in 2026 with annual adjustments for inflation. Most importantly, this development will squash the beef between the two agencies and make it possible to cut future deals that keep water flowing. It should give both agencies more room to negotiate with other areas rather than being locked in internal fights.
Lucas Robinson, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Ian James, The Los Angeles Times
Bots
TechMagic is a Japanese company that produces kitchen robots, specifically the I-Robo2, which cooks food like fried rice and chili shrimp in a tilted, rotating cylindrical pan, automatically adjusting heat, in addition to seasoning and washing the pan. The stir-fry bot requires humans to prep and place the ingredients, with the ability to produce about 30 meals an hour. It’s coming to America as TechMagic pursues a U.S. expansion, trying to capitalize on rising labor costs in the U.S. The company also has its eyes on South Korea, Australia and Europe. Leasing a bot goes for $1,440 per month after installation costs, and the company wants to have 1,000 units in action by 2030.
Sports Documentaries
Some fear we are reaching the limits of relevance when it comes to behind-the-scenes sports documentaries, as the share of docs about sports teams rises from just 3 percent of all newly commissioned docs in 2019 to 12.3 percent of all docs commissioned in the second quarter of this year. Riding on the back of the stunning success of Welcome to Wrexham and Drive to Survive, which managed to make tedious, obscure and even European sports palatable to American audiences by restructuring their seasons as cheap reality shows, these shows have become more and more popular. However, it does seem like we’re hitting blood from a stone. Yes, they’re popular — 60 percent of fans said they’d watch sports documentaries a few times a month. The highs can also get really high, whether it’s the acclaimed 30 for 30 franchise, smash hit The Last Dance or Academy Award-winning O.J.: Made in America. But there are enough behind-the-scenes documentaries about mediocre teams accomplishing nothing of particular interest (looking at you, The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox on Netflix) that networks are indeed getting choosier about what they buy.
St-Germain
The liqueur St-Germain was launched in 2007 at the dawn of the cocktail renaissance, the first commercial elderflower liqueur, instantly becoming a sensation. It developed a reputation as “bartender’s ketchup” based on how often a squirt of it would end up in a concoction just to add a bit of flavor. Now, with plenty of competition, the liqueur is less of a fixture in cocktails, but a new trend has the beverage back in the spotlight. The Aperol Spritz took Aperol from 9,000 cases shipped to the United States in 2010 to 390,000 cases shipped to the country in 2022. More importantly, it made the Spritz a common fixture of American menus. When the Aperol craze subsided but the spritz thirst endured, the moment of the Hugo Spritz — which utilizes St-Germain in its U.S. formulation — arrived, being named the drink of the summer by 2023. Google searches are up 500 percent since 2022, the drink’s hashtag has over 300 million views on TikTok and Yelp’s 2024 Food and Drink Trends Report has searches up 1,121 percent over 2023. Bacardi also reports a 25 percent off-premise sales boost for St-Germain in August 2024.
Muons
Physicists with the Muon g-2 collaboration have reported that the subatomic particle the muon is indeed exactly as magnetic as currently theorized, which means that the current understanding of the standard model is right and there’s no new heretofore unknown mystery about the muon yet to be solved. The Muon g-2 experiment first ran from 1997 to 2001 and found the muon was more magnetic than predicted by 8.6 parts per billion, which was very exciting. Experiments repeated in 2021 and 2023 confirmed it. Now, after increasing precision by a factor of two, they were able to get the muon’s magnetism with a precision of 148 parts per trillion. It no longer disagrees with the prediction. This means a major setback for the single biggest problem outstanding in particle physics, which is “how do we convince them to give us more money for particle colliders when we seem to have solved most of the truly difficult problems in particle physics.”
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