Numlock News: May 15, 2026 • MOOP, Klarity, Endgame
By Amanda Shendruk
Walt is on vacation, today’s edition comes from Amanda Shendruk, who writes the outstanding data visualization newsletter Not Ship.
Happy Friday! As a longtime Numhead, I’m honoured to take the reins for a day. (Numhead: noun. A hardcore Numlock News fan). This edition contains Canadians, Klarity and a statistically significant number of links to my own newsletter. Enjoy!
A Man. A Map. A MOOP
Each year, 70,000 people gather on a dry lakebed in Nevada to build a temporary city for Burning Man. When it’s over, 150 people stay behind. They spend weeks walking the 3,800 acres, picking up (and documenting!) every screw, sequin and cigarette butt they find. The result is the MOOP Map, an excruciatingly detailed, color-coded public record of what Burning Man leaves behind. The whole thing is exhausting — it’s like a month-long forensic sweep in the unrelenting sun — but they do it because the stakes are high. The annual festival can only return if the Bureau of Land Management finds no more than one square foot of debris per acre at test points.
Demon Hunters on Tour
Netflix isn't done with KPop Demon Hunters, its most-watched film of all time. Not by a long shot. In the second half of 2025, the movie about a demon-hunting girl band racked up 481.6 million views globally. Now, characters from the animated musical are slated for a 2027 world tour, timed just ahead of the film’s sequel. The HUNTR/X trio behind the soundtrack has performed at major events, including Coachella, though it hasn’t been confirmed whether the group will participate in the tour. Further details on cities and tickets are expected to be announced later this year. Parents of tweens, consider this your warning.
Saleah Blancaflor, Sherwood News
Elbows Up
Don’t anger Canadians, we really commit to a grudge. Cell phone data from the University of Toronto suggest the Canuck travel boycott of the US is far greater than official figures show — the real number is closer to 42 percent year-over-year, compared to the roughly 25 percent drop recorded by Statistics Canada. Of 267 US metro areas analyzed, only three saw an increase in Canadian visits between April 1, 2025 (“liberation day”) and March 31, 2026. Myrtle Beach led the losses at 65 percent down, and several Florida cities saw drops of 50 percent or more. Based on the US Travel Association’s estimates, the decline could translate to around $8.4 billion in lost spending for the American economy.
Bad News For Interior Designers
We like to believe that colors shape how we feel — blue walls reduce stress, pink cells calm prisoners — but a 2025 study reviewing 128 years of research across 64 countries found no solid evidence that colors actually impact our feelings. So why do we think they do? Probably because we constantly associate colors with emotions — yellow is linked to happiness, white to hope — and the patterns hold across a century of studies and dozens of cultures. Green-blue is widely seen as a positive color, while black is almost universally negative. But consistently associating the color yellow with joy and positivity is a very different thing from the color triggering dopamine production. In other words, you might be feeling blue, but blue didn’t make you feel blue … you know?
Not In My Back Yard
On the popularity scale, nuclear power sits pretty near the bottom. So this is pretty embarrassing for AI data centres: 71 percent of Americans oppose having one built in their area, while only 53 percent would reject a local nuclear plant. Those numbers are according to a new Gallup poll, which lists environmental concerns as the biggest driver of that unpopularity. A good 70 percent of respondents worried about the data centers’ local impact, and for good reason — they can consume up to five million gallons of water per day and have the energy needs of hundreds of thousands of homes.
Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, Forbes
Finally Some Klarity
It’s not really a data newsletter unless there’s something about popular baby names (I don’t make the rules). The 2025 findings, though, are a bit lackluster: America’s most-used names haven’t changed in seven years. New data from the Social Security Administration show that Olivia and Liam were again the top baby names — marking the seventh consecutive year for Olivia and the ninth for Liam. In fact, the top 10 for boys was entirely unchanged from the previous year. However, despite their staying power, both names are being chosen less often, as more parents opt for unique names. The fastest-rising names of 2025 were Kasai for boys and Klarity for girls. Somewhere, the Kardashians are taking notes …
The Endgame Begins
The U.K. passed a landmark law making it illegal to ever sell tobacco to anyone born after 2009 — only the second country ever to introduce a generational smoking ban. The case for the ban is hard to argue against: smoking accounted for 879,000 deaths in Europe and 333,000 in the U.S. in 2023 alone, 83 percent of smokers start between ages 14 and 25. The U.K. government estimates the law will also save 30.4 billion pounds over 30 years. With a major economy leading the way, other countries might consider similar legislation. Globally, the trend is already moving in the right direction: Of 167 countries, only 20 have seen smoking rates increase since 2005. And 18 percent of countries are now classified as “endgame ready” — the charmingly dramatic phrase academics use for eliminating smoking forever.
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I get the hate for data centers but we need to have the right reaction: don't ban them, make them pay for their share! This includes not just the generation that they need but also updating the dilapidated transmission infrastructure from the 60s that we all need! The VC money will eventually dry up and after Anthropic gets their "$900 billion IPO" they may want to spend a bit before cutting costs, but infrastructure upgrades will last for decades for everybody's benefit. Make em pay for it! (Since people appear to hate paying more for electricity when it's so desperately needed).