Numlock News: May 14, 2024 • Everest, Quebec, Seabirds

May 14, 2024

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A new settlement involving 49 out of 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia has the three major telecom carriers forking over $10.2 million — $4.1 million each from T-Mobile and Verizon and $2 million from AT&T — to settle allegations that the carriers engaged in false advertising when they threw around words like “unlimited” wireless plans and “free” phones. It also sets up five years of advertising restrictions around the specific vocabulary of those words, and concluded a nine-year-long investigation.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Everest

Sunday saw two new records posted, with Nepali guide Kami Rita Sherpa scaling the mountain for a record 29th time at the age of 54, the highest-ever number of summits, while on the very same day Kenton Cool, also a guide, summited the peak for the 18th time, marking the most ascents made by a foreigner. This is the very beginning of the climbing season on Mount Everest, which was once a recognizable and impressive achievement in mountaineering but recently was converted into a facility that grants about 800 sporty rich people an ego boost in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars.

Frances Mao, BBC

It Follows

The theory that humans are natural pursuit hunters, using our endurance and persistence to chase down and exhaust targeted beasties, is controversial, but recently got more evidence in its favor. A new study published yesterday in Nature Human Behavior documented 391 historical reports of endurance pursuits among indigenous peoples from around the globe between the 16th and 21st centuries. This involved poring over 8,000 texts produced over 500 years to find the reports.

Kermit Pattison, Science

Security

Coaching is never the easiest or most secure job, but one league in particular has a permanent hot seat for coaches. Across the 124 teams of the MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL, 45 percent of the current coaches have been in their current job for at least two full seasons. In the NFL, that’s 60 percent of coaches in their gig for two years, and in the MLB and NBA it’s an above average 53 percent of managers and coaches, but in the National Hockey League it’s a paltry 16 percent, as just five coaches out of all 32 teams have been in their current job for at least two years, following the summary dismissal of Maple Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe last week.

Tim Reynolds and Stephen Whyno, The Associated Press

Maple Syrup

The Quebec Global Maple Syrup Reserve, the local cartel’s way of maintaining prices, is alive and well with high-security warehouses with a capacity of 221,000 barrels of maple syrup, drawing comparisons as the Saudi Arabia of syrup. The 595,000-square-mile province has 50 million syrup-producing trees, which gives Quebec control over 72 percent of the world’s supply. Quebec’s tech is also bleeding-edge, with reverse osmosis machines that can more efficiently separate water from sugar in sap than the traditional slow-boil method, increasing yield by 200 percent.

Vipal Monga, The Wall Street Journal

Bounce Back

Tromelin Island is a 1-square-kilometer uninhabited island in the western Indian Ocean that was first infested with rats sometime in the late 1700s. Before then it was probably home to eight different species of seabirds, but the rats were voracious and decimated the birds, with just two bird species left: masked and red-footed boobies. In 2005, the French made the effort and killed off the rats with a rodenticide campaign. The fun part, though, is that after the ensuing 20 years, the birds are back in town; thousands of breeding pairs are back, from at least seven different species, and it didn’t really even take a ton of coaxing.

Ethan Freedman, Hakai Magazine

Bedrooms

It’s become more and more common in recent decades for kids growing up in the United States to have their own room and not have to share a room with a sibling. This was the result of a couple of trends, including bigger houses and fewer kids per family. As a result, the average number of bedrooms per child in the U.S. from 1960 to 2000 increased from 0.7 bedrooms per kid to 1.1 bedrooms per kid. That said, there isn’t a ton of evidence that either setup — independent rooms or bunking with a sibling — has any particularly positive or negative long-term impacts.

Annie Midori Atherton, The Atlantic

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