Numlock News: June 6, 2025 • Tom Cruise, Rhino, Nuclear Plant
By Walt Hickey
Corellium
In a fascinating deal for the cloak-and-dagger types, the Florida startup Corellium was purchased by Cellebrite for $200 million, and just because they sound like Star Wars planets you’ve never heard of doesn’t mean this doesn’t affect you. Corellium is used by cybersecurity researchers who want to find vulnerabilities in iPhones and Android devices, and rather than actually breaking the device in question when hacking it the company specializes in producing a virtual version of the phone in their software. A neat tool, but Cellebrite is a $4 billion company that has long been a customer of Corellium because they make tools so law enforcement can break into phones, and claim that their tech — which often times exploits bugs in cellphone software — is used in 1.5 million law enforcement investigations annually, with its largest client being Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Boatlift
An uninhabited island called Squaxin Island in the Puget Sound exists at a a key point in the hydrological corridor such that over the course of decades there are tons of abandoned boats beached on and within the island. Washington State has worked to remove this flotsam, and since a boat removal program began in 2002, the state has removed over 1,200 derelict vessels that have washed ashore the uninhabited isle. There are still 300 more out there, and the state took some extreme measures by using one of its firefighting helicopters to haul 14 vessels that were particularly hard to get to onto the mainland. It’s a somewhat hilarious version of the Dunkirk evacuation, in which instead of a ragtag group of boats working to lift daring pilots from the mainland to an island, in this case daring pilots worked to lift a ragtag group of boats from an island to the mainland.
Manuel Valdes, The Associated Press
Tom Cruise
The Guinness World Records has given actor Tom Cruise recognition for the most burning parachute jumps ever done, coming in at 16 flaming parachute jumps. It’s not entirely clear what the previous record was, but I’d have to assume that the general maximum times that people have done that is the past has been “once,” and one can’t really imagine they got another shot. The film reportedly had a budget of $400 million which some considered to be an unbelievable budget; no, I can believe it, apparently Tom Cruise did an on-fire parachute stunt 16 times, I think I have an idea of where that cost came from.
Cool Roof
Roofs are about a fourth of the surface area of major cities, and the very basic principle of “dark absorbs more energy from sunlight than light roofs” dictates that if we were to make many dark colored roofs into, say, white roofs, we could save lots of energy in the summer on cooling costs, all for pretty much the same roof cost. This is indeed the case: light-colored roofs can be 50 degrees cooler on hot days than dark roofs, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that a cool roof on a house in central California cuts energy costs by 20 percent — and so at least eight states and over a dozen cities in other states have made requirements to install cool roofs, and the appeal of retrofitting roofs is high just because of the energy savings. That said, this policy has enemies who are mustering a lobbying effort to stymie cool roof legislation: makers of the black synthetic rubber EPDM that once dominated roofing don’t want to lose to the white TPO material replacing them as cool roofs, and are fighting the regulations.
Transit
Compared to their metro system’s ridership in 2019, today Madrid is at 105 percent of those levels, Hong Kong is at 104 percent, Paris 103 percent, Seoul 93 percent, Shanghai 92 percent, and London 85 percent. In Europe and Asia, those transit systems have made a full or at least nearly complete ridership recovery. In the Americas, though, things have decisively not recovered: Rio’s only 73 percent of 2019 capacity, New York is at 72 percent, Washington at 71 percent, Chicago and Buenos Aires 61 percent, and San Francisco 44 percent. What gives? What makes a transit system not recover this side of the Atlantic or Pacific? It’s a mix of things, but appears to be a shortfall in weekday traffic (while weekend metro use comparatively booms), less frequent operating rates in the Americas, and price hikes, whereas the rest of the world kept the trains running and kept them cheap.
Aaron Gordon and Marie Patino, Bloomberg
Energy
An annual survey is out about Americans preferred energy sources, and while preferences for solar and fossil fuels (including offshore drilling, fracking, and coal mining) is year over year flat, wind is down, and nuclear power way up. Overall, when asked if they preferred more of it, the preference leader still is using more radiation from a nearby star to produce electricity, with 77 percent percent of respondents wanting more. Using large airfoils to crank turbines powered by the inherent energy of Earth’s atmosphere was down to 68 percent, while using sophisticated equipment to coax protons out of rocks in order to boil water came in at 59 percent, up near 20 points in ten years. Various endeavors to extract the limited carboniferous debris of ancient plant life is still controversial, with just 48 percent wanting more of it dragged out of the ocean seabed, 45 percent bubbling it out with injected fluids, and 41 wanting more of it extracted from caves.
Brian Kennedy, Emma Kikuchi, and Alex Tyson, Pew Research Center
Rhinos
Rhino poaching has devastated populations of the animal across Africa, with hunters shooting and killing the rhinos to get at their horns, which can then be sold for high amounts while leaving the rest of the body to rot. One strategy to stop rhino poaching is to institutionally dehorn large numbers of them, preemptively removing the part of the creature that gets them killed, and in doing so taking away the incentive for people to poach them. A new study published in Science found that this in fact drastically reduced rhino poaching as hoped: an analysis of poaching data at 11 reserves from 2017 to 2023 found that 1,985 rhinos (6.5 percent of the population annually) were poached over the period. During that time, 2,284 rhinos were dehorned across eight reserves, and this managed to achieve a 78 percent reduction in poaching. Perhaps most compellingly, it’s one of the cheapest ways to prevent poaching, as just 1.2 percent of the $78 million anti-poaching budget went to dehorning rhinos.
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Every time I a story about rhinos and what we have done to those beautiful animals, it fills me with anger and sadness. We are such a shortsighted species.
The Roofs will come without regulation when A) People are shown tangible savings, and B) they manage to be visually-appealing. You don’t have to set regulations ahead of time…..and if you do set regs, you actually end up hurting adoption.
This kinda fits with the Ezra Klein “Abundance” push. But it’s so unnatural to people who’ve been educated that rigorous pre-planning with ongoing regulation are the only ways to get things done.
On the transit — was a good interview on Statecraft last couple of days about WMATA here in DC. They actually had regs about bus shelters needing to be able to withstand CAT-5 hurricane winds. If winds that hard are hitting DC, there’s a lot more than bus shelters that’ll need to be repaired.